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A False Accusation Just Got a Man Locked Out of His Smart Home

Truthstream Media | July 1, 2023

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July 6, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

The Fake China Threat, Then and Now

By Joseph Solis-Mullen | The Libertarian Institute | July 5, 2023

Republicans are terrible on China. Examples abound, but perhaps the most instructive illustration of this long-term handicap comes from the following quotation:

“We must be prepared to go it alone in China if our allies desert us. We must not fool ourselves into thinking we can avoid taking up arms with the Chinese Reds. If we don’t fight them in China and Formosa [Taiwan] we’ll be fighting them in San Francisco, in Seattle, in Kansas City.”1

This wasn’t excerpted from a recent speech by Senator Tom Cotton (R-AK). Rather, it was by then-Senate Majority Leader William Knowland (R-CA), in the January 1954 edition of Collier’s Magazine. While perhaps particularly rabid in his Sinophobia, President Dwight D. Eisenhower privately opined that “Knowland has no foreign policy, except to develop high blood pressure whenever he mentions ‘Red China’…In his case, there seems to be no final answer to the question, ‘How stupid can you get?’”2 The parallels between Knowland’s time and our own are significant. Representing the respective nadirs of Sino-American relations, they are worth considering in depth.

First, a necessary bit of high-level background.

In 1949 Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party defeated the nominally republican forces of Chiang Kai-shek. Despite internal warnings that this was likely to happen, Chiang and his nationalist cronies being “thieves, every last one of them…corrupt as they come” according to President Harry Truman, this kicked off a firestorm in Washington3. “Who lost China?” subsequently became a driving force of the Second Red Scare that consumed American politics, distorting perceptions and constraining the ability of even the most powerful figures, such as Eisenhower or Secretary of State Dean Acheson, to act towards China in the more rational manner they would have liked.

Dean Acheson had presciently forecast as early as 1950 that Mao could be an “Asian Tito,” a disruptor of communist unity akin to the Yugoslav leader, Josip Broz Tito, Stalin’s bête noire. As things happened, however, the powerful China Lobby, led by men such as the editor of Time Henry Luce, was predictably able to push policy in the opposite direction.

For his part, Chiang refused to acknowledge defeat and demanded help retaking the mainland. While Eisenhower had bowed to domestic pressure to “unleash Chiang” in 1953, removing American impediments to cross-Strait engagement, further American support was not (yet) forthcoming. While Chiang’s friends worked on Washington, succeeding in securing for him more American planes and bombs, Chiang sought to do what he could to make life difficult for the new communist regime in Beijing. His policy of “Guanbi,” or “closed port policy,” involved the interdicting of foreign vessels bound for the mainland, eventually some one hundred in total.

The provocative policy prevented necessary trade and led to a series of skirmishes and several deaths, playing a larger role in precipitating what would come to be known as the First Taiwan Straits Crisis. In 1954 Chiang decided to fortify Quemoy and Matsu, islands so close to mainland China they’re visible from the shore on a clear day.

Predictably, the islands quickly came under bombardment by PRC forces. Resisting calls by the Joint Chiefs to either place U.S. troops in Taiwan or unleash nuclear weapons on mainland China, Eisenhower felt forced into the next worst thing. Concluding, in the words of Patterson, that “it would be politically risky to do nothing,” Eisenhower formalized the American commitment to defend Taiwan in the event of an attack. In making this commitment Eisenhower was careful to exclude islands such as Quemoy and Matsu, while also securing from Chiang a promise to cease unilateral military actions against the mainland.

That was in December 1954. When in January 1955 the PRC moved to occupy Inchaing, another of the contested islands (but some 200 miles to the north of Taiwan), Eisenhower asked Congress for authorization to defend “Formosa, the Pescadores and related positions,” the latter an archipelago of nearby islands. The so-called Formosa Resolution, which virtually ceded to the president the decision for war, passed the U.S. House of Representatives by a vote of 410-3 and the U.S. Senate by a vote of 85-3. President Lyndon Johnson later used the resolution, passed when he was Senate majority leader, to expand his predecessors’ war in Vietnam.

These actions did not defuse the situation, and several further confrontations eventually saw Eisenhower’s administration threaten the use of nuclear weapons against China.

The misaligned domestic political incentive structures, lack of strategic imagination, and abrogation of congressional duty that defined American policy toward China in the 1950s is eerily similar to contemporary efforts of Senators Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to effectively gut the longstanding “One China policy.” Or of Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) to give whoever is president unilateral authority to intervene in the event of an attack on Taiwan.

The Taiwan Lobby is trying to sway decision-makers and American public opinion, and U.S. military leaders are advocating aggressive preparations on the basis of the most speculative reasoning.

Public Choice Theory easily explains this behavior: appearing tough is politically advantageous, while passing the buck for making the actually tough decisions is why Congress hasn’t officially declared war since the attack on Pearl Harbor. Meanwhile, a few million dollars spent by Taiwan sponsoring so-called “think tanks” or buying members of Congress is far cheaper than floating multi-billion dollar naval vessels of their own, while the concerned U.S. admirals and generals want to ensure their budgets climb and their commands expand.

In the words of Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton, it is understandable but unacceptable.

The ability of client states to drag their patrons into conflicts is as old as Thucydides, as is their use of powerful interest groups within that patron state to influence policy decisions.

Such prior conflicts, however, did not threaten the destruction of human civilization.

This is no longer the case. Our policies must change.

July 5, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Cancer Care and The Role of Repurposed Drugs – Dr. Paul Marik & Dr. Mobeen Syed

FLCCC Weekly Update – June 28, 2023 

Betsy Ashton hosts Dr. Marik and Dr. Mobeen Syed (Dr. Been) to discuss Dr. Marik’s new ‘Cancer Care’ document and look at the role repurposed drugs have in cancer treatment.

Read ‘Challenging the Status Quo: How  learned that much of what he once understood about cancer was wrong:
https://geni.us/FLCCC-Substack-June28

Dr. Marik’s “Cancer Care” doc can e found here:
http://flccc.net/cancer-care

To learn more about our protocols click here:
https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/

July 5, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Exposed, the multi-billion-dollar illusion of ‘HIV’: Part 2

Readers of TCW will be familiar with Neville Hodgkinson’s critical reporting of the ‘Covid crisis’ since December 2020, notably his expert, science-based informed alarm about the mass ‘vaccine’ rollout, so absent from mainstream coverage. What they may be less aware of is the international storm this former Sunday Times medical and science correspondent created in the 1990s by reporting a scientific challenge to the ‘HIV’ theory of Aids, presaging the hostile response to science critics of Covid today. In this series he details findings that form the substance of his newly updated and expanded book, How HIV/Aids Set the Stage for the Covid Crisis, on the controversy. It is available here. You can read the first part of this series here. 

By Neville Hodgkinson | TCW Defending Freedom | July 4, 2023

When an idea is fervently adopted by most of the world’s doctors, scientists and politicians and supported by millions of people, it is a tall order to make the case for a rethink. Such was the experience of biophysicist Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, who 40 years ago developed a detailed theory about Aids that contradicts the generally accepted belief that a deadly virus, HIV, is the cause. Decades of unremitting censorship and rejection preceded her death from heart failure in March 2022, aged 85.

Her story has important, and disturbing, implications for our understanding of what has been happening with the Covid crisis.

Born in Greek Macedonia, she and her brother Dmitris were part of a kinder diaspora sent to Eastern Europe to escape the Greek civil war of 1946-49. She was cared for well, and graduated with a Masters degree in nuclear physics from the University of Bucharest, Romania.

In 1965, at the age of 29, she was reunited with her family in Perth, Western Australia, where they had emigrated. She learned English and joined the staff of the medical physics department at the Royal Perth Hospital, remaining on the books there for more than half a century.

In September 1976 she married Kosta Eleopulos, also a child sent to Romania who eventually found his way to Australia. She blamed herself for his death, five years later, from gastric cancer, believing she should have been able to save him with the knowledge she had acquired.

Her job was to research and improve radiation treatments for cancer patients. The work led her into a deep examination of some fundamentals in biology, in particular how the body’s cells maintain healthy function, and the mechanisms involved when their activity and growth become disordered.

In 1982 the high-prestige Journal of Theoretical Biology published a 21-page paper in which she explored how oxidation causes cell activation and expenditure of energy, while a counterpart process known as reduction enables the cell to absorb and store energy. The processes have a cyclic nature, controlled by a periodic exchange of electrical charge between two proteins, actin and myosin.

Changes in the factors regulating these cycles beyond the point where homoeostatic safety mechanisms are breached can lead to a variety of disorders, including cancer.

When Aids was first reported in 1981, ‘it wasn’t too big a jump to see that oxidative mechanisms had the power to explain much about Aids and perhaps even “HIV” itself,’ says Valendar Turner, an emergency physician at the Royal Perth, one of a small band of doctors and scientists who tried to help Papadopulos’s work become more widely known.

In explaining the seemingly disparate groups of people at risk of Aids, her theory implicated a variety of toxins, all known to be powerful oxidants. These included injected and ingested drugs; nitrite inhalants used for sexual enhancement; repeated infections and many of the agents used to treat them; blood-clotting agents given to haemophiliacs, which in the early days of Aids were made from concentrated extracts of blood from thousands of donors; and anally deposited sperm. Semen in the rectum is separated from blood vessels and the lymph system by a single, easily penetrated layer of cells, whereas the vagina has a thick protective lining.

