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Hospital admissions double – and it’s got to be down to the vaccines

By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | March 24, 2023

Data from the New Zealand Ministry of Health has revealed a massive 103 per cent increase in hospitalisations among 12 disease categories measured in 2021 following the mRNA rollout. This calls into serious question the safety of medical interventions such as mRNA vaccines which penetrate the cell wall and re-program activity in the cell cytoplasm.

NZ had very few cases of Covid in 2021 due to draconian restrictions. Therefore the only reasonable cause of the disease increase is mRNA vaccination.

There were 38,178 extra hospitalisations in 2021 across the 12 categories compared with 2019 figures. The Ministry of Health tracks 37 disease categories, and figures for the remaining 25, including cancer, have not yet been released. These figures alone mean that New Zealanders had greater than a 1 in 90 chance of hospitalisation within one year of Covid vaccination. You can read a longer discussion of the figures here.

Similar disastrous figures have surfaced in official data from Western Australia (greater than 1 in 100 chance of serious injury).

Last week in the UK, MP Andrew Bridgen again attempted to capture the attention of the House of Commons about severe injury and death following Covid vaccination, but almost all MPs walked out before he had even started his speech. Undeterred, he gave a brilliant, succinct summary of the dangers and huge costs of Covid vaccination as revealed by the UK Government’s own statistics. In essence he explained how Covid vaccines make roughly a thousand people ill enough to send them to hospital in order to prevent one hospitalisation from Covid. In passing he revealed that the members of the committee approving vaccines in the UK own a billion pounds’ worth of vaccine company shares between them. (Please watch him speak here and share).

YouTube kicked off by deleting the video, but public outrage ensured they had to back down. This underlined the fact that we are not engaged in a rational or fair argument. Hundreds of concerned scientists around the world are analysing data and raising questions about Covid vaccine safety, but like Andrew Bridgen we are all speaking to an empty room.

In contrast, vaccine proponents are still speaking freely to a full house, courtesy of a compliant and well-funded media, who seem not only incapable of sorting truth from falsehood, but woefully ignorant about the fundamentals of genetics.

On Sunday we were subjected to a long piece on NZ’s 1News entitled The Gene Genie. The presenter misinformed the nation that right now we are ending disease in New Zealand with a little snip to our DNA. No doubt this news wowed the audience, but the impression it gave was entirely false and misleading.

The programme did not cover the ending of all disease as the presenter appeared to imply. The real story turned out to be a phase one trial of a novel form of RNA gene therapy designed to tackle amyloidosis, a deadly disease that affects some members of families who inherit a single faulty gene (possibly up to around 60 people in NZ). The trial aims to identify whether a novel approach to amyloidosis gene therapy is safe and effective. It will take years to complete.

Just how monumentally ignorant and naive the programme’s producers were was revealed when the interviewer asked the study’s supervisor, Auckland liver specialist Dr Ed Gane, ‘Should we be able to select for height or intelligence when we do gene editing?’ The interviewer was parroting a false idea, planted in the public imagination by commercial hype, that genetic manipulation could cure all diseases and develop desirable looks and abilities. In fact, more than 300,000 genes play a role in a person’s height, not one, and the idea that there are a few specific genes which could increase intelligence is just fantasy.

To understand just how misleading these ideas are, we need to consider some basic concepts of cellular biology. This will enable us to assess just how much and in how many ways vaccine injury might ultimately affect us.

In 1953, when Watson and Crick unravelled the double helical structure of DNA, the world was dazzled by the discovery. Not only did this promise to solve the mysteries of heredity but it was also heralded as the key to understanding the origin of life itself. The whole focus of biology underwent a seismic shift. Henceforth, work on DNA, its code and its functions, would come to dominate biological research and ultimately medicine. Genetic essentialism had been born – the imaginative idea that just about everything concerning life could be reduced to the operation of genes.

Gradually over the last few years, research on epigenetics began to eat away at the edges of the edifice of genetic essentialism. Traits acquired by parents during their lifetime can be inherited by their offspring. Cellular and physiological factors directly influence how DNA expresses itself. In other words, the wider environment of DNA is intimately involved in its operation.

Genetic code is a part of a cellular system. DNA is not the sole source of life. The popular rush to regard DNA as an almost stand-alone reference point for life misses the established scientific reality.

Cells form the building blocks of life: DNA does not function on its own. By implication the whole cell is the source of heredity, not solely DNA.

Human cells are enormously complex; each contains approximately 100trillion atoms which make up more than 42million proteins.

Cellular functions are protected by a cell wall or membrane. Cells are connected to form a single conscious identity. The mRNA vaccines are designed to pierce the protective cell membrane and co-opt functions in order to redirect cellular activity. As such they are in fact parasitic and ultimately damage the functions of the host cell. They disrupt the whole cell and therefore disrupt multiple characteristics of human life, including physiological stability, adaptability, immunity, and possibly even our mental acuity.

Interventions carrying novel genetic instructions which cross the cell membrane put health and consciousness, body and mind at risk of degradation.

Hospitalisation rates have doubled, all-cause deaths are at record levels, and there is an unexplained total disregard on the part of governments.

The full extent of how much mRNA vaccines will ultimately influence mental and physical health remains unknown.

GLOBE is promoting a campaign for Global Legislation Outlawing Biotechnology Experimentation.

The writer is in New Zealand.

March 24, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Covid, imaginary pandemic of the brainwashed

By James Delingpole | TCW Defending Freedom | March 24, 2023

Tell me about your personal experiences of Covid 19. Actually, wait, don’t. I think I may have heard it already, about a million times. You lost all sense of smell or taste – and just how weird was that? It floored you for days. It gave you a funny dry cough, the dryness and ticklishness of which was unprecedented in your entire coughing career. You’ve had flu a couple of times and, boy, when you’ve got real flu do you know it. But this definitely wasn’t flu. It was so completely different from anything you’ve ever known, why you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it had been bioengineered in a lab with all manner of spike proteins and gain-of-function additives, perhaps even up to and including fragments of the Aids virus . . .

Yeah, right. Forgive me for treading on the sacred, personal domain of your lived experience. But might I cautiously suggest that none of what you went through necessarily validates lab-leak theory. Rather what it may demonstrate is the power of susceptibility, brainwashing and an overactive imagination. You lived – we all did – through a two-year period in which health-suffering anecdotes became valuable currency. Whereas in the years before the ‘pandemic’, no one had been much interested in the gory details of your nasty cold, suddenly everyone wanted to compare notes to see whether they’d had it as bad as you – or, preferably, for the sake of oneupmanship, even worse. This in turn created a self-reinforcing mechanism of Covid panic escalation: the more everyone talked about it, the more inconvertible the ‘pandemic’ became.

Meanwhile, in the real world, hard evidence – as opposed to anecdotal evidence – for this ‘pandemic’ remained stubbornly non-existent. The clincher for me was a landmark article published in January 2021 by Simon Elmer at his website Architects For Social Housing. It was titled ‘Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics: Manufacturing the Crisis’.

In it Elmer asked the question every journalist should have asked but which almost none did: is this ‘pandemic’ really as serious as all the experts, and government ministers and media outlets and medics are telling us it is? The answer was a very obvious No. As the Office for National Statistics data cited by Elmer clearly showed, 2020 – Year Zero for supposedly the biggest public health threat since ‘Spanish Flu’ a century earlier – was one of the milder years for death in the lives of most people.

Let’s be clear about this point, because something you often hear people on the sceptical side of the argument say is, ‘Of course, no one is suggesting that Covid didn’t cause a horrific number of deaths.’ But that’s exactly what they should be suggesting: because it’s true. Elmer was quoting the Age Standardised Mortality statistics for England and Wales dating back to 1941. What these show is that in every year up to and including 2008, more people died per head of population than in the deadly Covid outbreak year of 2020. Of the previous 79 years, 2020 had the 12th lowest mortality rate.

Covid, in other words, was a pandemic of the imagination, of anecdote, of emotion rather than of measured ill-health and death. Yet even now, when I draw someone’s attention to that ONS data, I find that the most common response I get is one of denial. That is, when presented with the clearest, most untainted (this was before ONS got politicised and began cooking the books), impossible-to-refute evidence that there was NO Covid pandemic in 2020, most people, even intelligent ones, still choose to go with their feelings rather with the hard data.

This natural tendency many of us have to choose emotive narratives over cool evidence makes us ripe for exploitation by the cynical and unscrupulous. We saw this during the pandemic when the majority fell for the exciting but mendacious story that they were living through a new Great Plague, and that only by observing bizarre rituals – putting strips of cloth over one’s face, dancing round one another in supermarkets, injecting unknown substances into one’s body – could one hope to save oneself and granny. And we’re seeing it now, in a slightly different variant, in which lots of people – even many who ought to know better – are falling for some similarly thrilling but erroneous nonsense about lab-leaked viruses.

It’s such a sexy story that I fell for it myself. In those early days when all the papers were still dutifully trotting out World Health Organisation-approved propaganda about pangolins and bats and the apparently notorious wet market (whatever the hell that is) in Wuhan, I was already well ahead of the game. I knew, I just knew, as all the edgy, fearless seekers of truth did that it was a lab leak wot done it. If you knew where to dig, there was a clear evidence trail to support it.

We edgy, fearless truth seekers knew all the names and facts. Dodgy Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance was in it up to the neck; so too, obviously, was the loathsomely chipper and smugly deceitful Anthony Fauci. We knew that all this crazy, Frankenvirus research had initially been conducted in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but had been outsourced to China after President Obama changed the regulations and it became too much of a hot potato for US-based labs. And let’s not forget Ukraine – all those secret bio-research labs run on behalf of the US Deep State, but then exposed as the Russians unhelpfully overran territory such as Mariupol.

And it all made perfect sense because it accorded with everything else we knew about the ‘pandemic’: that it was planned, orchestrated and manipulated at a high level by some of the most devious and evil people on the planet. Also, lots of our fellow sceptics and anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine crusaders in the fields of vaccinology and epidemiology confirmed that this was so, with all manner of abstruse technical detail which we absorbed and became almost-expert on. We learned such terms as ‘gain of function’, ‘cytokine storm’, ‘spike protein’, ‘viral load’ and ‘shedding’. Why, we almost became virologists ourselves!

So why do I no longer believe in lab leak theory? Why do I now share the suspicions of Mike Yeadon that there never was a Covid virus? Well, for me the most obvious clue is that the lab-leak theory is currently being pushed heavily by the very same mainstream media which has been lying to us relentlessly about mask efficacy, vaccine safety, Net Zero, climate change, Ukraine, CBDCs, 15 Minute Cities and the now very obvious threat posed by the New World Order. Sure, it’s theoretically possible that they might suddenly have alighted on a topic where they are not going to push the nefarious agenda of their sinister paymasters. But if they did it would be a first.

Like Patrick Henningsen – more details on our recent podcast – I take the view that if lab-leak is now the officially endorsed conspiracy theory of the US government then we should all be suspicious that there is an underlying agenda. Promoting lab-leak serves a number of purposes: it distracts from the more pressing issue of vaccine injury; it promotes the notion that the world is potentially swarming with rogue, bio-engineered viruses which require urgent defensive measures by supranational bodies such as the World Health Organisation, including compulsory vaccination against new viral strains; it fingers China as an even bigger enemy than it really is, justifying higher defence spending, escalated economic warfare and potential military action, and it creates further division within the sceptical community.

I notice plenty of evidence of the latter in the comments section below Mike Yeadon’s latest piece at TCW, headlined ‘Why I don’t believe there ever was a Covid virus’. Commenters who were previously united in the – correct – view that the ‘pandemic’ was a massive scam and that the ‘vaccines’ are a monstrous and unnecessary assault on public health are now bickering furiously over whether or not they believe in the Covid virus or in viruses generally.

Most of those defending the existence of the Covid virus do so on the basis of the personal health experiences I invoked at the beginning. I’m not disputing that they may have felt all the exotic and unpleasant symptoms they describe, nor even that these were quite unlike any they had had before. What I am questioning is the logical leap which leads them all to infer that these were definitely the result of a novel virus. How could they possibly know? There are any number of other potential causes for these symptoms: radiation or chemical poisoning; the effects of 5G; a fairly routine brand of flu rebadged as Covid – and escalated in their imagination through groupthink into something much worse; terrain theory . . .

I remain open-minded on the cause of those symptoms, as I do on ‘virus theory’ versus ‘terrain theory’, or whether maybe it’s a mixture of both. But it seems evident to me that certain facts about the supposed pandemic of 2020 are now beyond dispute: it was a ‘pandemic’ only because the WHO changed its definition of the word; mortality rates were not above normal; the PCR tests were fraudulent; SARS-CoV-2 has never been isolated; the pandemic was wargamed in 2019 at Event 201, and heavily promoted by vested interests (most funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) in the media, academe, the bio-medical establishment and client governments. Given the scale of the dishonesty surrounding this fake crisis, it would hardly constitute an extravagant leap to infer that the ‘virus’, like everything else, was just another fabricated part of the psyop.

And you don’t need to plump fully for terrain theory for this to be the case. Nor are you required to believe that China is a force for integrity and goodness, nor that Fauci and Daszak are stand-up guys, nor that there aren’t lots of black-budget-funded labs experimenting with pathogens. All you need to do is accept that the weight of evidence thus far shows that Mike Yeadon, and brave souls like him, are justified in their scepticism about the existence of a novel, possibly man-made virus called SARS-CoV-2. And the fact that in 2020 you had a nasty dose of flu-like symptoms is really neither here nor there.

March 24, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

No Guilt, No Shame: Western Leaders’ Excuses for NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia

Sputnik – March 24, 2023

Air attacks by NATO forces on Yugoslavia began this day 24 years ago. Between 1,200 and 2,500 people died within two months, and many more saw their lives crumbling into pieces when the US-led coalition unleashed war and destruction in the midst of Europe.