In this multifactorial theory of Aids, the various contributory factors were unified by their shared ability to put the body’s tissues under a chronic, progressively destructive oxidative assault. This affects all cells in the body, not just immune cells, injuring them to the point of their becoming susceptible to the microbial infections and cancers that underlie the Aids diseases.

Papadopulos also described how this process gave rise to biochemical phenomena which, she maintained, had been misinterpreted as meaning a new virus was present.

She was an immensely dedicated scientist who built up a huge body of work on these lines, citing thousands of studies from the fields of virology, immunology and epidemiology in support of her case. Yet of six papers she wrote from these perspectives during the 1980s, only one was published, and even then only after protracted correspondence countering criticism from referees.

Entitled Reappraisal of Aids – is the Oxidation Induced by the Risk Factors the Primary Cause? it was written mostly in 1985 and twice rejected by Nature during 1986. It finally saw the light of day in 1988 in the journal Medical Hypotheses, which although a serious scientific publication does not carry the same weight as the mainstream journals.

A breakthrough appeared imminent when in 2010 Medical Hypotheses accepted two more papers. One reviewed evidence that Aids is not an STI – a sexually transmitted infection – although it can be sexually acquired through the mechanisms described above. The other questioned whether HIV had ever been proven to exist. Both papers, with their every assertion supported by detailed references, entered the pipeline for publication.

A prolonged silence followed, in the wake of which Professor Bruce Charlton, the journal’s editor, explained that the journal’s owner Elsevier, a giant Netherlands-based publisher specialising in scientific and medical content, had ‘intercepted’ the papers. When he insisted on keeping them in press, he was fired. His successor pulled them both.

One of the aims of this series is to appeal to the global scientific community to re-examine the HIV theory, not just because of the harm I believe it to be causing, but because of the clues it gives us as to how and why the Covid pandemic also became so badly mishandled. In both instances, misinformation by powerful agencies played a big part. This robbed the public and most media outlets of the ability to judge the situations accurately.

With Covid, once it was realised that SARS-CoV-2 was on the loose, organised efforts were made to hide the laboratory origin of the virus. If the truth were known, future funds would be at risk. The prestige of biomedical science itself was at stake.

Funding agencies, and journals such as ScienceNature and The Lancet which depend heavily on advertisements related to biomedical research, put their weight behind attempts to persuade us that the virus had a natural origin. Anyone who suggested otherwise was labelled a ‘conspiracy theorist’. At the same time, exaggerated fears about the risks involved among those ‘in the know’ about the virus’s genetically engineered status led to the betrayal of long-established principles for pandemic management as well as vaccine safety.

Anthony Fauci, who stood down at the end of 2022 as head of the US Government’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), was central to this cover-up in early 2020, and in the subsequent drive for mass vaccination. He showed a frightening degree of certainty in his leadership abilities (attributed by some to his Jesuit education) declaring in a 2021 interview: ‘Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.’ He condemned as ‘ridiculous’ the Great Barrington Declaration, signed by 60,000 doctors and scientists, opposing lockdowns and urging that protection should be focused on the most vulnerable. He likened it to ‘Aids denialism’, an insult long used by the Aids industry to stifle questioning of the HIV theory.

The US ended up with one of the highest Covid death rates in the world.

Money plays a big part in maintaining the illusions. The drug companies that won the race with the mRNA vaccines earned a $100billion jackpot. Vast sums were spent on advertising and on grants for scientific, medical, consumer and civil rights groups who helped to promote the jab. Largesse of this kind readily distorts judgment. Beneficiaries find it all too easy to close their minds to arguments that might jeopardise the flow of cash.

Most mainstream media went along with the obfuscations, and the many damaging policies that came in their wake, including false predictions of spread, extended lockdowns, neglect of treatment protocols, and an experimental, poorly tested vaccine promoted globally as safe and effective, in the hope of gaining some kind of redemption for science. According to a recent reanalysis of trial data reported in the journal Cell, the mRNA vaccines had no effect on overall mortality.

Fauci set a similar lead on Aids. When the syndrome was first recognised, he was the newly appointed head of NIAID. He supported the ‘deadly virus’ theory of Aids to the hilt, telling the New York Times in 1987, just three years after HIV’s purported discovery, that the evidence it causes Aids ‘is so overwhelming that it almost doesn’t deserve discussion any more’. As with Covid, dissenting voices were not tolerated.

Yet the virus theory reeked of bad science from the start. Callous disregard of the first Aids victims because of their ‘fast-track’ urban gay lifestyle gave way to an urgent search for a less discriminatory explanation for the syndrome, and a front-runner proposal was that a virus might be involved. US Government researcher Robert Gallo, in what he called his ‘passionate’ phase, determined that if that was the case, his team should be the first to identify it.

When the French scientist Luc Montagnier tentatively suggested that genetic material he had drawn from Aids patients’ lymph nodes could mean a virus was present, British and American experts, including Gallo, dismissed the idea. But after finding a way to amplify the material sent to him by Montagnier, Gallo announced at a government-backed press conference that the ‘probable’ cause of Aids had been found. A blood test for what would soon be called the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) was in the pipeline, and a vaccine would be available within two years. Gallo did not acknowledge that he had worked with material sent to him by Montagnier.

Decades later, the search for a vaccine continues, with Africans usually the main test subjects. There have been more than 250 failed trials, costing billions of dollars.

As we shall see, the ‘HIV’ test rushed out on the basis of Gallo’s work did not demonstrate the presence of a specific virus. It had value as a broad screen for blood safety, but was never validated for diagnostic purposes. Nevertheless, it was nodded through for wider use at a World Health Organization meeting in Geneva in April, 1986, after regulators were told it was ‘simply not practical’ to stop this.

As the idea grew that all sexually active people were at risk, the test kits became big earners, and an international row broke out over who should get the credit. Eventually a profit-sharing agreement was brokered by the French and American governments, but in the meantime the high-profile dispute helped to consolidate the theory in most people’s minds. The idea that both Montagnier and Gallo were mistaken in equating an ‘HIV-positive’ test result with risk of Aids became as unthinkable as a religious heresy.

There was one prominent challenger, who met the same fate as scientists questioning Covid orthodoxies. In 1987 US molecular biologist Professor Peter Duesberg, a world expert on retroviruses, of which HIV was supposed to be one, published a long scholarly article in the journal Cancer Research arguing that HIV was a harmless passenger among the many infections picked up by Aids patients, and by those at risk for Aids. Everything he knew about retroviruses told him this could not possibly be the cause of such a devastating illness as Aids.

The alarm this caused was revealed in an internal memo about the paper from the office of the Secretary of Health and Human Services to recipients including the Surgeon General and the White House. Headed MEDIA ALERT, it warned:

‘This obviously has the potential to raise a lot of controversy (If this isn’t the virus, how do we know the blood supply is safe? How do we know anything about transmission? How could you all be so stupid and why should we ever believe you again?) and we need to be prepared to respond.’

The journal’s editor was astonished that he did not receive a single letter in response, though Duesberg learned privately from a number of colleagues that they had been shaken by his analysis.

Like a person hiding some guilty secret, the scientific world was refusing to admit publicly that such a huge mistake could have been made. We are witnessing a similar state of denial today regarding deaths and injuries caused by the Covid vaccines.

On November 17, 1988, the late John Maddox, then editor of Nature, who rejected numerous submissions from Duesberg on HIV and Aids, wrote to him: ‘I am glad you correctly infer from my letter that I am in many ways sympathetic to what you say. I did not ask you to revise the manuscript, however. The danger, as it seems to me, is that the dispute between you and what you call the HIV community will mislead and distress the public in the following way. You point to a number of ways in which the HIV hypothesis may be deficient. It would be a rash person who said that you are wrong, but . . . if we were to publish your paper, we would find ourselves asking people to believe that what has been said so far about the cause of Aids is a pack of lies.’

Well . . . yes! But isn’t error-correction supposed to be science’s great strength?

Duesberg, previously a shining star in the virological world with a $350,000 ‘outstanding investigator’ award from the National Institutes of Health, became persona non grata in the mainstream scientific community. His subsequent research grant applications were rejected. Graduate students were advised to steer clear of him. Fauci and others refused to attend conferences or broadcast debates if he was to contribute. Publication of papers became difficult. His university could not fire him, but while other faculty members dealt with weighty matters such as teaching policies and speaker invitations, he was placed in charge of the annual picnic committee.

In contrast, today Gallo tops a list of National Institutes of Health scientists who shared an estimated $350million in royalties between 2010 and 2020, according to a recent report by Open the Books, a nonprofit government watchdog.

Incomprehension and intolerance of any criticism of ‘HIV’ have continued through the decades. When President Mbeki of South Africa set up a panel in 2000 to look into Aids science,he became the subject of an international campaign of ridicule to bring him down.

When Celia Farber, a brilliant American journalist covering the controversy since the mid-1980s, wrote a major piece about it for Harper’s in 2006, the Columbia Journalism Review condemned her for espousing a ‘crackpot theory’, ‘widely refuted for years’.

When the journal Frontiers in Public Health published a peer-reviewed article in 2014 by Dr Patricia Goodson, a highly respected professor of health education, entitled ‘Questioning the HIV/Aids hypothesis: 30 years of dissent’, there were immediate protests. The article was allowed to stand, but with several invited critical commentaries to go alongside it ‘to ensure that all readers understand that the causal link between HIV and Aids cannot be called into question’.