The decision to bomb Yugoslavia was made without the approval of the UN Security Council, and the order was issued to the commander of the allied forces, US General Wesley Clark, by NATO Secretary General Javier Solana.

Politicians, generals, and journalists from Europe and America engaged in an abominable competition, trying to justify the massacre and sugar-coat the violation of international laws.

The claims of the then-leaders of Western countries are displayed in this Sputnik gallery – alongside the results of the alliance’s brutal operation.

March 24, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Tyranny on the waters: The UAE-Israeli occupation of Yemen’s Socotra Island

By Karim Shami | The Cradle | March 24, 2023

Located off the southern coast of Yemen in the Arabian Sea, the Socotra archipelago has become a focal point of regional and international interest because of its strategic proximity to one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

On 21 June, 2020, the Yemeni island was militarily occupied by Saudi Arabia’s Emirati coalition partner, which has aggressively pursued a policy of establishing and controlling ports throughout West Asia and the Horn of Africa since 1999.

The archipelago consists of four large islands: Socotra (3,796km2), Abd al-Kuri (130.2km2), Samhah (39.6km2), and Darsah (7.5km2), as well as three small islets.

Socotra, the biggest of the islands, lies 350 km south of the Arabian Peninsula and 95 km from Somalia. It is surrounded by the Gulf of Aden, the Indian Ocean, and the Arabian Sea, and faces the Horn of Africa from the west. Around 20,000 shipping vessels pass around Socotra each year, including 9 percent of the world’s annual global petroleum supply.

The War on Yemen

The assault on Yemen was launched on 26 March, 2015, in an announcement by Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir from Washington DC, in which he stated that a coalition of ten countries, led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, would take military action to reinstate the government of Yemeni President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi.

Hadi had been ousted in popular protests in 2014, after losing the capital city, Sanaa, to the joint forces of the Ansarallah movement and their allies in the country’s armed forces. Based in northern Yemen, the Ansarallah movement had been advocating for fair representation in the government for a long time.

With US-backing, Saudi Arabia launched “Operation Decisive Storm,” and the air strikes began. Initially expected to last only a few weeks or months – and according to MbS himself, just “a few days” – the Yemeni war has now entered its eighth year and taken on a markedly different shape than the coalition initially contended.

Two years into the war, the Emiratis began pursuing their own hidden agenda of establishing a “self-styled maritime empire” in Yemen, which veered sharply from Riyadh’s objectives. To achieve this goal, Abu Dhabi sought to control the country’s southern coastline and its ports and enlisted the help of a local Yemeni proxy called the Southern Movement.

The Southern Movement was formed by secessionist tribes and groups seeking to divide Yemen along the old partition lines of 1967–1990. However, the movement had to be restructured to match the UAE’s aspirations, and in 2017 it was transformed into the Southern Transitional Council (STC).

Map of the Emirati-controlled areas and ports in southern Yemen

The significance of Socotra

Socotra Island falls under the territorial jurisdiction of the exiled Hadi government, which to this day – despite his physical absence and the replacement of the “presidency” with an 8-member, Saudi-sponsored Presidential Leadership Council (PLC) – remains Yemen’s internationally-recognized government.

However, on 30 April, 2018, the UAE deployed hundreds of troops with artillery and armored vehicles on the island, which is located 350 km away from the mainland conflict, without any prior coordination with Yemeni authorities.

The Riyadh-backed Yemeni government condemned the Emirati aggression, backed by local islanders protesting against the occupation of their territory. The Saudis were forced to intervene by sending troops and training locals to deter the UAE from seizing the island.

But later that year, UAE General Khalfan al-Mazrouei arrived on Socotra Island and has since been considered its de facto ruler. Under his leadership, the Emiratis gained the loyalty of local tribes by using bribery under the guise of “humanitarian aid.” They offered Socotra residents UAE passports and promised them an improved quality of life.

The STC seizes Socotra

On the morning of 21 June, 2020, the UAE-backed STC separatists forcibly seized control of Socotra and ousted the Saudi-backed, pro-Hadi forces.

The UAE had been planning and preparing for this operation for two years, using its Yemeni proxies to gain full control over the Socotra archipelago. The Emirati flag was raised across the territory, and UAE telecommunication companies replaced Yemeni ones. Consequently, all phone calls from Socotra now register Emirati phone networks.

UAE-Israel normalization

Three months after the seizure of Socotra, the highly-controversial Abraham Accords was signed in Washington DC between Israel and the UAE, along with Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. On the Arab side, the normalization thrust was led by Abu Dhabi, which quickly moved to expand its diplomatic, military, and economic ties with Tel Aviv.

Shortly after the signing of the Abraham Accords, reports and images of Israeli “tourists” visiting Socotra began to emerge. According to an Al-Mayadeen report, however, the Israeli visitors were not tourists, but rather, military experts.

Abd al-Kuri Island

In February 2023, Ansarallah released a statement condemning the UAE’s eviction of residents from Abd al-Kuri, the archipelago’s second-largest island. The resistance movement accused Abu Dhabi of carrying out a long-planned operation to transform Socotra into an Israeli-Emirati military and intelligence hub.

These actions by the UAE are not isolated incidents. In another 2022 episode, Ansarallah accused Abu Dhabi of transferring fishermen from the small island of Perim (13 km2) to other parts of the Taiz Governorate. Several months later, satellite imagery revealed the construction of a military base runway on the volcanic Island. Perim is now empty of its original inhabitants, according to media reports.

An Emirati military base on Perim Island (Mayyun in Arabic) on the Bab al-Mandab Strait

Perim Island has historically divided the Bab al-Mandab Strait into two waterways – whoever controls the island holds strategic influence over the strait. While Ansarallah’s statement about Emirati designs on Socotra was not entirely new, it raised hackles throughout the Arab world by confirming Israel’s military and intelligence presence on this key Yemeni island.

The UAE’s maritime ambitions

Many have questioned Abu Dhabi’s motivation for seizing Socotra and risking its relationships with Saudi Arabia and neighboring Oman (virtually overnight surrounded by UAE ports and bases). The UAE’s actions may be entirely attributed to the strategic vision of its President Mohammed bin Zayed (MbZ) and his no-longer secret desire to establish an Emirati maritime empire –from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea – by controlling the region’s key waterways.

The UAE’s economic reliance on these waterways is a clear driver of MbZ’s plans: non-petroleum commodity re-exports make up almost half of Abu Dhabi’s total exports. As such, maritime security is a top priority in the country’s foreign policy calculations.

The UAE currently controls 12 ports off the coast of Yemen, including Aden, Makha, Mukalla, Al-Dabba, Bir Ali, Belhaf, Rudum, Zoubab, Al-Khawkhah, Al-Khouba, Qena, and Al-Nashima. The country is also building a new port in Al-Mahra that will cost an estimated $100 million.

By controlling these ports and the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the UAE can dominate one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, elevating its position in global and regional trade to a strategic player.

In addition to its aggressive accumulation of Yemeni ports, the UAE also has a significant presence in the Horn of Africa, where it currently controls two ports in Eritrea and one in Somalia. It previously owned a port in Djibouti, but this became a point of territorial friction between the two countries. The UAE’s control over these ports and their strategic location in the region allow it to project its power and expand its influence in East Africa.

Why is Socotra important to Israel?

The UAE and Israel share mutual security concerns over Iran’s regional ascension over the past decade. The Islamic Republic’s naval presence is expanding into many new waterways, and its seaborne activities from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea alarm both nations. Given Washington’s growing reluctance to engage its armed forces in West Asia, MbZ turned to the region’s military behemoth and main Iranian rival to help him execute his vision. Unlike Israel, no other regional state has the ability to garner unconditional US support – nor the willingness to cavalierly defy international law and territorial integrity.

Abu Dhabi has calculated that it stands to benefit from Israel’s intelligence network and early warning systems, particularly after its cities were subject to unprecedented Ansarallah missile and drone strikes in January 2022.

For Tel Aviv, its physical presence in any Arab state is perceived as a victory, which aligns with its ambitions for regional expansion. By establishing a base on Abd al-Kuri Island, Israel can reinforce its maritime security – around 25 percent of its trade passes through the Bab al-Mandab Strait. Another objective of the Israeli-Emirati military and intelligence hub could be to gather data or engage in espionage activities in the southern Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa.

During the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Yemen – in partnership with Egypt – blocked the passage of Israeli ships and tankers from accessing the strategic strait, leading to disastrous consequences for Israel.

The tactic could be replicated under Ansarallah Chief Abdel Malak al-Houthi’s leadership, since the movement considers Israel one of its main regional adversaries. While it may seem like a distant possibility, if the war concludes under current Riyadh-Sanaa peace efforts and Ansarallah gains control of Yemen’s south, the movement will enjoy unusual leverage to obstruct Israeli shipments whenever Tel Aviv launches regional aggressions. It should be noted that Ansarallah has already publicly threatened, on several occasions, to strike sensitive Israeli sites with its new missile capabilities.

Moreover, there has been an ongoing “ghost ship war” between Israel and Iran for several years, with occasional reports of Iranian or Israeli ships being attacked in these waterways. Israel’s presence on Socotra Island could provide it with leverage over Iran in their waterway stand-off and enable Tel Aviv to counter Ansarallah inside Yemeni territory.

NATO’s Combined Maritime Forces

It is important to note that the involvement of the US in the Israeli-Emirati collaboration and actions in Yemeni waters is not confirmed. However, it is true that the US has been a maritime security provider for the Persian Gulf monarchies for decades, and its NATO-led Combined Maritime Forces (CMF) have been present in West Asian waters since 1983 – including leading hostile actions against Iraq and Somalia.

The CMF alliance has assumed responsibility for the security of four bodies of water: The Red Sea, Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea, and the Gulf of Aden.

But with China’s rapid rise as a global economic competitor, US policy pivoted further eastward, and Washington has sought to subcontract out its West Asian security policies to its regional allies.

As such, last December, the CMF assigned command of its Red Sea task force to the Egyptian Navy, who took over from US naval forces. In this regard, the UAE, backed by Israel, may be another candidate to lead a NATO-backed naval security operation in the region.

Map of the NATO-led Combined Maritime Forces (CMF) areas of operation in West Asian waterways

Implications for Iran and Saudi Arabia

Any Israeli expansion is likely to alarm Iran and vice versa, potentially leading to direct or proxy clashes in various regional theaters. However, the presence of the UAE – Iran’s second-largest trading partner – in southern Yemen may limit Tehran’s options. Unless Iran perceives a serious security threat from the new “Arab-Israeli alliance,” it is unlikely to take any significant actions that could harm its trade relations with Abu Dhabi.

The war against Yemen has severely damaged Saudi Arabia’s image as a regional powerhouse. During the last few years, all major Saudi cities have been the subject of Ansarallah missile and drone strikes – including the country’s key oil infrastructure.

It has been humiliating for the Persian Gulf’s wealthiest and most heavily militarized state to have its vulnerabilities so completely exposed by West Asia’s poorest nation. In contrast, the UAE has thus far only benefited from the Yemen war and expanded its influence in the region.

Recently, there have been reports of a possible breakthrough in negotiations between Riyadh and Ansarallah, and observers are hoping for an early roadmap to end the conflict during the holy month of Ramadan. Obstacles are aplenty: The UAE is notably absent from the discussions, the Emirati-backed Yemeni separatists – the STC – reject any solution that doesn’t leave them in control of the south, and the US has sought to scuttle any final solution that undermines Washington’s regional leverage.

Liberating the island

Of all the stakeholders with interest in Socotra Island, none are ultimately as important as the Yemeni ones, primarily the UAE-backed STC, the Saudi-backed PLC, and Iran-backed Ansarallah.

In his most recent televised appearance, Ansarallah’s Abdel Malik al-Houthi stated: “We seek to defeat the aggression, whether on the islands, on land or at sea, and from anyone who violates our independence and the sovereignty of our country.” Unlike other leaders, al-Houthi’s threats are usually translated into action and Ansarallah will not hesitate to strike the Israeli-Emirati bases or seize their ships if the aggression continues.

Ansarallah is currently the strongest player in Yemen, controlling more than 80 percent of the country in terms of population density. On the other hand, the PLC is the most vulnerable of the three main Yemeni players, and Riyadh’s recent rapprochement agreement with Tehran has further weakened the group. If an agreement is reached between Riyadh and Sanaa, the PLC will have one of two options: to hand over their weapons or merge into Ansarallah’s armed forces.

On the other side of the spectrum, the UAE-backed STC is worried about ongoing peace talks and fears being left alone to fight head-to-head with Ansarallah-aligned armed forces.

The question now is whether there will be a peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Ansarallah that excludes the UAE and its Yemeni proxies. If that happens, Sanaa’s armed forces will almost certainly turn their big guns on the Emiratis and their Yemeni interests. The Saudis will have already calculated this outcome as they seek to advance a deal with Ansarallah. In this event, it is unlikely that Riyadh will come to Abu Dhabi’s assistance. Their common goals in Yemen ended years ago.

March 24, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Washington used 300 tons of depleted uranium in Iraq: Moscow

Children who were born with birth defects in Fallujah. (Photo Credit: Getty Images)
The Cradle | March 24, 2023

The Commander of the Russian army’s Radiological, Chemical, and Biological Protection Forces, Igor Kirillov, on 24 March accused the US of using “no less than 300 tons of depleted uranium” during the early years of the Iraq war.

“In 2003-2004, the USA extensively used such munitions in strikes on targets in Iraqi cities: Amarah, Baghdad, Basra, Karbala, Fallujah. According to the UN, the US used no less than 300 tons of depleted uranium in Iraq,” Kirillov told reporters on 24 March.

He added that the resulting radioactive fallout in Fallujah alone was “worse than what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

“This city is still called the second Chernobyl,” the Russian official stressed.