Five years later, following the appointment of a new editor, Dr Paolo Vineis of Imperial College London, the article was retracted. This was not because of any errors, but because it was reaching too many people. It had received more than 91,800 views, while the commentaries had fewer than 19,000 between them. Announcing the retraction, the Frontiers editorial office said it had been decided that the article ‘presents a public health risk by lending credibility to refuted claims that place doubt on the HIV causation of Aids’.

The claims have not been refuted: they have been suppressed. Leaders of the scientific world have stubbornly refused to discuss them, just as they are refusing now to face the evidence of extensive harm from the mRNA Covid injections.

In both instances, with such extreme sensitivity to any criticism, the question arises: What are they trying to hide?

I have dedicated How HIV/Aids Set the Stage for the Covid Crisis to Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos in the hope that her endeavours will not have been in vain and that finally her work and genius will get the attention and recognition it deserves.

Next: Where ‘HIV’ pioneers first went wrong

July 5, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Exposing the COVID hospital protocol

By Stella Paul | American Thinker | July 3, 2023 

If you’re driving in Ridgefield, N.J., you may notice history being made. The first billboard of a statewide campaign is now up on Route 1, highlighting the deadly hospital protocol during COVID that took thousands of innocent lives.  More billboards should be coming soon.

I’ve been writing about the Hospital Death Protocol for some time, explaining how the federal government paid big bonuses to hospitals if they treated patients with the lethal drug Remdesivir, then ventilated and killed them. Many people now know about the damage from the vaccines, mandates, and lockdowns, but news of the medical carnage in the hospitals has been sparse.

Fortunately, a group of volunteers is determined to get the word out. I think of them as the Bereaved Army. They lost a parent or spouse or sibling or child to what one eyewitness doctor called “organized homicide,” and they won’t stop fighting ’til they get justice.

I spoke with Charlene Delfico, the state chair of the New Jersey chapter of FormerFeds Freedom Foundation, which organized the billboard campaign. “I lost my stepdad to the death protocol in Virtua Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden, New Jersey. My mother was admitted at the same time. She survived thirty days of brutal torture and came home unable to move or talk. She’s slowly recovering. But they put my stepdad on a ventilator and ran roughshod over him until he died.”

In her grief, Charlene found her way to FormerFeds Freedom Foundation, a nationwide group of people who lost a loved one to the hospital protocol. A few survivors of the protocol participate, too — but not many, because most people forced into the federally subsidized “treatment” for COVID didn’t make it.

“We’re all connected because of this tragedy throughout the country,” Charlene said. “It’s an amazing group of people, and we’re all working together. We’re creating the COVID-19 Humanity Betrayal Memory Project (CHBMP.org), a living record of what happened. We gather videos and written testimonies and documentation for history. And we’re working to get justice for our murdered loved ones and to make sure that other people never have to go through what they did.

“As a group, we’ve had discussions about putting up billboards, but they’re expensive to take on. The brother of one of the hospital victims in New Jersey has been active, handing out flyers and trying to get attention. One day, he walked into the billboard company and said he wanted to do this.

“We made a logo that shows the Hippocratic Oath being torn in half, surrounded by the phrase ‘Crimes Against Humanity,’ because that’s what the hospital protocol was. And we posed the question ‘Covid Death… Are You Sure?’ to get people thinking and questioning about what happened.

“We already have other state chapters of FormerFeds interested in putting up billboards and we’re planning on having planes with our slogan fly across the Jersey shore beaches this summer. We’ve got car magnets and bumper stickers and things are really starting to move.

“We’re not stopping, and we never will till we get justice. I get inspiration from my favorite quote: ‘Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.'”

Stella is on twitter @stellapaulny.  You can write her at stellapaulny@gmail.com.

July 4, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Israel’s bloodcurdling ‘poison policy’ to replace Palestinians with Jewish settlers

By Kit Klarenberg | The Cradle | July 4, 2023

shocking document last September revealed that, during the 1948 Nakba, Zionist militias engaged in a wide-ranging chemical and biological warfare campaign to expel indigenous Palestinian communities from their lands, slow the advance of intervening Arab armies, and poison citizens of neighboring states.

This unconscionable use of biological weapons on civilian targets, which sought to infect the local Palestinian population with typhoid, dysentery, malaria, and other diseases by contaminating local water supplies, was subject to a concerted coverup at the time – one that was maintained by the Zionist state for decades thereafter.

Even after its exposure, the Israeli academics who helped break the story were at pains to diminish its significance, unconvincingly arguing it was a failed strategy promptly jettisoned and forgotten about as a result.

But newly declassified Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) files starkly underline this narrative to be an abject lie. Released by the Jewish Settlements Archival Project, an initiative of New York University’s Taub Center for Israel Studies, they amply show that the Israeli occupiers employed much the same tactics in order to purge Palestinian areas to make way for illegal settlements in the West Bank, and elsewhere.

Facts on the ground

In 1967, Tel Aviv emerged victorious in the Six Day War and effectively annexed significant swaths of surrounding territory from neighboring Arab states.

Israel’s occupation of these areas, and indeed the construction of settlements for Jewish colonists, was and remains absolutely illegal under international law and has been repeatedly condemned by the United Nations. Initially, successive Israeli governments claimed the settlements were the work of individual settlers and non-governmental entities such as the Jewish Agency and World Zionist Organization, and insisted that the state neither approved of nor could prevent their expansion.

Again, the newly-released papers starkly demonstrate this to be a deliberate deception. The trail begins in January 1971, when the cabinet of then-Israeli prime minister Golda Meir met to discuss the forthcoming construction of settlements. The need for unfailing public secrecy about what was about to happen was considered paramount. At the start of the summit, the premier requested:

“Before we move forward with our discussion, there’s something I’d like to ask. It was our habit that for anything that has to do with settlements, outposts, land expropriations, and so on, we simply do and do not talk [about it]… Lately, this … has broken down, and I’m asking ministers for the sake of our homeland to hold back, talk less, and do as much as possible. But the main thing, as much as possible, is to talk less.”

This extended to Meir demanding ministers not attend settlement opening ceremonies, and avoid being seen by the media anywhere near the sites. In April 1972, this oath of silence remained very much in force, with minister without portfolio Yisrael Galili reminding his cabinet confederates at a meeting to “refrain from dealing with the matter in the press, as it could cause damage.”

Around this time, the Israelis began constructing the first illegal Jewish settlement, Gitit, in the West Bank. Kickstarting the criminal enterprise required displacing Palestinians from the nearby village of Aqraba. This was first attempted by brute force, with IDF soldiers demanding they vacate the area to make way for a new military training zone.

The Palestinians ignored them, and continued cultivating the land, prompting Israeli forces to damage their tools. When they still refused to budge, the IDF was ordered to use vehicles to destroy crops, and dispossess the indigenous population. Soldiers struck upon a radical, bloodcurdling solution: a crop duster would rain down toxic chemicals, lethal to animals and dangerous for humans, to precipitate their departure.

Still, Aqraba’s population refused to budge, prompting the IDF to up its devilish campaign’s ante quite considerably. In April 1972, the military’s Central Command met with representatives of the Jewish Agency’s settlements department. They established “responsibility and schedule for the spraying,” at such a density that it would preclude humans from inhabiting the area for several days “for fear of stomach poisoning” and animals for a full week.

The Jewish Agency was given the job of obtaining the plane, which it did from Chemair, a local crop-dusting company. The explicit aim was to “destroy the harvest” of the Palestinians, and forcibly expel them from the area in perpetuity.

The next month, the destruction was so severe that Aqraba’s mayor wrote to Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. They stated the village had 4,000 residents, who until recently had cultivated “145,000 dunams of agricultural land.” Now, after “the authorities” had burned wheat and confiscated land, the Palestinians were left with just 25,000 dunams.

“The damage is unbearable … how will we be able to provide for ourselves?” the mayor despaired.

Israeli occupation forces finally took over the land in May 1973. Tel Aviv was asked for permission to “seize the land for the purpose of establishing a settlement,” which was granted. Three months later, construction commenced.

‘Get cover for it’

While Israeli governments covertly encouraged and facilitated the creation of illegal settlements, it is clear there was some internal dissent on the issue at various times.

In 1974, the head of the Israel Lands Administration began steps to establish another Jewish settlement in the West Bank, Ma’aleh Adumim, before the government had made a formal decision on the matter. Former IDF general turned Knesset representative Meir “Zarro” Zorea actively lobbied the Jewish Agency to allocate an appropriate budget for the effort, suggesting the organization “funnel money to settlement activity and get cover for it after a while, when I request budget approval.”

At a subsequent cabinet meeting however, then-Housing Minister Yehoshua Rabinovitz was dismayed, declaring, “this has no budget, and I don’t know how work is being started without sitting down with us.” Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin attempted to calm him, stating, “that’s what we’re meeting about right now.”

“There might be room for clarifying this issue, but I wouldn’t suggest going into it today. I know it may not be following the neatest definitions, but I’m in favor of them starting to carry out this infrastructure work,” he added.

Later on, the aforementioned Yisrael Galili pressed ministers to define Ma’aleh Adumim as “an A-class area,” thereby granting it and its Jewish settler population greater benefits from the government, despite the fact it would lie in illegally occupied territory. The Israeli government officially granting the settlement this classification would, by definition, amount to a de facto endorsement, in contradiction to its official public stance.

“I’m surprised that you don’t understand that this whole subject is one of the ingenious methods to alleviate a process that could be very dangerous internally in Israel,” Galili explained.

These shocking communications remained concealed for half a century before the Jewish Settlements Archival Project released them to the world. It is almost inevitable that a great many more incriminating documents remain sealed in the IDF’s vaults. The project’s archives end in summer of 1977, and as of January 2023, there are 144 illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, including 12 in East Jerusalem, housing 450,000 colonizers.

Stealing that much land, and displacing so many people in the process, was a vast undertaking that frequently met bitter local resistance, which continues today. Given the efficacy of chemical and biological warfare in stealing Palestinian land over so many years, there is no reason to think this heinous approach wasn’t employed again and again over the years.

July 4, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Netanyahu’s remarks should prompt a major paradigm shift in occupied Palestine

By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | July 4, 2023

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is known to be against the establishment of a Palestinian state, but now he has made it clear that he wants to go even further. “We need to eliminate [Palestinian Arab] aspirations for a state,” he told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee as reported in Israeli media on 26 June. The right-wing leader added that his government is “preparing for the day after Abbas,” referring to the 88-year-old head of the Palestinian Authority. “We have an interest in the [Palestinian] Authority continuing to work. In the areas in which it manages to act, it does the work for us.”

Some people, including Palestinian Authority officials, seemed surprised by his words, which is odd, given that Israel’s intentions regarding Palestinian freedom and statehood are known even to political novices.

The official spokesperson for the Palestinian presidency retorted by emphasising that only an independent Palestinian state can achieve “security” and “stability”. This terminology is often used by Palestinian officials to induce sympathy in the US, as such language is borrowed from Washington’s narrative about Palestine and the Middle East. Practically-speaking, “security” is almost always linked to Israel, and “stability” is related to the US agenda and interests in the region.

For Israel, however, such language lacks any urgency, because “security” from Tel Aviv’s perspective is obtained through unconditional US support and “security coordination” between the Israeli military occupation and the PA. Both are already satisfied. That is why Netanyahu told the Knesset committee that the PA “does the work for us” and added, “And we have no interest in it collapsing.” In other words, the Israeli prime minister sees the PA as another line of defence against the very Palestinians whose interests the Authority is supposed to represent and promote.

As for “stability”, this is of little concern to Israel, for in practical terms it defines stability as its own complete dominance over the Palestinians. Actually, make that the whole region.

None of the above assertions are predicated on complex analyses or guesswork; they are extracted from official Israeli statements and actions on the ground.

When Israel’s far-right Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared in March that there was “no such thing as Palestinians because there’s no such thing as the Palestinian people,” he was not giving a history lecture, or merely engaging in hate speech. He was stating circuitously that Israel is neither morally, legally nor politically accountable for its actions against those who do not exist in the twisted Zionist worldview.

His remarks were consistent with the ongoing pogroms carried out by his supporters, the armed and dangerous illegal Jewish settlers across the occupied West Bank, against Palestinians in Huwara in February and, more recently, against Turmus Ayya and other Palestinian towns and villages. Neither the Americans nor the Europeans have imposed any punitive measures against Smotrich or even against the gangs of settlers who torched Palestinian homes and cars, killing and wounding many in the process.

Yet that is only a microcosm of the larger picture, whereby Israel says and does what it wants, while the Americans continue to read from an old political script as if nothing has changed on the ground. There can be no doubt, though, that US foreign policymakers know very well that Israel has zero interest in a just and peaceful settlement to its military occupation of Palestine.

We are entitled to ask, therefore, why the US government insists on following the same tired formula and urges both sides to re-engage in the so-called “peace process” and return to negotiations. This mantra continues to define US foreign policy, as it has done since the early 1990s, when Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) signed the Oslo Accords. Oslo made a bad situation much worse; the number of illegal settlements and settlers has since tripled, and the Palestinian people are even more vulnerable, not only to Israeli violence but also to the PA’s repression and corruption. It is surely no coincidence that Abbas played a key role in getting the Oslo Accords signed.

Although Oslo was unfair to the Palestinians since it operated largely outside acceptable international paradigms and had no enforcement clauses or deadlines, Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders objected to it anyway, because — albeit symbolically — it expected Israel to behave in a certain manner. To be told not to build or expand settlements, for example, has always infuriated Netanyahu, who has lashed out even at his American benefactors many times in the past over this issue, most notably under the administration of President Barack Obama.

Israeli leaders feel that they are above any law or expectations emanating from outside, even if these expectations are quite minimal and made by close allies, such as Washington. With time, of course, Netanyahu prevailed, not only over any supposed “pressure” from the US and the international community, but also over the more “liberal” political forces in his own society.

Now, armed with a stable coalition government and apparently immune from any meaningful criticism, let alone tangible consequences for his actions, the Israeli leader is ready to carry out his right-wing agenda without hesitation.

Hence his recent remarks, which are a more emboldened version of the comments made in October 2004 by top Israeli government advisor Dov Weissglas, who explained the true intentions behind the Israeli military deployment in Gaza in 2005. It was an Israeli tactic aimed at “freezing the peace process,” Weissglas told Haaretz. “And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda.”

Even though this “whole package” has, indeed, been long removed from the Israeli agenda, the country’s leaders kept referencing a Palestinian state anyway in order to satisfy the minimal expectations of US policy. Netanyahu has played this game on more than one occasion, including his February interview with CNN, where he argued that a Palestinian state is possible, but only if it has no sovereignty. Now, he is ready to move past that seemingly old language, to new political territories, where even the aspiration for an independent Palestine is not permissible.

While Netanyahu’s disturbing but honest language is likely to invite yet more Israeli violence and Palestinian resistance, it should also bring about greater clarity by shelving, once and for all, the fraudulent discourse of “security”, “stability” and the moribund “peace process”.

July 4, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Exposed, the multi-billion-dollar illusion of ‘HIV’: Part 1

Readers of TCW will be familiar with Neville Hodgkinson’s critical reporting of the ‘Covid crisis’ since December 2020, notably his expert, science-based informed alarm about the mass ‘vaccine’ rollout, so absent from mainstream coverage. What they may be less aware of is the international storm this former Sunday Times medical and science correspondent created in the 1990s by reporting a scientific challenge to the ‘HIV’ theory of Aids, presaging the hostile response to science critics of Covid today. In this series, written exclusively for TCW, he details findings that form the substance of his newly updated and expanded book, How HIV/Aids Set the Stage for the Covid Crisis, on the controversy. It is available here.

By Neville Hodgkinson | TCW Defending Freedom | July 3, 2023

Three years into the Covid crisis, many are now aware of the disastrous advice on which so many governments blindly acted. False predictions of spread, fearmongering propaganda, lockdowns damaging young and old, suppression of cheap treatments to make way for a dangerous, experimental vaccine . . . so much of ‘the science’ turned out to be fiction, hugely profitable for a few but harmful for billions.

These failures have brought back into focus claims that the syndrome known as HIV/Aids was – and still is – being similarly mishandled and exploited by the worlds of medical science, public health and Big Pharma. Robert Kennedy Jr documents this in detail his best-selling 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.

What few people know however is that for almost 40 years a small group of scientists has deconstructed almost every aspect of the theory that Aids is caused by a lethal, sexually transmitted virus known as HIV. Their critique goes beyond questioning HIV as the cause of Aids. They say ‘HIV’ has never even been proved to exist. And the reason you have probably never heard of their work is that, like the doctors and scientists who challenged Covid insanities, they have been silenced at every turn.

With Covid, pressure to conform came through government-directed appeals to our higher nature through slogans such as ‘Stay at home. Protect the NHS. Save Lives’ and ‘Every vaccination gives us hope’. The implied claim was that anyone who thought differently was either an idiot or a murderer.

Similarly with Aids, advocates of the deadly virus theory sought to make those who questioned it sound as though they were lacking in compassion, irresponsible or stupid.

I was working as medical correspondent of the London Sunday Times in the 1980s when Aids suddenly became big news after American government scientists claimed to have identified a previously unknown virus as the cause of a mysterious cluster of symptoms related to severely depleted immunity. They included Kaposi’s sarcoma, a cancer affecting the skin and internal organs; severe candidiasis; and pneumonia caused by an out-of-control fungus. The symptoms proved resistant to treatment, and fatal in a number of cases.

The first victims were groups of gay men who were challenging long-standing homophobic attitudes in American society through what came to be known as the ‘fast-track’ gay lifestyle. This involved multiple sex partners and heavy drug use.

The partying was fun, I was later told, but it caused disease microbes to become pooled among participants such that almost every encounter carried a risk of infection. Prophylactic use of antibiotics staved off some illnesses but contributed to an underlying deterioration, and in some cases complete collapse, of the immune system.

The crisis at first met an unsympathetic response from the right-wing Reagan administration. The common histories of the victims led to dismissive descriptions of Aids as a ‘gay plague’. As numbers increased, however, outrage and anger grew. Those involved had often already suffered greatly from discriminatory attitudes and behaviour, and their efforts to end this bigotry through the Gay Lib movement looked to be under threat.

That was the context in which US biomedical researcher Robert Gallo found immediate acceptance when in 1984 he claimed to have identified a deadly virus, new to humanity, as the cause of Aids. The theory took off like wildfire and by the end of 1984 had come to be accepted by virtually everyone. The microbe Gallo said he had found became known as the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV.

It brought virologists, drug companies and public health experts to centre stage. Taxpayer dollars, eventually reaching hundreds of billions, were poured into Aids research and treatment through the US National Institutes of Health, in particular the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under the leadership of Dr Anthony Fauci. Well-funded NGOs and activist groups sprang up with the aim of contributing to the fight against the disease.