A 2018 investigation by Al Araby shows Iraq recorded the highest rate of congenital malformations in the world over the previous decade. These rates were worse in Fallujah, which was showered in depleted uranium and white phosphorus by US coalition forces.

“According to the Iraqi government, in 2005, the incidence of cancer in the country due to the use of depleted uranium munitions increased from 40 to 1,600 cases per 100,000 citizens. In this regard, Baghdad filed an official lawsuit with the International Court of Arbitration in Stockholm on December 26, 2020, against Washington, claiming compensation for the damages sustained,” Kirillov added.

In 2014,  the Dutch peace group Pax revealed that US jets and tanks fired nearly 10,000 depleted uranium rounds in Iraq, many of which were fired in or near populated areas.

The Kremlin official made his statement on Friday in response to the UK government saying earlier this week they will provide Ukraine with armor-piercing rounds containing depleted uranium.

Depleted uranium is a byproduct of creating enriched uranium used in nuclear fuel and weapons. Although it can not generate a nuclear reaction, depleted uranium is higher in density than lead, making it highly attractive as a projectile.

“It’s so dense, and it’s got so much momentum that it just keeps going through the armor – and it heats it up so much that it catches on fire,” Edward Geist, a nuclear expert at research organization RAND, told Al Jazeera on Thursday.

US officials backed London’s decision, claiming the ammunition is “not anywhere close to going into” the sphere of nuclear weaponry.

“This is a commonplace type of munition … If Russia is particularly concerned about the welfare of their tanks and their tank soldiers … they could just take them across the border back into Russia,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said.

The UN Environment Program described depleted uranium ammunition as “chemically and radiologically toxic heavy metal.” A 2001 World Health Organization (WHO) report concluded that depleted uranium could accumulate at the ground surface and enter the food chain, while uranium dust can be inhaled and retained in the lungs.

London’s plan to send the radioactive arms to Ukraine came to light as the twentieth anniversary of the Iraq invasion passed. Last December, the US navy named a next-generation warship the ‘USS Fallujah.’

March 24, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Uranium Shells to Cause Irreversible Harm to Health of Ukrainians, Russian MoD Says

Sputnik – 24.03.2023

MOSCOW – The use of uranium ammunition will cause irreversible harm to the health of the military and civilian population of Ukraine, but NATO is ready to supply them to Kiev, Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the head of the radiation, chemical and biological defense troops of the Russian armed forces, said on Friday.

“Despite the fact that the use of such ammunition [with depleted uranium] will cause irreparable harm to the health of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the civilian population, NATO countries, in particular the UK, express their readiness to supply this type of weapon to the Kiev regime,” Kirillov told a briefing.

Depleted uranium compounds, remaining in the soil after its use as part of projectiles, may be dangerous for people, animals and the environment for a long time, the official added.

After the use of shells with depleted uranium on the territory of Ukraine, significant cultivation areas will be contaminated — through vehicles, radioactive substances will be carried to the territory outside the combat zone, he said.

Lt. Gen. added that use of depleted uranium shells can provoke serious diseases, and the ingestion of dust into the body is a radiation hazard.

“As a result of the impact of a depleted uranium munition, a mobile hot cloud of a finely dispersed aerosol of uranium-238 and its oxides is formed, which, when exposed to the body in the future, can provoke the development of serious diseases,” Kirillov said.

The main radiation hazard from depleted uranium occurs if it enters the body in the form of dust, the official added.

“The flux of alpha-radiation from small uranium particles deposited in the upper and lower respiratory tract, lungs and esophagus cause the development of malignant tumors. Uranium dust accumulating in the kidneys, bone tissue and liver leads to changes in internal organs,” Lt. Gen. explained.

NATO fired about 40,000 shells with more than 15 tons of depleted uranium during the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, Kirillov recalled.

“It is necessary to recall that depleted uranium aircraft munitions were used by NATO forces during the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. In total, about 40,000 armor-piercing air shells with a total amount of depleted uranium of more than 15 tons were used on the territory of this country,” Kirillov told reporters.

The level of uranium contamination of soil and groundwater in Serbia still requires constant monitoring to assess potential risks, the official added.

NATO soldiers have become victims of the use of depleted uranium ammunition in Iraq and Yugoslavia, he stressed.

“The victims of the irresponsible policy of their own leadership were NATO servicemen who took part in military campaigns in Iraq and Yugoslavia,” Kirillov told a briefing.

According to a 2016 report by the Chief Military Medical Inspector of Italy, it is reported that more than 4,000 servicemen of the national armed forces had malignant tumors of various types. These soldiers were deployed in the Balkans in 1994-1999 and in Iraq in 2003 in areas where the alliance forces used depleted uranium ammunition. At the same time, 330 people — 8% of cases — died as a result of the disease, official concluded.

Meanwhile, Kirillov stressed the fact that depleted uranium shells do not have significant advantage over tungsten shells in conditions of modern military operations.
“The use of ammunition containing depleted uranium has no significant advantage over tungsten in the conditions of modern military operations,” he told.

The term depleted uranium is a trivial name for a metal based on over 90% of the isotopes of uranium-238 and less than 1% of uranium-235, the official said.

“The use of depleted uranium in such ammunition is associated with its high density, which ensures a high armor-piercing effect. This effect is achieved by using the kinetic energy of the core itself, as well as its shell. Upon impact with the armor, the shell made of soft steel is destroyed and transfers its energy to the core, which penetrates into the armor,” Kirillov explained.

According to the military, tungsten alloys have similar characteristics, but ammunition based on them is much more expensive to manufacture. Therefore, depleted uranium ammunition is much more often used in those countries where there are uranium reserves, its processing technology, and their use is planned on foreign territory when there is no need to think about environmental consequences.

March 24, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Seymour Hersh makes claim over reasons for Nord Stream sabotage

RT | March 24, 2023

US President Joe Biden ordered the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines because he was unhappy with the level of support provided by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has claimed.

Hersh first accused Washington of destroying the key European energy route in an article released in February, and made more allegations in an interview with the China Daily newspaper published on Friday.

“The [US] president was afraid of Chancellor Scholz not wanting to put more guns and more arms [forward for Kiev]. That’s all. I don’t know whether that it was anger or punishment, but the net effect is that it cut off a major power source through Western Europe,” Hersh claimed.

Despite attempts by the US to deny its involvement in the Nord Stream attack, “Europe is in crisis now” and Biden will receive “a lot of criticism for what he did” in the coming months, the journalist argued.

The Pulitzer Prize winner alleged that “the people that were initially asked to do the job” of destroying the pipelines were contacted by US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan towards the end of 2021.

The initial purpose of mining Nord Stream 1 and 2, built to deliver Russian gas to Europe through Germany, was “to give the [US] president an option to say to [Russian] President Putin, ‘If you go to war [in Ukraine], we’re going to destroy the pipelines,’” Hersh claimed.

Biden himself publicly confirmed that stance but “unfortunately, those people in the Western press seemed to have forgotten,” the journalist stated.