Religious leaders warmed to the theory because it discouraged sleeping around. Politicians liked it because it put in place a new ‘enemy within’ against which they could claim to offer protection with advertising campaigns such as the UK’s ‘Aids: Don’t Die of Ignorance’ – a precursor of the intense propaganda inflicted on us with the advent of Covid-19.

Media people – including me, I am ashamed to say – vigorously promulgated warnings that the virus put at risk everyone and anyone who had sex. It felt good to be not just selling newspapers, but helping to sound the alert.

Young people were less readily taken in. James Delingpole has recalled how the ad campaign put a dampener on his sex life, though after the initial shock it became increasingly clear to him that the government had been overstating the case.

In fact, as the late Nobel Prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis and other scientists were to point out, there never was a body of scientific evidence demonstrating the validity of the ‘deadly new virus’ idea. That remains the case today, despite hundreds of thousands of papers having been published over the years predicated on the HIV belief system.

Henry Bauer, a retired professor of science studies who has drawn on numerous sources in documenting The Case Against HIV, says: ‘Anyone open to looking at the actual data . . . can find an enormous amount of evidence that the diagnosis of HIV as cause of AIDS is simply wrong.’

One lasting outcome of the theory was that by ‘democratising’ Aids, with the message that the disease did not discriminate and so everyone was at risk, it prevented the feared setbacks for the Gay Lib movement. Lesbian and gay rights became firmly established in American society, and in some other parts of the world.

In many other ways, however, the global hysteria to which the theory gave rise has had disastrous consequences, some of which continue to this day.

A failed cancer drug called AZT, pulled off the shelf by American government researchers because of an apparent anti-HIV effect, killed and injured thousands. It was administered in high doses not just to people with Aids but to gay men, haemophiliacs and others thought to be HIV-infected, earning hundreds of millions of pounds for the US drug company Burroughs Wellcome and its British parent, the Wellcome Foundation (later taken over by Glaxo). American and British government institutions promoted it vigorously as the ‘gold standard’ of Aids treatment. Doctors who stepped publicly out of line were hounded out of the profession.

Although later generations of drugs can genuinely help to support a failing immune system, 40 years of research has failed to bring either a vaccine or cure for the purported ‘HIV’ infection. Taken over long periods, the drugs themselves can kill, contributing significantly to the 800 or so deaths reported annually of ‘people living with HIV’ in the UK.

The most widespread and long-lasting harm, however, has been to the countless people around the world, especially in Africa and of African descent, terrorised with a false belief that they are victims of a sexually transmitted virus which only Western medicine has the means to hold at bay. The World Health Organization (WHO) claims that more than 80million people have been infected, and that about 40million have died from HIV. Three-fifths of purported new HIV infections are said by WHO to be in the African region. African Americans are eight times more likely to be diagnosed with HIV infection compared with the white population.

American taxpayers in particular have been burdened with the huge expense of maintaining an industry that has grown up around HIV/Aids. The US government spends more than $28billion a year on the domestic response, and expenditure globally between 2000 and 2015 totalled more than half a trillion dollars ($562.6billion), according to a University of Washington study. Yet the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), in a never-ending plea for more money, says the pandemic continues to take a life every minute.

In this series of articles I am going to describe the fruits of years of painstaking work by scientists based in Perth, Western Australia, collating evidence challenging almost every aspect of the ‘HIV’ theory. The essence of their case is that there is no ‘HIV’ epidemic, and there never will be a vaccine or cure, because there is no ‘HIV’.

If you find this hard to believe, I am with you entirely in the sense that it took me years to accept fully how wrong I had been in my early reporting on Aids. I documented this painful journey of discovery in my book AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science, published in 1996 by Fourth Estate.

If you ask how it could be possible that for 40 years the scientific and medical worlds have failed to correct a belief in a mythological virus, the answer is more sociological than scientific.

Solidarity with the suffering of the gay community played a part – although genuine kindness, such as Louise Hay demonstrated in her early healing work with people with Aids, strongly and successfully challenged the medical view that they were certain to die. An arrogant, but ill-informed, neocolonial drive by countless NGOs to ‘do good’ in poorer parts of the world also contributed. But probably the most powerful and detrimental element in maintaining the deception was the money and influence involved, as governments went into partnership with the hugely profitable pharmaceutical industry. The resources poured into HIV/Aids created thousands of jobs, buying loyal collaboration and stifling dissent.

Highly experienced scientists who spoke out against the theory were ridiculed, defunded, gaslighted, and accused of killing people by weakening the public health message.

I experienced this pressure myself when I began to examine alternative ways of looking at Aids in the early 1990s, when I was  working as Sunday Times science correspondent. Joan Shenton of Meditel, producers of prize-winning but much criticised documentaries on the issue, alerted me to the fact that several distinguished scientists had challenged the idea that HIV could be doing all the damage attributed to it.

Andrew Neil, editor of the Sunday Times, which had serialised Michael Fumento’s 1990 book The Myth of Heterosexual Aids, supported my reports on an ever-deepening scientific challenge to the theory. Over a three-year period, condemnation came from just about every quarter. The deeper the critique went, the shriller the protests became.

In 1993, with the HIV/Aids industry still pointing to Africa as proof of how millions could become infected, Neil told me to go there to find out what was happening. Over six weeks, travelling through Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania, it became increasingly plain to me that the entire pandemic was an illusion arising from diseases of poverty being reclassified as ‘HIV/Aids’.

My reports to this effect proved too much for the scientific establishment, and Nature – supposedly one of the top scientific journals in the world – declared that we must be stopped. Having decided that picketing our offices would be impractical, the magazine mounted a campaign of ridicule. The UK’s Health Education Authority started an Aids journalism award specifically in my dishonour. They said it was to counter the newspaper’s dangerously misleading coverage. There was incomprehension and abuse from all three main political parties, as well as from scientific and medical chiefs.

But we also heard from many doctors, health workers, gay men, and specialists on Africa, thanking the newspaper for its challenging coverage. An ‘HIV’ diagnosis at that time could still have the power of a witch-doctor’s hex, and people who had tested positive wrote to say that our reports were like a breath of fresh air.

Andrew Neil was undeterred by the hostile bluster, while insisting the paper was ready to publish any evidence that countered the dissident case we were presenting. In 1994 he left the paper for New York, and I left too after his successor John Witherow made it plain that he did not want me to continue this line of reporting. The literary agent David Godwin had been in touch, suggesting a book on the controversy, and this took shape over the following year.

When Fourth Estate published it in 1996, however, it became an early victim of ‘cancel culture’.  The late American gay activist Larry Kramer, at first a bitter critic of Fauci but later his friend and ally, was in the UK at the time of publication to address a conference on Aids. He picked up a copy at a pre-conference gathering, tore several pages, and spat in it, telling his audience: ‘Do the same if you come across this book. They will soon stop stocking it.’ It quickly disappeared from view, subsequently topping a list of ‘Books You’re Not Supposed to Read’ in a work on political incorrectness in science.

(From The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, by Tom Bethell, Regnery, 2005)

I am republishing it now, with additional material including a summary of where the science of ‘HIV’ went wrong, because the story is so redolent of the misunderstandings, mishandling and downright lies surrounding Covid-19. As with Aids, huge grants from Big Pharma and ‘philanthropic’ foundations to researchers, medical associations, consumer groups, and civil rights organisations fuelled the Covid illusions.

There is one important difference. At first I thought the Covid fearmongering was as ill-conceived as that over ‘HIV’ and Aids. It soon became clear, however, that unlike ‘HIV’ this was a genuine pathogen. A disgracefully suppressed paper by the UK’s Professor Angus Dalgleish, working with Norwegian colleagues including a biowarfare expert, demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt the genetically-engineered nature of SARS-CoV-2 (see here and here).

Panic measures to try to hide its laboratory origin confirm that view. These were led by the Chinese, from whose Wuhan laboratory the virus almost certainly escaped, and by Fauci, whose NIAID had part-funded the work. Sir Jeremy Farrar, then director of the UK’s Wellcome Trust and now WHO chief scientist, also played a leading role in the cover-up.

Many are now aware of the adverse social, economic and health consequences of the Covid hysteria into which Fauci and others led us. Billions of people meekly accepted and even welcomed unprecedented lockdowns and other fearmongering measures, along with mass administration of the mRNA gene products. TCW Defending Freedom has been one of few voices constantly critical of the mishandling of Covid over the past three years, despite high-level, far-reaching efforts to silence and defund the site.

Much less widely understood is the way Aids became subject to similar mismanagement 40 years ago, with adverse consequences lasting until today.

July 3, 2023 Posted by | Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Mike Yeadon on the toxicities deliberately designed into the Covid ‘vaccines’

By Kathy Gyngell | TCW Defending Freedom | July 3, 2023

This is the second in a series of edited extracts of James Delingpole’s recent podcast with Dr Mike Yeadon (PhD in respiratory pharmacology, co-founded a biotech company and conducted research at Pfizer) to discuss the evil WEF, their own faith journeys, ‘Gollum-class AI’ and more. You can listen to the full podcast here.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/6rSEiXDcJ2IDWR7aheYTjW

and read the first selection of extracts here. 

Before their emergency authorisation, Dr Yeadon warned the European Medicines Agency that these gene-based vaccines were not safe. Since then he has come to believe in a sinister agenda behind their determined rollout. What follows is the part of the podcast where James questions him on this. Mike explains rational drug design and how he saw obvious ‘designed-in’ toxicities in the mRNA and DNA Covid ‘vaccines’.