Just under three weeks before the launch of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine, Biden warned during a press conference on February 7 that “if Russia invades… there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”

According to Hersh, the US leader decided to order the detonation of mines at the bottom of the Baltic Sea last September because the conflict “wasn’t going great in Ukraine” from a US perspective. There was “at best a stalemate” during that period, in what Hersh described as “the American war that President Biden was so eager to support.”

March 24, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | 1 Comment

Romania to consider bill seeking land grab in Ukraine

RT | March 24, 2023

A controversial bill submitted to the Romanian parliament this week has urged the government to drop its recognition of Ukraine’s borders by 2027 and “annex” territories where ethnic Romanians live.

The bill, introduced by right-wing lawmaker Diana Sosoaca, would repeal a provision in the 1997 treaty with Ukraine, which pledged respect for each other’s national borders. She described the document as “the biggest act of treason” in Romania’s modern history because it “recognized the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact,” according to a formal justification of the bill.

Sosoaca was referring to the non-aggression agreement between the USSR and Nazi Germany, sealed in August 1939, which included a classified portion delineating spheres of influence for Moscow and Berlin.

The pact was one of several such agreements signed by European nations with Adolf Hitler’s government, as they maneuvered diplomatically in the last days of the interwar period. Romania was a Nazi ally for a significant portion of World War II, before switching sides. It lost some of its territories in the post-war settlement, which were added to Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Moldova.

Sosoaca listed several lands, which she deems as historically Romanian and currently “abusively held by Ukraine,” from Northern Bukovina to Snake Island. The latter was part of a lengthy legal battle over maritime borders, which ended in 2009 with Kiev keeping sovereignty over the islet.

Romania would “annex” those territories under the bill. The legislator cited a need to protect ethnic Romanians living in Ukraine from Kiev’s discriminatory policies, and ensure that they can maintain their cultural identity.

After the bill was met with pushback in Romania, Sosoaca stressed that she did not want Bucharest to go to war with Kiev for a land grab. However, she added: “peace cannot be based on the forced ethnic assimilation of the Romanian minority, which is the practice of the Ukrainian state.”

The initiative was introduced in the upper chamber of the Romanian parliament on Monday, with Sosoaca’s SOS Party holding a presentation the next day. She used to be a member of a different political force, but was expelled from its parliamentary faction in 2021 for allegedly breaking with its political strategy, and is now technically independent.

Critics have described Sosoaca as “far right” and claimed that she has ties with Russia, based on her attempts to soften a diplomatic dispute a few years ago, and her calls for a neutral stance on the Ukrainian conflict. The Romanian government is a staunch supporter of Kiev.

March 24, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Russia’s ‘inexplicable’ ability to withstand Western aggression

British and French invaders exit from Crimea in defeat
By Drago Bosnic | March 24, 2023

One of the most self-defeating and yet inexplicably persistent mistakes Russia’s enemies have been making for over a thousand years is underestimating it. Regardless of the direction the invasion was coming from, Moscow was able to prevail each time. Its ability to not just successfully defend itself, but also counterattack and reach the opponent’s heartland has been unmatched in modern history. And yet, the myth of Russia’s supposed perpetual decline and dilapidation is an incessant propaganda trope used by its enemies for centuries. None of it ever came true, despite all the grim predictions, which are still being parroted to this very day and are unlikely to go away any time soon, especially nowadays, when the political West needs to keep its populace under the illusion that Moscow is supposedly “losing”.

We often hear that Russia is no more than a regional power with an economy the size of Spain’s, a military budget that has been consistently smaller than the Saudi one, etc. And indeed, on paper, this may seem true. Taking into account nominal GDP as the only measure of success and power, one might fall into the trap of believing such statistics. However, the reality is quite different. All one needs to do is ask just a few logical questions. Could the Spanish economy ever withstand the sanctions imposed on Russia, let alone grow and outperform those enforcing them? Is the Spanish economy a key global supplier of vital commodities such as food, oil, natural gas, various types of heavy machinery, crucial chemical products (such as fertilizers), enriched uranium for nuclear power plants, etc?

And yet, perhaps the most “inexplicable” segment of Russia’s resilience is its military power, particularly the cost-effectiveness of its forces, both on a tactical and strategic level. In 2021, Russia officially spent $65 billion on defense. For comparison, NATO spent close to $1.2 trillion. If we add other key US vassals such as Japan, Australia and South Korea, that figure is close to $1.4 trillion, meaning that the political West spends approximately 22 times more than Russia. So, is “global” NATO 22 times more powerful than Russia? The notion is even more ludicrous if we take into account that Moscow actually outproduces NATO in terms of air defense missiles, artillery shells and other munitions, while also maintaining a strategic arsenal greater and more powerful than that of the political West, combined.

This is without considering Russia’s absolute dominance in key technologies such as hypersonic weapons, with no NATO/Western countries deploying a single operational missile of that type and with no prospects of doing so before 2025 (or beyond). There are other aspects such as Moscow being able to fight on multiple fronts simultaneously, including in Syria, another US/NATO invasion ever so euphemistically dubbed the “Syrian Civil War”, where the Pentagon keeps complaining that its forces there are essentially powerless to stop Russia. This discrepancy in official figures is even more pronounced in Ukraine, where the political West spent approximately $120 billion in little more than a year, which is nearly twice as much as Moscow’s entire annual military budget and approximately 25 times more than what Russia has allocated for the special military operation.

And yet, the Kiev regime forces are suffering staggering losses at a rate of nearly 9:1 in Russia’s favor. Worse yet, Russian forces have consistently been outnumbered 2:1 for over a year now, all the while conducting offensive operations in multiple directions simultaneously. It should also be noted that several former high-ranking US/NATO officers have pointed out that the Neo-Nazi junta forces would be among the top three NATO military powers had the Kiev regime been admitted into the belligerent alliance. Given their performance against the Russian military, while having a massive numerical advantage and NATO providing all the targeting data, as well as getting up to 25 times more funding than the Russian forces deployed on the frontlines, should we be surprised by the panic at the Pentagon?

John Kirby, Spokesman for the National Security Council and a former US admiral, was recently asked to comment on the Russian pilots being awarded medals for masterfully downing a US MQ-9 “Reaper” drone, to which he stated they were “idiots, at best”. However, when we compare the US handling of the so-called “balloon controversy”, things become a lot clearer. It took the Pentagon approximately a week to use the F-22 “Raptor”, its most expensive fighter jet, and shoot down weather balloons with missiles costing nearly $450,000 each. In addition, the F-22 is infamous for its flight hour of around $85,000, as well as costing approximately $350 million apiece. According to The Guardian, the price of one of its targets was a meager $12. Worse yet, it took at least two missiles for the “Raptor” to down one of the balloons it engaged.