JAMES DELINGPOLE: How do you persuade me that these vaccines, which were, due to the miracle of modern medical science, rolled out very quickly to deal with an unprecedented, hitherto unknown viral . . . variation on a virus, possibly leaked from a biolab, that these vaccines were actually part of a global depopulation programme?

DR MICHAEL YEADON: How would I persuade you that that’s what they were for? Well, [if] you are thinking of someone like, for example, Boris Johnson [might have been], I don’t believe for a moment he was any part of the plan, but at some point, he knew something . . .

JD: Yeah. Yeah.

MY: I don’t think very many people know, even on the perpetrators’ side . . . that these injections are designed to kill people. But I bet Boris Johnson had no idea that they were designed to injure people . . .  I think very few people would have thought this will be, you know, a depopulation event. If you’re asking, ‘Mike, in a few sentences persuade me that there’s something . . .’

JD: Yes, that’s what I’m saying.

MY: So, I would say, I’d point out to people that drugs, pharmaceuticals, are designed. They don’t just fall out of the sky. So unless you extract them from a plant, they’re synthetic, someone has to design them. You don’t just grab a handful of atoms and hope it does something. You do what’s called intelligent or rational drug design. You think about what you’re trying to accomplish. And, you [will] know, from hundreds or thousands of examples in the past, what kind of chemical structures would potentially allow that objective to be met. So if it’s an oral drug, you don’t pick something that’s a thousand molecular weight because high molecular weight drugs don’t tend to be absorbed.

There are some rules. About the size, about the kind of chemical structures, about the charges on them and so on. You use all of these skills and knowledge, various databases, and you try to design a molecule to do what you want. And you try to combine a synthesis of a test drug – a prototype and a test and you iterate between the two, trying to get closer and closer to the objective. Sometimes you get to select a clinical candidate and sometimes not.

I point all of that out to say that this so-called rational drug design is what I did for over 30 years. And I was reasonably good at it. You learn generalities and then some specialities and so on. So when I look at the structure of something, I can often see intent in that structure, because I put myself in the mind of the designer. What were they trying to accomplish, looking at the structure?

When I apply those rational drug design skills that I have, and I look at the vaccines, I can see three or four obvious designed-in toxicities that cannot possibly be there by accident, because people like me would have been designing them. So although people say, ‘Oh, you’ve never worked in vaccines,’ no, I didn’t. [But] these are not vaccines. You know, in no way are they typical. So if I’d had 25 years’ experience in traditional vaccines, it would be of no use, folks, because these are not like that. What they’re much more like are the kind of molecules I worked in. They are larger, these are macromolecules. I tended to work in smaller molecules, but the design principles are the same. What did you want to accomplish? What kind of structures, formulations, requirements and ‘must not haves’ would have to be there? When I look at the vaccines, I can name two of them because they’re so easy that other people can get them too. So the first is that they have a genetic code for a piece of protein that we’ve all come to know and love called spike protein, which is at least allegedly the sticking out spike bit on the surface of these floating things that look like mines, you see them on your TV and the media, those spike proteins.

JD: And we saw them at the Olympics opening ceremony before that.

MY: In 2012. It’s astonishing. You cannot miss it. If you watch that opening ceremony, there it is, a copy of coronavirus. Anyway, here’s the point, I ask people this question: what is it about your immune system that means that you play nice with yourself most of your life and your immune system doesn’t attack you, and yet under certain circumstances, your body absolutely goes to war and unleashes all weapons it’s got against something? I say it’s recognition of self.

So your immune system, when you were being developed as a foetus, all of the components of your body were being introduced to the components of your immune system, which are being formed by some, like, random selection at binding sites. And basically it was like, ‘This is James, this is James, this is James – don’t attack it.’ So by the time you were born, you had a very powerful immune system that would attack anything that wasn’t James, but which leaves James or ‘self’ alone. So when you’re injected with something that made your cells manufacture a non-self protein – because that’s what a viral protein is – guess what your immune system did to every single cell in your body that took that diabolical stuff up and made non-self protein – I’m afraid the answer is autoimmune lethal attack.

I’ve spoken to at least ten immunologists and I’ve put it to them, and they’ve gone, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ I said, ‘Could I be wrong?’ No, it’s immunology 101. That’s how your immune system fundamentally plays nice with you, except when you get some circumstances, like developing cancer sometimes, you can destroy cancer cells, because they start to make different proteins than normal, and they’re recognised as non-self, and you can often kill them. It’s called immune surveillance, you do it every day, your body kills off single cell cancers, or potentially single cell cancers. Every day, your clever immune system goes, ‘That shouldn’t be here.’ They leap on it and kill it.

So if you take an injection, whatever it is a third of a ml, bang it in your shoulder, hundreds of billions of particles float around your body. Wherever they land, if they were taken up and that cell started to grind out non-self protein, I’m afraid your immune system recognises non-self is in the offing and it absolutely goes to war. And that is by design. It cannot but happen that way.

So the moment I saw it – actually, that was not the first thought, at first, I thought, ‘Oh, you’re expressing a dangerous protein, this spike protein is toxic,’ and it is. But after a little while, I thought it wouldn’t make any difference what protein it is. If it’s not you, if it’s going to trigger autoimmunity. So that’s the first thing I’ll tell you.

All of these gene-based so-called vaccines are dangerous. Please don’t take any of them. So if they tell you there’s a flying Ebola and you must take this mRNA vaccine, please do not take it. Because if it encodes a piece of the alleged Ebola, flying Ebola, it will kill you. Your immune system will recognise what you’ve just made, when you copy that instruction, it will recognise that it is not belonging to your body, and it will kill the cell that’s making it.

Now, what I’ve just told you fits perfectly with the observed pathology, because this stuff randomly landed up in various tissues. If it landed in your heart, you might get pericarditis or myocarditis. If it landed anywhere in your neurological system, you could get various neurological conditions. If it landed in the back of your eyes, you could go blind. Your pregnant uterus: miscarriage. And so on, you know, kidney failure. So, I think there’s lots of pathologies. I think there are several. But I think this one is one that always occurs. And it maps exactly on to why you’ve got just a tremendous range of anatomically different conditions. You know, why aren’t people inquisitive about that? How could . . . so, for example, if you take an overdose of paracetamol, I can assure you, you don’t end up with, I don’t know, your heart generally doesn’t stop beating. What happens is your liver is killed, because your liver converts it from a not very nice substance into a really very toxic substance. And if you take large doses, you end up, I think it’s centrilobular necrosis. It kills your liver. If you take lower doses over decades, it kills your kidneys through glomerular foot process loss, something like that. So it’s quite unusual to take a single substance that has produced 1,200 different side-effects that vary. One person would get blood clots in their brain, and someone else would lose their baby.

What I’ve just explained fits perfectly. Now, it may not be perfectly correct, but all that I have said is true. Anyone who’s had even the first introduction to immunology will recognise this self/non-self dichotomy is at the heart of how your immune system works. So that’s the first thing. That is unequivocal evidence that all four companies designed . . . conspired to produce something that your body . . . would lead your body to kill itself.

The second part is, at least in the case of the Moderna and Pfizer products, they are wrapped in what are called lipid nanoparticles. They’re quite funky. They essentially mimic the fatty outer coating of yourself. Your body is divided into tiny compartments called cells. They’re so small you need a microscope to see them. But, you know, that’s what they are. They’re like little bubbles or balloons, and they’re surrounded by a lipid bilayer – that’s its cell membrane. And it allows itself to regulate what’s inside compared with outside. So lipid nanoparticles look a bit like that. And so they just, in a stealthy fashion, go all the way around your body and slide into various cells. And if you didn’t have something like that, your body would recognise and destroy the foreign genetic information. I mean, it’s not surprising. Your genetic inheritance is the thing that you would want to preserve, right? If you’re going to have offspring, you don’t want your own genetic inheritance to be coloured by foreign DNA and RNA. And so we’ve got extraordinarily good systems designed to stop foreign DNA and RNA entering our cells.

But if you coat it in this lipid that makes it look like a cell, you probably don’t notice it, by analogy you miss it, it goes past in the corner of your eye and you don’t notice. But you might think, ‘Well, that’s not evidence of depopulation.’ Ah, but I’ve got a factoid for you, James. People who work in formulations, it’s a special area, you know, formulation, R&D [research and development] is itself a discipline. It’s difficult to know how to make the right salts of a particular drug, and people become good at this stuff over decades of formulation R&D, process R&D. These departments were as big as my department, it’s that difficult.

I happened to come across a piece of literature that was ten years old at the time of rolling out these vaccines that told us that lipid nanoparticle wrapped macromolecules – big molecules – preferentially accumulate in various organs, including the ovaries. So we knew for certain that if you wrapped the Moderna and Pfizer jabs in this stuff and then injected it into girls and women, it would accumulate in their ovaries.

I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that’s what it’s doing. Well, why would you do that if you were trying to produce immunity to a respiratory virus? And the answer is you wouldn’t. Would you do this if you were trying to harm their fertility? Yes, you would. Especially if you combine the two things I’ve said. Because if a girl or a woman’s ovaries expresses this non-self protein, her own immune system will destroy her ovaries. So I guessed in 2020 – and we have it in writing – that there was a risk of reduction in live babies. And I’m afraid I’ve not followed the field, because I’m not competent to do it properly. But I followed some demographers who are competent to do it, and it looks pretty awful, that between 10 per cent and 20 per cent reductions in live births everywhere – everywhere we look that there’s been intensive injections. So yeah, so on the first part, your immune system will kill you. On the second part, it will damage and potentially render you infertile. And there’s no excuse for either of those things. There were well known hazards of doing the two things they did.