If we were to compare this to Moscow’s interception of the US drone which took part in the Kiev regime’s attacks on Russian soldiers and civilians, the discrepancy becomes even more staggering. As previously mentioned, Russian pilots downed a US MQ-9 (the latest Block 5, costing over $32 million) without firing a single shot in an action that lasted no longer than 30 minutes. It should also be noted that the Su-27s they were flying cost approximately $15 million, with the flight hour being around $15,000. When considering those facts, Mr. Kirby should double-check the definition of the term “idiot” or maybe take a good look in the mirror, “at best”.

This also brings us to a rather amusing episode that happened in Serbia over two decades ago. Namely, two years after the (hopefully) final direct US/NATO attack (on this day 24 years ago) on Serbia at the end of nearly a decade-long aggression, a delegation from the Pentagon visited Belgrade, including the main Serbian aviation museum. During the tour that included showcasing downed American aircraft, a member of the US group arrogantly asked one of the Serbian officers how it felt fighting the most powerful military force in history, to which he replied: “I wouldn’t know. We never fought the Russians.” At the time it seemed like a jest that the Americans didn’t take too kindly. However, over 20 years later, the statement seems like anything but a joke.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

March 24, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | , | 1 Comment

Ron Unz: JFK Assassination, Iranian Channel Four TV (IRIB)

Iranian TV Fills the “Blank Spots” in Our National History

BY RON UNZ • UNZ REVIEW • MARCH 19, 2023

I recently read Lenin’s Tomb, David Remnick’s Pulitzer Prize winning 1993 account of the decay and political collapse of the Soviet Union, and one of the crucial points he emphasized was that Soviet history contained many important “Blank Spots,” deeply suppressed facts or incidents central to the true history of that unfortunate country.

Just as information suppressed by the Soviet authorities had once circulated freely in the West, topics totally banned from today’s Western media are openly discussed in other societies, which possess entirely different taboos.

A few months ago I was contacted by a host for Iranian broadcast television who had decided to feature interviews with a number of Western dissident thinkers, individuals whose controversial views had excluded them from American media outlets. Channel Four of the Iran Broadcasting Corporation is one of that country’s largest, having a potential audience of ten million, and I gladly spent four hours discussing a variety of my topics, while also suggesting a number of other figures who were also interviewed as well.

Thirty-odd segments featuring about a dozen different guests were ultimately recorded, and as they have been aired, they are also being released on a streaming website. About half are now available, including most of my own and those featuring E. Michael Jones, Nick Kollerstrom, Kevin Barrett, and Laurent Guyénot. For more convenient Western access, I had them video-captured and uploaded to a Rumble channel, realizing that many of the taboo topics would immediately trigger a purge on Youtube.

Those of my interviews already broadcast included discussions of the JFK Assassination, the 9/11 Attacks, and the Holocaust, and I was reasonably pleased with how they came out. I’m embedding these video segments below, followed in each case by some of the main articles I had previously published on those particular topics.

Ron Unz: JFK Assassination, Part #1, Iranian Channel Four TV (IRIB)

Ron Unz: JFK Assassination, Part #2, Iranian Channel Four TV (IRIB)

March 23, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

Iraq war is epitomy of media duplicity

By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | March 23, 2023

The Iraq War was spawned by a deadly combination of political depravity and media complicity. Unfortunately, on the twentieth anniversary of the war, both elements of that conspiracy are being whitewashed. Instead, politicians and their pundit accomplices are prattling as if the Iraq war was a well-intentioned mistake, not a crime against humanity.

In the days after 9/11, when pollsters asked Americans who they thought had carried out the 9/11 attacks, only 3 percent of respondents suggested Iraq or Saddam Hussein as culprits. But President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney worked ceaselessly to convince Americans that Saddam was the 9/11 culprit. Official propaganda trumpeting the Saddam/al-Qaeda link was the linchpin for exploiting 9/11 to justify war. A February 2003 poll found that 72 percent of Americans believed that Saddam was “personally involved in the September 11 attacks.” Shortly before the March 2003 invasion, almost half of all Americans believed that “most” or “some” of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens. Only 17 percent of respondents knew that none of the hijackers was Iraqi.

In his official notification of invasion sent to Congress (in lieu of a declaration of war) on March 18, 2003, Bush declared that he was attacking Iraq “to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” Bush tied Saddam to 9/11 even though confidential briefings he received informed him that no evidence of any link had been found. Three years after the war started, Bush publicly admitted that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11.

On March 17, 2003, Bush also justified invading Iraq by invoking UN resolutions purportedly authorizing the U.S. “to use force in ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.” In a speech giving Saddam 48 hours to abdicate power, Bush declared, “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” In the weeks and months after the fall of Baghdad, Bush repeatedly asserted that U.S. forces had discovered WMDs or that Saddam had weapons programs. “We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories,” Bush declared to journalists on May 29, 2003. Five weeks later, he again claimed vindication because “we found a biological lab” in a truck trailer. However, CIA investigators concluded that the trailer had nothing to do with an Iraqi WMD program. False claims by the Bush administration on Saddam seeking uranium in Niger sparked an uproar and leaks seeking to destroy the former ambassador who exposed the sham.

In June 2003, Bush repeatedly denounced “revisionist historians” who kept asking about the missing WMDs. In a November 12, 2003 interview with the BBC’s David Frost, Bush declared that he had sent a team to Iraq “to find the weapons or the intent of weapons.” Bush did not reveal how he defined “the intent of weapons.” The following month, Bush told ABC News that the war was justified because there was “the possibility that [Saddam] could acquire weapons.” In January 2004, David Kay—the man Bush chose to head the search for WMDs in Iraq—testified to Congress that “we were almost all wrong,” as far as Iraq possessing WMDs. Kay’s testimony demolished one of the prime pretexts for the war.

Bush responded by portraying the lack of evidence as proof of his courage. On February 8, 2004, Bush justified invading Iraq because Saddam “had the ability to make weapons at the very minimum.” This is like justifying a violent no-knock raid on someone’s house because they could have purchased gunpowder and tin cans.

In a March 2, 2004 speech to Homeland Security Department employees, Bush offered a new justification for invading Iraq: “America will not allow terrorists and outlaw regimes to threaten our Nation and the world with the world’s most dangerous technologies.” The mere suspicion that a nation might have “dangerous technologies” justified devastating their land.

But what did George W. Bush really think? That mystery was solved a few weeks later at the annual Washington dinner for the Radio and Television Correspondents Association. Bush performed a skit featuring slides showing him crawling around the Oval Office peeking behind curtains. Bush quipped to the poohbah attendees: “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere…Nope, no weapons over there… Maybe under here?” The crowd loved it and The Washington Post headlined its report on the evening: “George Bush, Entertainer in Chief.” Greg Mitchell, the editor of Editor & Publisher, labeled the performance and the press’s reaction that night as “one of the most shameful episodes in the recent history of the American media and presidency.” By the time of Bush’s performance, hundreds of American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians had already been killed.

Most of the media had embedded themselves for the Iraq war long before that dinner. The Washington Post buried pre-war articles questioning the Bush team’s shams on Iraq; their award-winning Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks complained, “There was an attitude among editors: ‘Look, we’re going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?’” Instead, before the war started, the Post ran 27 editorials in favor of invasion and 140 front-page articles supporting the Bush administration’s case for attacking Saddam. PBS’s Bill Moyers noted that “of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC and CBS nightly news, from September 2002 until February 2003, almost all the stories could be traced back to sources from the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department.” Jim Lehrer, the host of government-subsidized PBS Newshour, explained his timidity in 2004: “It would have been difficult to have had debates [about invading Iraq]… you’d have had to have gone against the grain.” Lehrer’s admission did not disgrace him since groveling to officialdom is the job description for Washington journalists.

In his 1971 opinion on the Pentagon Papers case, Justice Hugo Black declared that a free press has “the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.” But during the Iraq War, most of the media preferred to trumpet official lies instead of exposing them.

A 2005 American University survey of hundreds of journalists who covered Iraq concluded: “Many media outlets have self-censored their reporting on the conflict in Iraq because of concern about public reaction to graphic images and details about the war.” Individual journalists commented:

“In general, coverage downplayed civilian casualties and promoted a pro-U.S. viewpoint. No U.S. media show abuses by U.S. military carried out on regular basis.”

“Friendly fire incidents were to show only injured Americans, and no reference made to possible mistakes involving civilians.”

“The real damage of the war on the civilian population was uniformly omitted.”

The media sugarcoated the war and almost always refused to publish photos incriminating the U.S. military. The Washington Post received a leak of thousands of pages of confidential records on the 2005 massacre at Haditha, including stunning photos taken immediately after Marines killed 24 civilians (mostly women and children). Though the Post headlined its exclusive story, “Marines’ Photos Provide Graphic Evidence in Haditha Probe,” the article noted that “Post editors decided that most of the images are too graphic to publish.” The Post suppressed the evidence at the same time it continued deferentially reporting official denials that U.S. troops committed atrocities.

In 2007, two Apache helicopters targeted a group of men in Baghdad with 30 mm. cannons and killed kill up to 18 people. Video from the helicopter revealed one helicopter crew “laughing at some of the casualties, all of whom were civilians, including two Reuters journalists.” “Light ’em all up. Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,” one guy on the recording declared. Army Corporal Chelsea Manning leaked the video to Wikileaks, which disclosed it in 2010. Wikileaks declared on Twitter: “Washington Post had Collateral Murder video for over a year but DID NOT RELEASE IT to the public.” Wikileaks also disclosed thousands of official documents exposing U.S. war crimes and abuses, tacitly damning American media outlets that chose to ignore or shroud atrocities.

In 2007, Fox News talk show host Bill O’Reilly declared that at the beginning of the war in Iraq, “everybody in the country [was] behind it, except the kooks.” The “kooks” included UN weapons inspectors, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and many foreign governments. The “kook” label was also attached to Antiwar.com, The American Conservative, Counterpunch, the Future of Freedom Foundation, and an array of individual journalists who often found closed doors to their submissions. Likewise, the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of protestors who took to the streets of American cities to oppose the war were redefined into a laughingstock.

In his rush to war, President Bush showed boundless bad faith—followed by boundless righteousness after his lies were exposed. By the summer of 2008, only 22 percent of Americans approved of Bush and 41 percent said he was the “worst president ever.” But the same media outlets that championed the Iraq War helped resurrect Bush’s public image a decade later. Bush was exalted like the second coming of George Washington for his slams against the Trump administration. By early 2018,  a poll showed that 61 percent of Americans approved of Bush, and his support among Democrats quintupled, from 11 percent in early 2009 to 54 percent now. The key to Bush’s rehabilitation was burying his Iraq War record in the Memory Hole.

The media played the same trick to expunge its own tawdry Iraq record. Four years ago, the Washington Post spent a king’s ransom to produce and run a Super Bowl ad on its “Democracy Dies in the Darkness” motto. At that time, the Post was whipping up RussiaGate hysteria and reaping torrents of new subscribers. The Super Bowl ad, a paean to reporters, declared, “When we go off to war… knowing keeps us free.”

But kowtowing leaves people dead. Twenty years after the start of the Iraq War, President Biden is dragging America deeper into a foreign conflict that could spiral into World War III. Most of the mainstream media is again parroting whatever the U.S. government or its foreign lackeys say about the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Lies are political weapons of mass destruction, obliterating all limits on government power. The Iraq War should have taught Americans not to trust presidents or pundits who seek to unleash mass carnage. But don’t trust the Washington elite to ever learn or admit that lesson.

March 23, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | 1 Comment

Serbs Aware of UK’s ‘Gift’ for Ukraine: NATO Poisoned Serbia’s Soil for Billions of Years to Come

Sputnik – 23.03.2023

The radioactive substance that contaminated Serbian soil during NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 is still killing people, Dr. Zorka Vukmirovic, former scientific advisor at the Institute of Physics in Belgrade, told Sputnik, commenting on London’s plans to supply Ukraine with depleted uranium shells.

As one of the most glaring examples of the terrible consequences, she pointed to the depleted uranium bombing of a telecommunications station near Vranje in Serbia’s south in the spring of 1999 and the repercussions for the workers who had cleaned up the area around the destroyed facility. Seven of them have already died of cancer, and the eighth is suffering from cancer as well.

“It is a well-known fact that NATO has admitted to having dropped 10 tons of depleted uranium ammunition on the territory of Serbia. It was important to show where these munitions were used. A map was made in consultation with our army, which concluded that it was 15 tons of depleted uranium. The map was supplemented with some locations, and the map turned out to be far larger than NATO was trying to present,” Vukmirovic specified.

According to Dr. Vukmirovic, it is crucial to find places where pollution is still present because that is where people live, grow food and use water.

“The worst consequence is that all the dumped uranium, which gets into the groundwater with the rain, can endanger drinking water. Most of the known sites are along the border with Albania, and most of these sites belong to the Drin River. So it flows into the Adriatic Sea,” the expert said.

Vukmirovic points out that it is essential to clean up contaminated soil and properly dispose of waste throughout Serbia so that everyone can have healthy children.

“If this is not done, there is a great danger. Otherwise, the soil will remain contaminated for billions of years. Another problem is the solubility of uranium in contact with water. Rain dissolves this waste and sends it deeper into the groundwater, which is the source of drinking water,” she noted.

No Accurate Data on Illnesses

Sputnik’s source regrets that the exact number of people who came down with cancer as a result of the attacks with depleted uranium shells is unknown. No one has systematically collected such data.

According to the Institute of Public Health of Serbia, by 2014, 35,319 people nationwide were sick with cancer and 20,806 people had died. That’s more than 5,000 cases per million people, 2.8 times the global average.

In 2016, 22,004 people died, 60.8% more than in 1991.

With an annual mortality increase of 2.8%, Serbia has become the world’s leader in cancer deaths. In the US, for example, which has left the Serbs with tons of depleted uranium, these rates have been falling. During that time, the incidence rate there dropped by 0.6% and the mortality rate by 1.6%.

March 23, 2023 Posted by | Environmentalism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | 1 Comment

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