If someone would like to write to me and tell me why I’m wrong, I would love to be wrong. But I’ve been saying it for three years, and no one has pointed out why I’m wrong.

To be continued . . .

July 3, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Israel, not Arafat, scuppered Clinton-led peace deal

MEMO | July 3, 2023

The 23-year-old mystery over who was responsible for scuppering the so-called peace deal outlined by then US President Bill Clinton has been revealed in newly-released declassified documents from the Israeli state archive. The documents show that it was the Israelis who rejected the “Clinton Parameters” which led ultimately to the breakdown of the “Peace Process”. They were uncovered by Professor Norman Finkelstein.

The US academic is the author of several major books, including Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel is Coming to an End. Finkelstein, along with many others, has long disputed the Israeli claim that the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Yasser Arafat was responsible for spoiling the deal.

In fact, casting blame on the Palestinians for failed negotiations has been a stock in trade of Israeli propaganda since the creation of the apartheid state, and it was no different in 2000 when Clinton launched his failed bid to strike a deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Finkelstein recollected his own position on the matter before revealing details of the Israeli documents which exposed the intransigence of the occupation state that led to the breakdown of Clinton’s peace deal. He said that he had tried to obtain the documents for decades without any success, while speculating about their content.

The basis of a resolution between Israel and Palestine has been unambiguous since 1967, said the American professor, and are based on various UN Resolutions and international law. “However, on the core issues, the Clinton Parameters amended the international consensus such that all the concessions would have to come from the Palestinian side and none from Israel. Contrary to international law, a portion of the Palestinian West Bank, including much of East Jerusalem, would be forfeited to Israel; a portion of the Israeli settlements inside the Palestinian West Bank would be annexed to Israel; and only a token portion of Palestinian refugees would be permitted to exercise their [legitimate] right of return to Israel.”

According to Finkelstein’s account of the negotiations, the Palestinian team did not reject the Clinton Parameters but, rather, expressed in a detailed, professional memo reservations about them. The Israeli side likewise expressed reservations. In January 2001, Clinton formally announced that both sides had accepted his parameters “with some reservations.” However, when this round of negotiations collapsed at the end of January, both the Americans and Israelis blamed Arafat for the collapse.

“Clinton lied-and so did everyone else,” said Finkelstein, recounting the decade long campaign to pin the blame on Arafat. The documents from the Israeli state archive — “Response of the Government of Israel to the ideas raised by President Clinton regarding the outline of a Framework Agreement on Permanent Status” —show explicitly that Israeli reservations about the Clinton Parameters fell outside the plan that he presented.

The documents expose Israel’s refusal to concede territory to the Palestinians: “The permanent territorial arrangements would have to include annexation that exceeds the numerical territorial scope indicated by the President… The President’s ideas regarding the Old City and Har Habayit [in East Jerusalem] are different from Israel’s position… In the field of security, the Presidential ideas differ from the Israeli ones with regard to the Palestinian police and security force, the mandate of the international force and the monitoring of the non-militarisation of Palestine [etc.].”

Clinton was called upon to remove any ambiguities in his parameters over the “Right of Return of the refugees”; that is, “any entry of refugees to Israel shall be a matter of sole sovereign Israeli discretion.” Every single Israeli demand exceeded not only what the occupation state was entitled to under international law but also what was offered in the Clinton parameters.

Israel’s culpability for the breakdown of the peace process is just one of many revelations that have come to light following the release of documents from its state archives. Last week, details of how Israel poisoned Palestinian land was uncovered and before that state documents exposed massacres carried out by Israeli forces against Palestinian Christians and Muslims.

July 3, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

6 minutes of Lukashenko fighting the Covid agenda

July 3, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

The Contra-Cocaine Drug Trade: America’s Debt to Journalist Gary Webb

By Robert Parry | Consortium News | December 13, 2004

In 1996, journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of articles that forced a long-overdue investigation of a very dark chapter of recent U.S. foreign policy — the Reagan-Bush administration’s protection of cocaine traffickers who operated under the cover of the Nicaraguan contra war in the 1980s.

For his brave reporting at the San Jose Mercury News, Webb paid a high price. He was attacked by journalistic colleagues at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the American Journalism Review and even the Nation magazine. Under this media pressure, his editor Jerry Ceppos sold out the story and demoted Webb, causing him to quit the Mercury News. Even Webb’s marriage broke up.

On Friday, Dec. 10, Gary Webb, 49, died of an apparent suicide, a gunshot wound to the head.

Whatever the details of Webb’s death, American history owes him a huge debt.

Though denigrated by much of the national news media, Webb’s contra-cocaine series prompted internal investigations by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department, probes that confirmed that scores of contra units and contra-connected individuals were implicated in the drug trade. The probes also showed that the Reagan-Bush administration frustrated investigations into those crimes for geopolitical reasons.

Failed Media

Unintentionally, Webb also exposed the cowardice and unprofessional behavior that had become the new trademarks of the major U.S. news media by the mid-1990s. The big news outlets were always hot on the trail of some titillating scandal — the O.J. Simpson case or the Monica Lewinsky scandal — but the major media could no longer grapple with serious crimes of state.

Even after the CIA’s inspector general issued his findings in 1998, the major newspapers could not muster the talent or the courage to explain those extraordinary government admissions to the American people. Nor did the big newspapers apologize for their unfair treatment of Gary Webb. Foreshadowing the media incompetence that would fail to challenge George W. Bush’s case for war with Iraq five years later, the major news organizations effectively hid the CIA’s confession from the American people.

The New York Times and the Washington Post never got much past the CIA’s “executive summary,” which tried to put the best spin on Inspector General Frederick Hitz’s findings. The Los Angeles Times never even wrote a story after the final volume of the CIA’s report was published, though Webb’s initial story had focused on contra-connected cocaine shipments to South-Central Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles Times’ cover-up has now continued after Webb’s death. In a harsh obituary about Webb, the Times reporter, who called to interview me, ignored my comments about the debt the nation owed Webb and the importance of the CIA’s inspector general findings. Instead of using Webb’s death as an opportunity to finally get the story straight, the Times acted as if there never had been an official investigation confirming many of Webb’s allegations. [Los Angeles Times, Dec. 12, 2004.]

By maintaining the contra-cocaine cover-up — even after the CIA’s had admitted the facts — the big newspapers seemed to have understood that they could avoid any consequences for their egregious behavior in the 1990s or for their negligence toward the contra-cocaine issue when it first surfaced in the 1980s. After all, the conservative news media — the chief competitor to the mainstream press — isn’t going to demand a reexamination of the crimes of the Reagan-Bush years.

That means that only a few minor media outlets, like our own Consortiumnews.com, will go back over the facts now, just as only a few of us addressed the significance of the government admissions in the late 1990s. I compiled and explained the findings of the CIA/Justice investigations in my 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & “Project Truth.”

Contra-Cocaine Case

Lost History, which took its name from a series at this Web site, also describes how the contra-cocaine story first reached the public in a story that Brian Barger and I wrote for the Associated Press in December 1985. Though the big newspapers pooh-poohed our discovery, Sen. John Kerry followed up our story with his own groundbreaking investigation. For his efforts, Kerry also encountered media ridicule. Newsweek dubbed the Massachusetts senator a “randy conspiracy buff.” [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Kerry’s Contra-Cocaine Chapter.”]

So when Gary Webb revived the contra-cocaine issue in August 1996 with a 20,000-word three-part series entitled “Dark Alliance,” editors at major newspapers already had a powerful self-interest to slap down a story that they had disparaged for the past decade.

The challenge to their earlier judgments was doubly painful because the Mercury-News’ sophisticated Web site ensured that Webb’s series made a big splash on the Internet, which was just emerging as a threat to the traditional news media. Also, the African-American community was furious at the possibility that U.S. government policies had contributed to the crack-cocaine epidemic.

In other words, the mostly white, male editors at the major newspapers saw their preeminence in judging news challenged by an upstart regional newspaper, the Internet and common American citizens who also happened to be black. So, even as the CIA was prepared to conduct a relatively thorough and honest investigation, the major newspapers seemed more eager to protect their reputations and their turf.

Without doubt, Webb’s series had its limitations. It primarily tracked one West Coast network of contra-cocaine traffickers from the early-to-mid 1980s. Webb connected that cocaine to an early “crack” production network that supplied Los Angeles street gangs, the Crips and the Bloods, leading to Webb’s conclusion that contra cocaine fueled the early crack epidemic that devastated Los Angeles and other U.S. cities.

Counterattack

When black leaders began demanding a full investigation of these charges, the Washington media joined the political Establishment in circling the wagons. It fell to Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s right-wing Washington Times to begin the counterattack against Webb’s series. The Washington Times turned to some former CIA officials, who participated in the contra war, to refute the drug charges.

But — in a pattern that would repeat itself on other issues in the following years — the Washington Post and other mainstream newspapers quickly lined up behind the conservative news media. On Oct. 4, 1996, the Washington Post published a front-page article knocking down Webb’s story.

The Post’s approach was twofold: first, it presented the contra-cocaine allegations as old news — “even CIA personnel testified to Congress they knew that those covert operations involved drug traffickers,” the Post reported — and second, the Post minimized the importance of the one contra smuggling channel that Webb had highlighted — that it had not “played a major role in the emergence of crack.” A Post side-bar story dismissed African-Americans as prone to “conspiracy fears.”

Soon, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times joined in the piling on of Gary Webb. The big newspapers made much of the CIA’s internal reviews in 1987 and 1988 that supposedly cleared the spy agency of a role in contra-cocaine smuggling.

But the CIA’s decade-old cover-up began to crack on Oct. 24, 1996, when CIA Inspector General Hitz conceded before the Senate Intelligence Committee that the first CIA probe had lasted only 12 days, the second only three days. He promised a more thorough review.

Mocking Webb

Meanwhile, however, Gary Webb became the target of outright media ridicule. Influential Post media critic Howard Kurtz mocked Webb for saying in a book proposal that he would explore the possibility that the contra war was primarily a business to its participants. “Oliver Stone, check your voice mail,” Kurtz chortled. [Washington Post, Oct. 28, 1996]

Webb’s suspicion was not unfounded, however. Indeed, White House aide Oliver North’s emissary Rob Owen had made the same point a decade earlier, in a March 17, 1986, message about the contra leadership. “Few of the so-called leaders of the movement … really care about the boys in the field,” Owen wrote. “THIS WAR HAS BECOME A BUSINESS TO MANY OF THEM.” [Capitalization in the original.]

Nevertheless, the pillorying of Gary Webb was on, in earnest. The ridicule also had a predictable effect on the executives of the Mercury-News. By early 1997, executive editor Jerry Ceppos was in retreat.

On May 11, 1997, Ceppos published a front-page column saying the series “fell short of my standards.” He criticized the stories because they “strongly implied CIA knowledge” of contra connections to U.S. drug dealers who were manufacturing crack-cocaine. “We did not have proof that top CIA officials knew of the relationship.”

The big newspapers celebrated Ceppos’s retreat as vindication of their own dismissal of the contra-cocaine stories. Ceppos next pulled the plug on the Mercury-News’ continuing contra-cocaine investigation and reassigned Webb to a small office in Cupertino, California, far from his family. Webb resigned the paper in disgrace.

For undercutting Webb and the other reporters working on the contra investigation, Ceppos was lauded by the American Journalism Review and was given the 1997 national “Ethics in Journalism Award” by the Society of Professional Journalists. While Ceppos won raves, Webb watched his career collapse and his marriage break up.

Probes Advance

Still, Gary Webb had set in motion internal government investigations that would bring to the surface long-hidden facts about how the Reagan-Bush administration had conducted the contra war. The CIA’s defensive line against the contra-cocaine allegations began to break when the spy agency published Volume One of Hitz’s findings on Jan. 29, 1998.

Despite a largely exculpatory press release, Hitz’s Volume One admitted that not only were many of Webb’s allegations true but that he actually understated the seriousness of the contra-drug crimes and the CIA’s knowledge. Hitz acknowledged that cocaine smugglers played a significant early role in the Nicaraguan contra movement and that the CIA intervened to block an image-threatening 1984 federal investigation into a San Francisco-based drug ring with suspected ties to the contras. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & “Project Truth”]

On May 7, 1998, another disclosure from the government investigation shook the CIA’s weakening defenses. Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, introduced into the Congressional Record a Feb. 11, 1982, letter of understanding between the CIA and the Justice Department. The letter, which had been sought by CIA Director William Casey, freed the CIA from legal requirements that it must report drug smuggling by CIA assets, a provision that covered both the Nicaraguan contras and Afghan rebels who were fighting a Soviet-supported regime in Afghanistan.

Justice Report

Another crack in the defensive wall opened when the Justice Department released a report by its inspector general, Michael Bromwich. Given the hostile climate surrounding Webb’s series, Bromwich’s report opened with criticism of Webb. But, like the CIA’s Volume One, the contents revealed new details about government wrongdoing.

According to evidence cited by the report, the Reagan-Bush administration knew almost from the outset of the contra war that cocaine traffickers permeated the paramilitary operation. The administration also did next to nothing to expose or stop the criminal activities. The report revealed example after example of leads not followed, corroborated witnesses disparaged, official law-enforcement investigations sabotaged, and even the CIA facilitating the work of drug traffickers.

The Bromwich report showed that the contras and their supporters ran several parallel drug-smuggling operations, not just the one at the center of Webb’s series. The report also found that the CIA shared little of its information about contra drugs with law-enforcement agencies and on three occasions disrupted cocaine-trafficking investigations that threatened the contras.

Though depicting a more widespread contra-drug operation than Webb had understood, the Justice report also provided some important corroboration about a Nicaraguan drug smuggler, Norwin Meneses, who was a key figure in Webb’s series. Bromwich cited U.S. government informants who supplied detailed information about Meneses’s operation and his financial assistance to the contras.

For instance, Renato Pena, a money-and-drug courier for Meneses, said that in the early 1980s, the CIA allowed the contras to fly drugs into the United States, sell them and keep the proceeds. Pena, who also was the northern California representative for the CIA-backed FDN contra army, said the drug trafficking was forced on the contras by the inadequate levels of U.S. government assistance.

The Justice report also disclosed repeated examples of the CIA and U.S. embassies in Central America discouraging Drug Enforcement Administration investigations, including one into alleged contra-cocaine shipments moving through the airport in El Salvador. In an understated conclusion, Inspector General Bromwich wrote: “We have no doubt that the CIA and the U.S. Embassy were not anxious for the DEA to pursue its investigation at the airport.”

CIA’s Volume Two

Despite the remarkable admissions in the body of these reports, the big newspapers showed no inclination to read beyond the press releases and executive summaries. By fall 1998, official Washington was obsessed with the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, which made it easier to ignore even more stunning disclosures in the CIA’s Volume Two.

In Volume Two, published Oct. 8, 1998, CIA Inspector General Hitz identified more than 50 contras and contra-related entities implicated in the drug trade. He also detailed how the Reagan-Bush administration had protected these drug operations and frustrated federal investigations, which had threatened to expose the crimes in the mid-1980s. Hitz even published evidence that drug trafficking and money laundering tracked into Reagan’s National Security Council where Oliver North oversaw the contra operations.

Hitz revealed, too, that the CIA placed an admitted drug money launderer in charge of the Southern Front contras in Costa Rica. Also, according to Hitz’s evidence, the second-in-command of contra forces on the Northern Front in Honduras had escaped from a Colombian prison where he was serving time for drug trafficking

In Volume Two, the CIA’s defense against Webb’s series had shrunk to a tiny fig leaf: that the CIA did not conspire with the contras to raise money through cocaine trafficking. But Hitz made clear that the contra war took precedence over law enforcement and that the CIA withheld evidence of contra crimes from the Justice Department, the Congress and even the CIA’s own analytical division.

Hitz found in CIA files evidence that the spy agency knew from the first days of the contra war that its new clients were involved in the cocaine trade. According to a September 1981 cable to CIA headquarters, one of the early contra groups, known as ADREN, had decided to use drug trafficking as a financing mechanism. Two ADREN members made the first delivery of drugs to Miami in July 1981, the CIA cable reported.

ADREN’s leaders included Enrique Bermudez, who emerged as the top contra military commander in the 1980s. Webb’s series had identified Bermudez as giving the green light to contra fundraising by drug trafficker Meneses. Hitz’s report added that that the CIA had another Nicaraguan witness who implicated Bermudez in the drug trade in 1988.

Priorities

Besides tracing the evidence of contra-drug trafficking through the decade-long contra war, the inspector general interviewed senior CIA officers who acknowledged that they were aware of the contra-drug problem but didn’t want its exposure to undermine the struggle to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government.

According to Hitz, the CIA had “one overriding priority: to oust the Sandinista government. … [CIA officers] were determined that the various difficulties they encountered not be allowed to prevent effective implementation of the contra program.” One CIA field officer explained, “The focus was to get the job done, get the support and win the war.”

Hitz also recounted complaints from CIA analysts that CIA operations officers handling the contra war hid evidence of contra-drug trafficking even from the CIA’s analytical division. Because of the withheld evidence, the CIA analysts incorrectly concluded in the mid-1980s that “only a handful of contras might have been involved in drug trafficking.” That false assessment was passed on to Congress and the major news organizations — serving as an important basis for denouncing Gary Webb and his series in 1996.

Though Hitz’s report was an extraordinary admission of institutional guilt by the CIA, it passed almost unnoticed by the big newspapers.

Two days after Hitz’s report was posted at the CIA’s Internet site, the New York Times did a brief article that continued to deride Webb’s work, while acknowledging that the contra-drug problem may indeed have been worse than earlier understood. Several weeks later, the Washington Post weighed in with a similarly superficial article. The Los Angeles Times never published a story on the release of the CIA’s Volume Two.

Consequences

To this day, no editor or reporter who missed the contra-drug story has been punished for his or her negligence. Indeed, many of them are now top executives at their news organizations. On the other hand, Gary Webb’s career never recovered.

At Webb’s death, however, it should be noted that his great gift to American history was that he — along with angry African-American citizens — forced the government to admit some of the worst crimes ever condoned by any American administration: the protection of drug smuggling into the United States as part of a covert war against a country, Nicaragua, that represented no real threat to Americans.

The truth was ugly. Certainly the major news organizations would have come under criticism themselves if they had done their job and laid out this troubling story to the American people. Conservative defenders of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush would have been sure to howl in protest.

But the real tragedy of Webb’s historic gift — and of his life cut short — is that because of the major news media’s callowness and cowardice, this dark chapter of the Reagan-Bush era remains largely unknown to the American people.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It’s also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth.’

Copyright © 2004 The Consortium for Independent Journalism

July 2, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment