The Pakistani security state possesses an almost supernatural ability to discover “sovereignty” whenever cameras are rolling in Washington and to lose it entirely the moment the name Aafia Siddiqui is mentioned.
Apparently, the Field Marshal can help broker ceasefires, whisper into the ears of presidents, posture as a grand strategist of West Asian stability, and market Pakistan as the indispensable hinge of global diplomacy — yet cannot perform the infinitesimally smaller task of demanding the return of a Pakistani woman whose suffering has become one of the ugliest symbols of the War on Terror.
How extraordinary. A nuclear state that can allegedly influence the architecture of regional conflict suddenly develops the political helplessness of a hostage whenever Aafia enters the conversation. But this silence is not weakness. It is guilt.
Because Aafia Siddiqui is not merely a prisoner. She is evidence. Living evidence. Evidence of what Pakistan’s military establishment became during the War on Terror: a comprador security apparatus that rented out sovereignty to Washington in exchange for dollars, weapons, diplomatic indulgence, and the right to rule Pakistan without accountability.
The Pakistani security state did not merely cooperate with America’s post-9/11 imperial machinery; it became one of its most enthusiastic subcontractors.
Entire populations were surveilled, dissidents disappeared, torture outsourced, and citizens quietly transformed into bargaining chips in a grotesque marketplace of empire.
And hovering over this entire era is Aafia’s name — inconvenient, radioactive, impossible to bury completely.
That is why the establishment treats her like a political corpse that refuses to stay buried. To seriously campaign for her release would require reopening the darkest archives of Pakistan’s collaboration with American power. It would force questions about who handed whom over, who facilitated what, who remained silent, and who converted Pakistan into a logistics depot for the Pentagon’s civilizational psychosis after 9/11.
Far easier, then, to wrap the entire thing in patriotic theatre. More military parades. More speeches about dignity. More absurd chest-thumping from men whose understanding of sovereignty begins and ends with securing another meeting in Washington.
And what of Washington itself?
The same American national security class that spent two decades speaking the language of “freedom” while operating black sites, torture chambers, indefinite detentions, drone massacres, and legal black holes across the Muslim world now expects history to forget.
These people vaporized villages, normalized torture with bureaucratic calm, and transformed cruelty into administrative procedure. The War on Terror was not merely a military campaign; it was a moral collapse masquerading as policy sophistication. Entire careers in Washington were built on the suffering of nameless Muslims imprisoned, disappeared, or obliterated in countries most Americans could not locate on a map.
Aafia Siddiqui became one more body fed into that machine.
But perhaps the most nauseating silence of all has come from Pakistan’s self-described liberals — that exquisitely performative class forever eager to sermonise about human rights provided the victims are ideologically fashionable, geopolitically convenient, or capable of earning approving nods from Western think tanks.
For years, many treated Aafia’s case with embarrassment, discomfort, or outright contempt, as though opposing torture and indefinite imprisonment required ideological preconditions.
Their politics, so brave on social media and so submissive before Western power, collapsed entirely when confronted with a Muslim woman brutalised by the American security state.
One quickly discovers that many liberals denounce authoritarianism only when it is not backed, funded, or sanctified by Washington.
And this is why the current spectacle surrounding Pakistan’s supposed geopolitical “importance” feels so hollow.
If Islamabad truly possesses the leverage its propagandists endlessly advertise, then securing the return of Aafia Siddiqui should be diplomatically trivial. The fact that nothing happens exposes the fraud.
This entire performance — the summits, the strategic dialogues, the pompous headlines about mediation and influence — increasingly resembles what it has always been: choreography for a dependent elite desperate to appear powerful before a domestic audience it profoundly despises.
Because genuine sovereignty does not tremble before memory. Yet Aafia’s name continues to haunt Pakistan’s rulers precisely because it resurrects memories they cannot control: the years of submission, the moral prostitution of the War on Terror, the generals who sold obedience as patriotism, the politicians who marketed humiliation as pragmatism, and the intellectual class that watched much of it unfold with cowardly
silence.
Empires eventually decline. Press conferences disappear. Generals retire into gated compounds. But evidence remains.
In the wake of the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran and the subsequent maritime banditry and piracy, the Islamic Republic is reportedly moving to assert its long-dormant sovereign rights over the submarine internet cables that traverse the waters of the Strait of Hormuz.
This strategic reorientation – as confirmed by some reports – promises to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue while fundamentally reshaping the legal and economic architecture of global data transmission.
The unprovoked military aggression against Iran, which halted with a ceasefire on April 8, 2026, has fundamentally altered the strategic calculus of the Persian Gulf.
During the 40 days of aggression against Iran, a previously overlooked dimension of the country’s sovereign territory emerged as a critical vulnerability for the global digital economy.
Beneath the waters of the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran’s territorial sea extends 12 nautical miles and overlaps completely with Omani jurisdiction, leaving no high seas whatsoever, lie at least five major submarine fibre-optic cable systems.
These cables carry approximately 99 percent of all intercontinental internet traffic and an estimated 10 trillion US dollars in daily financial transactions.
Now, in the aftermath of the aggression, which came in the middle of nuclear talks, Iran is moving to exercise its full and legal sovereign authority over this hidden infrastructure.
The plan is increasingly centered on a comprehensive governance model that would include permit requirements, transit fees, Iranian legal jurisdiction over foreign technology companies, and exclusive Iranian control over cable maintenance and repair operations.
Forgotten dimension of the Strait of Hormuz
For decades, international discourse surrounding the Strait of Hormuz focused almost exclusively on traditional dimensions: freedom of navigation for oil tankers, security of energy flows, and the legal regime governing the passage of commercial and military vessels.
This narrow framing, however, systematically ignored one of the most vital emerging dimensions of this strategic corridor: the fibre-optic communication infrastructure and submarine data transmission cables that lie on the seabed of Iran’s territorial waters.
These cables, which include major systems such as FALCON (owned by Tata Communications of India), the Gulf Bridge International (GBI) system, and the TGN-Gulf system, form the backbone of the digital economy, not just for the Persian Gulf region but the entire world.
They carry international internet traffic, cloud data centre synchronization, enterprise virtual private networks, voice-over-IP communications, and – most critically – international banking and financial transactions, including SWIFT messages.
Any disruption to these communication highways, whether from natural disasters, ship anchoring, or military action, could cause irreparable damage to the tune of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars daily.
What makes this issue particularly significant for Iran is the undisputed legal reality that the Strait of Hormuz is not, and has never been, international waters.
The careful repetition of the phrase “international waters” by Western media and think tanks is part of a cognitive and legal battle designed to diminish the legitimate sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran over one of the world’s most vital waterways.
Why is the Strait Iranian territory
The legal status of the Strait of Hormuz must be understood through the precise geometry of international maritime law.
According to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, each coastal state has the right to determine the width of its territorial sea up to a maximum distance of 12 nautical miles from its baselines.
Iran has never ratified this convention, but it serves as a reference point for international practice. Within these 12 miles, the coastal state exercises absolute sovereignty over the water column, the seabed, the subsoil, and even the airspace above.
This is exactly the same sovereignty it exercises over the territory of its capital city.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has determined the width of its territorial sea in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman to be 12 nautical miles. The Kingdom of Oman has adopted exactly the same procedure.
The Strait of Hormuz, at its narrowest point between Iranian islands and the Omani coast, measures approximately 21 nautical miles in width.
When Iran extends its territorial sea 12 nautical miles southward from its northern coast, and Oman extends its territorial sea 12 nautical miles northward from the Musandam Peninsula, the combined territorial waters of the two countries total 24 nautical miles.
This exceeds the total width of the strait at that point by three nautical miles.
The result is geometrically inevitable: the territorial seas of Iran and Oman collide and overlap in the middle of the Strait of Hormuz.
There is not a single drop of water in the narrowest points of the strait and its main shipping channels that can be legally classified as high seas or even as an exclusive economic zone.
Any vessel, submarine, or cable that passes through this point is legally passing within the sovereign borders of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
To this geometric reality must be added the clarifying force of Article 34 of the Convention on the Law of the Sea.
That article states definitively that the regime of passage through straits used for international navigation does not in any way affect the legal status of the waters forming these straits.
Nor does it affect the exercise of sovereignty and jurisdiction by the bordering states over those waters, their airspace, their bed, and their subsoil.
The international community possesses only the right of passage through these waters under the rules set by Iran. This right of passage is limited to the rapid and continuous movement of ships and aircraft.
It does not extend to the laying of fixed infrastructure such as internet cables or energy pipelines on the seabed.
Sovereignty over the seabed, for laying communication cables, energy pipelines, and conducting research, remains entirely the exclusive preserve of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Value of what passes through Iranian waters
The economic significance of the cables transiting the Strait of Hormuz is staggering.
According to data from the TeleGeography database updated to January 2026, the main cable systems crossing the strait form a complex network connecting the Persian Gulf countries to the global network spanning Europe, India, and East Asia.
These systems carry not only public internet traffic but also the most sensitive and valuable data streams in the global economy.
Global content providers known as hyperscalers, companies including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, use these fibre-optic cables to connect their local nodes to the core of their global networks.
The traffic these companies carry consists primarily of cloud data centre synchronization, including real-time copies of distributed databases, virtual machine migrations, internal application programming interface traffic, and user-generated content.
In cloud computing architecture, maintaining stability and reliability at the level of 99.999 percent uptime, known as the “five nines” standard, is a mandatory requirement in service level agreements.
Rather than purchasing small amounts of bandwidth, these companies lease long-term dark capacity or purchase irrevocable rights to use submarine cables for periods of 15 to 25 years, keeping network latency in the millisecond range.
Level 1 and Level 2 telecommunications operators, including Etisalat of the UAE, Ooredoo of Qatar and Oman, the Telecommunications Infrastructure Company of Iran, and STC of Saudi Arabia, are responsible for transporting international internet traffic.
This traffic includes Border Gateway Protocol routing information, enterprise virtual private networks, international mobile roaming traffic, and network-based voice packets.
These operators are the gateway to the internet for the countries of the region, receiving terabits per second of capacity from the submarine cables in the Strait of Hormuz and then distributing it to smaller operators and end users.
These cables form the backbone of the digital economy of the Persian Gulf countries, creating a near-total dependence on connectivity to the global network.
Most critically, global financial institutions and content distribution networks, including Akamai, Cloudflare, and the SWIFT financial messaging network, depend on these cables.
Bank settlement messages and high-frequency transactions require dedicated, encrypted, low-latency paths with minimal signal variability.
In global stock market trading, a delay of even one millisecond can result in millions of dollars in losses. Submarine cables are the safest, fastest, and most reliable physical medium for transporting these sensitive intercontinental financial transactions.
According to analytical reports from British think tanks and transaction data from international payment networks, including SWIFT and the Central Interbank Dollar Payments System CHIPS, submarine cables carry more than 10 trillion US dollars in financial transactions every single day.
This colossal figure represents bank settlements, stock market transactions, foreign exchange operations, and all financial activities that form the lifeblood of the global economy.
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development confirms in its annual Digital Economy Reports that more than 99 percent of all international data traffic is transmitted through this cable network.
At the regional level, the West Asia international broadband market, for which the Strait of Hormuz serves as the main thoroughfare, is worth several billion dollars annually.
This value derives from the bulk sale of capacity by cable owners such as FALCON, GBI, and TGN-Gulf to national telecommunications operators.
The damage caused by a disruption or complete outage at this strategic bottleneck, however, is far larger than the direct revenues of this market.
Modelling based on studies of transatlantic cable outages estimates that a five-day disruption of cables through the Strait of Hormuz could inflict tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in damage daily to the combined economies of the Persian Gulf countries.
Failure of alternatives
In response to Iran’s assertion of its sovereign rights, some Western analysts have suggested that alternative routes or technologies could bypass the Strait of Hormuz.
The technical reality, however, offers no fast and reliable alternative.
Next-generation low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations such as Starlink offer lower latency than fibre-optic cables for very long distances, because lasers in space travel at actual light speed while light in glass fibres travels at roughly two-thirds of that speed.
However, while a single submarine cable can carry terabits of data per second, an entire satellite constellation offers bandwidth measured in gigabits.
Satellites cannot yet handle the massive bandwidth demands of artificial intelligence training, high-definition streaming for millions of users, or cloud backups. They are, in the assessment of industry experts, a boutique solution not scalable to millions of users.
Terrestrial overland corridors represent the most practical alternative, with massive land cables running through Iraq to Turkey or through Syria to the Mediterranean.
Ambitious projects such as Saudi Arabia’s SilkLink and Qatar’s FiG are underway. However, these routes must cross war-torn regions, including Syria and Iraq, where West-backed wars have previously destroyed similar infrastructure and where local militias and unstable governments remain capable of seizure, taxation, or sabotage.
These are not peaceful alternatives; they merely exchange one set of vulnerabilities for another. Free-space optical systems using lasers transmitted through air or vacuum are not a solution for the Strait of Hormuz at all.
Such systems are extremely susceptible to weather interference, including the fog and sandstorms common to the Persian Gulf, and have a limited range of less than 50 kilometres.
The verdict is clear: there exists no single alternative that is simultaneously fast, high-capacity, and secure. The Strait of Hormuz remains an irreplaceable chokepoint for global digital communications.
Repair regime and Iran’s essential role
The maintenance and repair of submarine cables in the Strait of Hormuz present another dimension of Iran’s sovereign authority.
According to International Cable Protection Committee technical documents and performance reports, the repair process for a complete cable cut follows a well-established sequence: fault location using optical time-domain reflectometer tools, application for navigation permits under international law, and dispatch of a cable repair ship.
The process of dispatching a ship, retrieving the two ends of the cable from the seabed, performing the reconnection, and returning the cable to the seabed typically requires between 7 and 30 days, depending on weather conditions and the availability of repair vessels.
In the Strait of Hormuz specifically, the exceptionally high volume of maritime traffic requires intensive traffic coordination during cable laying and repair operations.
Under normal conditions with full cooperation from the countries exercising sovereignty over the strait, the repair process would be expected to take up to 45 days.
During the recent joint US-Israeli aggression, however, major cable installation contractors, including Alcatel Submarine Networks, declared force majeure on Persian Gulf operations, halting both new installations and maintenance of existing systems.
Billions of dollars’ worth of cable projects were suspended or abandoned, with some reportedly 90 percent complete before work stopped.
Given that the Strait of Hormuz lies entirely within Iranian territorial waters, the logical conclusion is inescapable: the user companies whose cables transit Iranian sovereign territory must conclude contracts for cable repair and maintenance exclusively with Iranian companies, specifically companies owned more than 50 percent by Iranian entities and operating entirely under the laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
This is not a matter of political choice but of legal necessity arising from the undisputed fact that foreign vessels, including cable repair ships, cannot operate in Iranian territorial waters without Iranian permission.
Global recognition of the new reality
The world media has taken notice of Iran’s digital sovereignty initiative. Indian media outlets, including ABP Live and the Economic Times, have warned that a significant portion of India’s internet passes through the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, and that any disruption to these routes could disrupt online services, digital banking, and communications, pressuring the digital economy of countries, including India.
Russian media outlet AIA Daily reported that Iran has effectively conveyed the message that it possesses physical access to vital routes of the global internet, emphasizing that at least seven major internet cables pass through the Strait of Hormuz and serve as the backbone of e-commerce, cloud services, and international communications.
Asian media, including Korea’s Asia Business Daily and the English-language Asia Times, have described the Strait of Hormuz as one of the world’s most important internet bottlenecks.
Asia Times wrote that data infrastructure and fibre-optic cables have become part of the deterrence equation in the region, warning that an attack on cables could disrupt the global economy without firing a missile, and that future wars may take place on the seabed and over data cables rather than traditional battlefields.
Western media have also acknowledged the vulnerability. Reuters reported in a piece that Iran’s warning about the vulnerability of undersea cables has raised concerns, emphasizing that several important fibre-optic cables lie in the Strait of Hormuz connecting countries in Asia, the Persian Gulf, and Europe, and that any damage in this area would disrupt cloud services, online communications, and the digital economy.
The Washington Post warned that submarine cables have become one of the most vulnerable parts of the world’s digital economy, with Western governments concerned that undersea cables could be used as a tool of strategic pressure.
The French newspaper Le Monde wrote that the joint US-Israeli aggression against Iran has placed infrastructure, including submarine cables, data centres, and cloud computing networks under the simultaneous pressure of geopolitical and security crises.
Three practical steps
Based on the legal, technical, and economic factors, the Islamic Republic of Iran can implement three practical steps to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue from the Strait of Hormuz internet cables while exercising its full sovereign rights.
First, all companies wishing to use this infrastructure must obtain an initial license from Iranian authorities, and because this license must be renewed annually, these companies must pay all outstanding amounts on a recurring basis.
The fee model can draw from international precedents, including the Egyptian model based on providing exclusive services, the Singaporean model based on policy-making and administrative licensing, the Indonesian bureaucratic model based on permits and corridors, and the Russian model based on strategic control and state participation.
Egypt, for example, earns between 250 million and 400 million US dollars annually from submarine cable infrastructure alone, representing 15 to 20 percent of the Egyptian Telecommunications Company’s total operating revenues.
Second, all cross-border communications and information technology companies operating in the region, including US companies such as Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft that transfer Iranian user data abroad through these cables, must be subject to the laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran and supervised and regulated by the Iranian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.
With the official activities of these companies and their cooperation with the Iranian side, there would no longer be any need for filtering or blocking of their platforms.
Third, because the Strait of Hormuz is entirely part of Iranian territory, the user companies must conclude contracts for cable repair and maintenance exclusively with an Iranian company, meaning a company owned more than 50 percent by the Iranian side and operating fully under the laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The proceeds from this entire framework will flow to the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, specifically to the Fibre-Optic Development Fund, and will be used to create and improve the country’s information technology infrastructure.
The Zionist Entity cannot fight real wars, instead it uses assassinations and terror bombing campaigns to avoid having to actually engage its opponents. Since October of 2023, it has been proven that this strategy is a liability, especially when it is attempting to expand its occupation.
On March 3, 2026, Lebanese Hezbollah debunked the Israeli illusion that it was nearing “total victory” in a 7-front war. Now the reality is setting in for everyone. The Israelis have carried out their most successful assassination strikes, Mossad operations, and implemented the most destructive air attacks that the world has ever witnessed against a defenseless civilian population in Gaza.
All of this, and they haven’t defeated a single opponent. So why then did almost everyone believe that the Israelis had managed to overcome the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance? The answer is quite simple: propaganda.
Hezbollah, Hamas, Ansar Allah, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq and Iran’s IRGC are all still in existence today. In fact, the Israelis failed through committing a genocide in Gaza to fully defeat even one of the some dozen Palestinian Resistance factions that exist there. This is not to say that nothing has been achieved and no blows were suffered, evidently that would be delusional, but the fact of the matter is that the Zionist Entity has thrown everything they have at securing “total victory”.
Some would then come along and argue that Hezbollah did suffer significant blows, with the assassination of their senior leadership, the terrorist pager attacks, that Hamas and the other Palestinian factions have also lost much of their senior leadership, as has the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC). All of this is true, but that isn’t what wins a war.
This is especially the case when it comes to the Israelis, who possess the most advanced military technology and are on paper supposed to be a complete mismatch when facing up against Hezbollah or Hamas.
Their biggest issue lies in their military doctrine, the overreliance on technology, and beyond this the ideological weakness that runs through their society. In the year 2000, former Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah issued perhaps his most well-known address, which would later be referred to as the “Spider’s Web Speech”.
26 years later, and the Israeli political and military leadership, along with their media, are still obsessed with the speech. The reason why is because it cuts deep into the Israeli psyche and their self-perception. Israeli society is a military society, one that is obsessed with its citizen army. “The IDF is the most moral army” is the settler mantra, a concept so ridiculous to the rest of the world, yet a concept that the settlers themselves cling to with every ounce of their being. This is because the entire occupying regime is centred around the armed forces and militarism.
A soldier’s death is infinitely more difficult for the Israelis to accept than that of a non-combatant, which is why they do their utmost to cover up soldier casualties. If their soldiers are being killed in enormous numbers, then this begins to rock the entire society to its core and impact their belief in themselves to uphold their settler colonial project. Hence Nasrallah’s Spider’s Web theory. The idea of the Zionist entity being a spider’s web, is that its society is weak, not its technology, not its ability to drop bombs and carry out complex intelligence operations.
The concept of fighting short wars is enshrined in Israeli military thinking; it is a concept that dates back to its first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion. This is to say, fighting short and intense wars is safe, because the Israelis are militarily superior to their opponents, yet fighting long, drawn out conflicts of attrition is a danger due to the sheer size of their enemies.
The most successful Israeli war of aggression, the “6-Day War,” reinforced this view. Over the years, since the US has fully thrown its weight behind the occupying ethno-supremacist regime, the United States military has itself shifted to become risk adverse and implement a counter-insurgency doctrine.
In the Second Intifada, the Israelis then leaned into the use of “targeted assassinations”, special forces raids and counter-insurgency strategies, in a way that they hadn’t previously implemented at such a scale. Palestinian Resistance groups in the West Bank were indeed defeated as a result of it, but in Gaza, they managed to adapt and develop in strength.
After originally withdrawing from Lebanon, the Israelis realised that the threat of Hezbollah had grown to a level where it now posed a significant threat, but when they tried to defeat it in 2006, they failed. Therefore, they developed the Dahiyeh Doctrine, the concept of inflicting massive death and destruction against civilian populations.
The belief was that this achieved “deterrence”; in reality, it was Hezbollah that had deterred the Israelis, because Hezbollah was not the aggressor or attempting to implement a belligerent occupation. In order to deal with their defeat in Lebanon, the Israelis then implemented the Dahiyeh Doctrine in the Gaza Strip, where they were dealing with a weaker Resistance group under siege.
Over the years, the Dahiyeh Doctrine was repeatedly used against the Gaza Strip, alongside assassination campaigns, aimed at “mowing the lawn”, a twisted way of saying subduing the threat and achieving “deterrence”. Yet, this also backfired in Gaza, because eventually the Resistance would become so strong that they pulled off the largest military defeat of the Israelis that had ever been inflicted.
As a reaction to October 7, 2023, the Israelis went bad; they initiated a genocide in the Gaza Strip, before going on the offensive across the region. They relied on those same tactics that had failed them time and again, which led them to the Hamas-led surprise attack.
Assassination after assassination, terrorist tactics against civilian populations in order to try and force them into submission, economic warfare, using proxy groups, doing everything possible without having to actually make the sacrifices necessary to attain victory. The reason why they couldn’t simply fight on the ground and go after the Palestinian Resistance in Gaza, nor wage costly and bloody battles against Hezbollah, is because the Spider’s Web theory is true.
If the Israelis were to actually do what is necessary to truly defeat their opponents, they would have to accept losing tens of thousands of soldiers. This is a price that their citizens’ army is simply not willing to pay. The Palestinians, Lebanese, Yemeni and Iranians are willing to make that level of sacrifice, but the Israelis aren’t.
The Zionist regime seeks to achieve “Greater Israel”, but doesn’t want to make any real sacrifice in order to attain that project; they want to do it the easy way, but an easy way doesn’t exist. People are not simply going to bow down and accept enslavement, to live under the rule of an ethno-supremacist regime that treats them as animals, nor will they stop resisting because you slaughter their families.
Sneaky assassinations, surprise attacks and killing babies do not win wars against populations who are fighting for their ability to live freely in their lands. The Zionist entity had the opportunity to actually secure its existence, which was through accepting the so-called “Two-State solution”, but that would have defeated their entire purpose, despite it being the only route to securing their place in the region.
The “Two-State solution” was the Zionist solution that could have given them the ability to remain, but they chose to go down the path of no return. They couldn’t accept living as equals, because the Zionist project is one of ethno-supremacy, so now they are stuck. The illusion of victory over Lebanon is crumbling, as they fail to produce any solutions other than mass murder against civilian populations and ethnic cleansing across the region.
Especially when the Israelis are a weak society, they can’t succeed. This is why there is an obsession with achieving regime change in Iran and using the US to do it for them, because they are desperately betting on the idea that if they do succeed, the resistance against them will end.
A reader wrote to me this week. Her question, in essence:
She knows someone trying to come off Seroquel safely. Does anyone know the deficiencies it might have caused? Are there books or functional doctors who work on that?
She is looking for a functional doctor. Someone to walk her person through the Seroquel taper the way a functional cardiologist walks a patient off statins, or a functional endocrinologist walks a patient off long-term steroids. She wants someone who understands what the drug has done to the body, can identify the depletions, can order the right tests, and can hold the patient’s hand through the worst of it.
That person does not exist. Not as a profession. Not as a network. Not in any country I have looked at.
The Assumption Hidden in the Question
Every other branch of medicine has a parallel network for patients who decide that what they have been prescribed is making them worse. Someone leaving conventional cardiology finds functional cardiologists, integrative GPs, nutritionists, lifestyle medicine doctors, chiropractors, osteopaths, and bodyworkers. The person leaving an oncologist finds clinics in Mexico and Germany, a literature on metabolic therapies, and dozens of practitioners whose practices are built around helping the patient leave the mainstream pathway.
These parallel networks are not perfect. They vary in quality. Some are captured by their own commercial pressures. But they exist. A patient can find them. A patient can book an appointment.
Now try the same exercise for someone on Seroquel. Or for someone six years into a benzodiazepine. Or two decades into an SSRI.
What they find is a peer forum, a free PDF from Denmark, and a book by a British psychiatrist whose own profession ignored the problem until he forced them to look at it. They find a small number of dissident practitioners, most of them retired or semi-retired, with waiting lists measured in months. They find a great many websites. They find almost no doctors.
My reader did not ask a strange question. She asked the normal question. The strangeness is that there is no normal answer.
What the Evidence Says About the Vacuum
The emptiness is documented in plain language by the clinicians who actually do this work.
Peter Breggin, who has been doing psychiatric drug withdrawal work for more than forty years, states it directly. It has become very easy for individuals to find clinicians who will prescribe psychiatric drugs, but it remains very difficult for patients to find help in reducing or withdrawing from them. He attributes this to a lack of peer support and training, which leaves most clinicians uncomfortable even responding to a patient’s request for reduction or withdrawal.¹
Peter Gøtzsche puts it more bluntly. Very few doctors know anything about withdrawal, and many make horrible mistakes. If they taper at all, they do it far too quickly, because the prevailing wisdom treats withdrawal as a problem only with benzodiazepines, and because the few guidelines that exist recommend tapering schedules that are dangerously fast.²
The largest survey of long-term users who tried to discontinue — Ostrow and colleagues, published in Psychiatric Services in 2017 — quantifies the vacuum. Of 250 adults with serious mental illness diagnoses who wanted to stop psychiatric drugs, 71% had been taking them for over nine years. Only 54% met their goal of completely discontinuing. Among those who attempted it, only 45% rated doctors as helpful during withdrawal. Sixteen percent began the process against their doctor’s advice. Twenty-seven percent did not tell their doctor, stopped seeing the doctor, or changed doctors. Self-education and contact with peers who had withdrawn were the most frequently cited sources of help.³
More than a quarter of the people who tried to come off went around their doctor or away from their doctor entirely. They were not helped by the profession that put them on the drug. In many cases they were actively avoided by it.
Gøtzsche documents something worse in Denmark. Researchers there tried to run a withdrawal trial involving patients on antipsychotics. The trial collapsed — not because the drugs failed to come off, but because patients were too frightened to participate. They had been told for so long that they would relapse without their medication that the prospect of stopping was, in itself, destabilising.² The profession had successfully convinced them that leaving was more dangerous than staying.
The Horowitz Exception
Mark Horowitz is a training psychiatrist at the NHS with a PhD in the pharmacology of antidepressants from King’s College London. He was prescribed an antidepressant in medical school. Fifteen years later, he tried to come off it following the standard guidelines his own profession had produced. He was blindsided by withdrawal symptoms so severe they forced him back onto the drug.⁴
Unable to find clinical support, he turned to an online peer community founded by Adele Framer — SurvivingAntidepressants.org — and discovered that the people there had worked out, through years of collective trial and error, what the psychiatric literature did not contain. The dose-response curve for these drugs is hyperbolic, not linear. Halving the dose at each taper step, as the official guidelines recommended, guaranteed a withdrawal crash at the bottom of the curve. The patients had figured it out. The profession had not.⁵
In 2019, Horowitz published this finding with David Taylor in The Lancet Psychiatry.⁵ In 2021, with Joanna Moncrieff, he set up England’s first psychiatric drug deprescribing clinic.⁴ In 2024, he and Taylor published The Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines — the first clinical textbook on how to come off these drugs written within the British medical establishment.⁶
One clinician. One clinic. One book. For a problem that affects tens of millions of patients across every Western country.
Horowitz’s findings were accommodated only after the peer communities had been telling people the same thing for a decade, and after the evidence became too large to ignore. Joanna Moncrieff, Peter Gøtzsche, Peter Breggin, David Healy, and a small handful of others have done comparable work. They remain isolated. They have no referral network underneath them. They are not training a generation of younger clinicians to replace them.
The vacuum is not the temporary feature of a field that hasn’t yet matured. It is the product of active resistance from within the profession.
Why the Vacuum Is Structural
The parallel practitioner network that exists in cardiology, endocrinology, and oncology exists because those branches of medicine concede, even at their most conventional, that the body can heal. A functional cardiologist can hang a shingle because conventional cardiology admits that diet, exercise, stress, and sleep can reverse heart disease. The door is cracked open. The functional practitioner walks through.
Psychiatry does not open that door. Its official framework holds that the conditions it diagnoses are chronic, lifelong, and biologically driven. The Royal College of Psychiatrists, the American Psychiatric Association, and every major national equivalent tell patients that their “illness” requires long-term management, often lifelong, and that stopping medication invites relapse. The DSM categories are described as diseases. The drugs are described as treatments that correct an underlying dysfunction.
In this framework, no role exists for a practitioner who helps people leave. A practitioner who helps people leave is, by definition, someone who believes the drugs were not necessary in the first place, or are no longer necessary, or are causing more harm than the original distress. That practitioner is a heretic within the profession. Not a specialist filling a niche. A threat to the diagnostic framework itself.
The vacuum is not a gap in a functioning system. It is the absence that the system requires in order to continue functioning.
If the profession built a deprescribing subspecialty — trained practitioners, published guidelines, referral pathways, insurance codes — it would be admitting that a significant fraction of its patients never needed the drugs, were harmed by them, and can and should come off them. That admission would collapse the commercial and intellectual scaffolding of the field. The admission is not made. The subspecialty is not built. The patients are left to find their own way.
Gøtzsche puts it in one sentence. It seems, he writes, as if lifelong medication is tacitly assumed to be a good thing.² That is the explanation for the vacuum.
What the Reader Is Actually Asking For
When I translate my reader’s question into what it would take to answer it, the practitioner she is looking for would need to
understand what Seroquel has done to the body,
design a hyperbolic taper matched to this patient’s half-life and receptor profile,
order compounded doses or guide the making of them,
address the depletions that accumulate during years of antipsychotic exposure,
manage the return of sleep disruption, anxiety, and emotional intensity that follows removal of the drug,
and walk alongside for the twelve to thirty-six months this typically takes.
This is a real job. It is a needed job. It is nobody’s job.
No medical school trains for it. No residency offers it. No insurance code reimburses it. No malpractice carrier covers a psychiatrist who specialises in getting people off psychiatric drugs. No prescriber can build a practice around it without accepting the isolation and reduced income that come with practising outside the standard framework. No primary care doctor has the time, the knowledge, or the institutional cover to do it either.
The work exists. The workers do not.
The Reframe: This Was Never a Psychiatric Problem
The practitioner my reader is looking for does not exist because psychiatric drug recovery is not a psychiatric problem. The body’s task, once the drug is tapered off, is not a psychiatric task. It is a terrain task.
The drug was a toxic exposure — a sustained, daily, years-long exposure acting on a nervous system that was probably already carrying some combination of nutritional deficiency, accumulated toxic burden, disrupted sleep, chronic stress, and environmental insult before the prescription was ever written. Years of Seroquel add to that burden. They deplete the body in predictable ways: oxidative stress that consumes glutathione and antioxidant enzymes,⁷ mitochondrial damage, metabolic disruption producing weight gain, blood sugar dysregulation, and elevated lipids,⁸ and a cascade of effects on movement, cognition, and sleep architecture.
What the body needs, once the drug is being reduced, is not correction by a psychiatric specialist. It is removal of the toxic input and restoration of the conditions that allow repair — clean water, nutrient-dense food, mineral repletion, sunlight, sleep, movement, reduction of other ongoing toxic and stress inputs, and time.
The practitioners who support that work do exist. They are simply not labelled as psychiatric practitioners, because the work is not psychiatric. They are the terrain-oriented doctors, the New Biology practitioners, the functional medicine clinicians who understand mitochondrial recovery and mineral repletion, the nutritionists who work with detoxification, the bodyworkers who address the fascia and the lymph.
My reader asked whether there were functional doctors “on that topic.” The honest answer is that the topic, correctly named, is not psychiatric drug withdrawal. The topic is terrain restoration after a prolonged toxic exposure. That has practitioners. Those are the practitioners she needs.
The psychiatric part of the work — writing the taper prescription, adjusting compounded doses — is the smallest part, and it requires the least expertise. Any honest prescriber willing to listen to the patient and read the Horowitz guidelines can do it. The rest of the work, the terrain work, is what actually determines whether recovery happens.
A Practical Map
For my reader, and for anyone in her position, here is what the road actually looks like.
For the taper itself. Horowitz and Taylor’s Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines is the single most important book.⁶ Breggin’s Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal covers the clinical management in detail, including a case involving Seroquel.¹ Gøtzsche’s Mental Health Survival Kit and Withdrawal from Psychiatric Drugs is plain-language and principles-based.² Sørensen, Rüdinger, Gøtzsche and Toft’s A Practical Guide to Slow Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal is free as a PDF from deadly-medicines.dk.⁹ These four texts contain most of what is known.
For the prescriber. You are probably looking for any doctor — primary care, psychiatrist, or integrative — willing to write the taper according to the schedule you bring them. You are not looking for the prescriber to design it. You are looking for them not to obstruct it. This is a much smaller ask, and much more achievable, than finding a specialist. Compounding pharmacies produce the small custom doses that manufactured pills cannot.
For the peer community. SurvivingAntidepressants.org is the largest and most rigorous. Benzo Buddies covers the benzodiazepine side. Mad in America (madinamerica.com) hosts an enormous archive of first-person accounts, research summaries, and practitioner interviews. The International Institute for Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal (iipdw.org) and the Inner Compass Initiative (theinnercompass.org) are both worth knowing. Ostrow’s survey found that peer contact and self-education were the two most frequently cited sources of help during withdrawal, rated more useful than doctors.³
For the terrain work. The New Biology Clinic (newbiologyclinic.com), built around the framework of Tom Cowan, Andy Kaufman, and colleagues, addresses the underlying causes that mainstream medicine will not examine. Kelly Brogan’s A Mind of Your Own is written by a psychiatrist who now works from a broadly terrain-compatible orientation and addresses coming off psychiatric drugs directly.¹⁰ Competent functional medicine practitioners who understand mitochondrial recovery, mineral repletion, and the role of ongoing toxic exposures can carry much of the load, though their familiarity with psychiatric drugs specifically will vary.
For the depletions. Long-term antipsychotic exposure is associated with oxidative stress consuming glutathione and related antioxidant systems.⁷ The commonly reported associated depletions, drawing from the broader clinical literature, include coenzyme Q10, magnesium, B vitamins (particularly B12 and folate), vitamin D, zinc, and omega-3 fatty acids. These are worth testing and repleting. They are not a substitute for the terrain work. They are part of it.
None of this replaces the specialist network that does not exist. It is what is actually available, and it is what actually works when people succeed — which many do.
For a Six-Year-Old
Your body knows how to get better. It has always known.
When something is hurting it, the body’s job is to repair. It does this on its own, every day, all the time. It does not need a special doctor to do it.
What it needs is good food, clean water, sleep, sunshine, and time. It needs whatever was hurting it to slowly, carefully, stop being there.
The slowly and carefully part matters. You cannot rip a plaster off a wound that has grown into the skin. You have to loosen it a little at a time, and let the skin heal as you go.
That is the whole of it.
Closing
My reader asked for leads to help someone detox from Seroquel safely, and for functional doctors who work on that topic. I have given her the leads I have. I have also told her that the functional doctors she is looking for, in the form she imagines them, do not exist — and will not exist, because the framework that would need to produce them has structural reasons not to.
The absence of a specialist network is not the absence of a path. The path exists. It is slower and harder than it should be. It requires self-education, peer support, a cooperative prescriber, a terrain-oriented practitioner, and time. Many people walk it. Many get to the other side. Ostrow’s survey of those who succeeded found that 82% were satisfied with their decision.³ Few psychiatric interventions can claim that.
What psychiatry will not provide, the body provides — once the exposure stops and the conditions for repair are restored. The doctor she is looking for does not exist. The recovery she is looking for does.
Nothing in this essay is medical advice. It is research and analysis. Anyone reducing or stopping a psychiatric drug should do so with qualified support and adequate time, informed by the texts and communities referenced above.
References
Breggin, Peter R. Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal: A Guide for Prescribers, Therapists, Patients and Their Families. New York: Springer, 2012.
Gøtzsche, Peter C. Mental Health Survival Kit and Withdrawal from Psychiatric Drugs. Ann Arbor: L H Press, 2022.
Ostrow, L., Jessell, L., Hurd, M., Darrow, S. M., & Cohen, D. “Discontinuing psychiatric medications: a survey of long-term users.” Psychiatric Services 68 (2017): 1232–8.
Horowitz, Mark A. Personal and professional biography. See markhorowitz.org and Simons, P., “Peer-support groups were right, guidelines were wrong: Dr. Mark Horowitz on tapering off antidepressants,” Mad in America, March 20, 2019.
Horowitz, Mark A., and David Taylor. “Tapering of SSRI treatment to mitigate withdrawal symptoms.” Lancet Psychiatry 6 (2019): 538–46.
Horowitz, Mark, and David M. Taylor. The Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines: Antidepressants, Benzodiazepines, Gabapentinoids and Z-drugs. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2024.
Salim, Samina. “Oxidative Stress and Psychological Disorders.” Current Neuropharmacology 12, no. 2 (2014): 140–147.
Lieberman, J. A., et al. “Effectiveness of antipsychotic drugs in patients with chronic schizophrenia” (CATIE study). New England Journal of Medicine 353 (2005): 1209–1223.
Sørensen, A., Rüdinger, B., Gøtzsche, P. C., and Toft, B. S. A Practical Guide to Slow Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal. Copenhagen, 2020. Available at deadly-medicines.dk.
Brogan, Kelly. A Mind of Your Own: The Truth About Depression and How Women Can Heal Their Bodies to Reclaim Their Lives. New York: HarperCollins, 2016.
Gøtzsche, Peter C. Is Psychiatry a Crime Against Humanity? Copenhagen: Institute for Scientific Freedom, 2024.
Whitaker, Robert. Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, 2nd ed. New York: Broadway Paperbacks, 2015.
Davies, J., and J. Read. “A systematic review into the incidence, severity and duration of antidepressant withdrawal effects: Are guidelines evidence-based?” Addictive Behaviors 97 (2019): 111–121.
In 2026, the British monarch issued a public message marking Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr, while Easter, unlike in all previous years, was no longer accompanied by a special royal address. Only a brief greeting on behalf of the royal family was published for the Christian holiday.
This pattern in the king’s addresses to his subjects reflects not only the increased demographic and political weight of the Muslim community, but also a clear setting of priorities.
The British monarch’s refusal to deliver the traditional Easter address continues a policy that can hardly be described as anything other than anti-Christian and anti-national. When, in Southport, the son of migrants from Rwanda carried out the stabbing of little girls at a children’s club, all those who came out in protest – including the parents of the murdered children – were labeled ultra-right-wing extremists. As part of the “total retribution” announced by the prime minister, 1,280 protesters were arrested, and to make room for them in the autumn of 2024, the government released around 2,000 criminals from prison early.
In the spring of 2025, the government gave a final answer to those Britons who dared to say: “We want our country back.” The Sentencing Council recommended that magistrates and judges take the ethnic and religious background of an offender into account when issuing verdicts, thereby enshrining privileges for ethnic and religious minorities instead of the principle of equality before the law.
What we are seeing is a deliberate dismantling of the nation-state and the British nation through the replacement of the island’s population. The House of Windsor is no bulwark of British tradition, but a crowned representative of the globalist oligarchy, systematically and consistently implementing a strategy of transhumanism – the divergence between the capitalist elite and the mass of service populations, mixed together in megacities, stripped of historical memory and religious roots, and having voluntarily renounced the reproduction of a now superfluous humanity through a child-free lifestyle.
The logical result of such a strategy is the final transformation of Britain from an icon of capitalist progress into an epicenter of growing social dysfunction. You can see this by examining RT’s global survey – the Social Well-Being Index (SWI). While the West compares who has more money and greater opportunities for consumption, we measure what truly matters for the survival and flourishing of nations: the ability to produce life (birth rates); the preservation of life (infant mortality, longevity, homicide mortality); and the minimization of oppression (the level of inequality between rich and poor, and children’s education). As a result, the great Western powers did not even make the top 20 in the SWI rankings. France is in 29th place, Germany 41st, the US 48th, and the UK 53rd.
Mikhail Afanasyev is the creator and head of research of RT’s Social Well-Being Index project.
Editor’s note: I have long resisted the climate manipulatioin idea but this seems convincing.
Below is an automated translation of an article from the French weekly RIVAROL, one of the last far-right publications in France, which is beset by lawsuits and has lost its press accreditation (and the tax advantages that came with it). It is a paper publication, but it can no longer appear on newsstands, so Rivarol has opted for the PDF format.
The article deals with a subject that we don’t see surfacing much in the American far-right press: drought and climate control as an already existing weapon, discreetly – but intensively – used by the Americans against Iran.
RIVAROL is not a scientific journal, but that being said, the facts are troubling and we must force our opponents to respond:
Why is it that the end of the Iranian drought coincides with the destruction of the ring of American radar installations in the Arabian Peninsula? Doesn’t this confirm what President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had already said long ago about manipulating climate to pursue political interests?
While Iran rains missiles down on its enemies, the rain returns to Iran. Coincidence?
§§§§§
Iran’s first victory against the climate conspiracy
AN ABNORMAL DROUGHT THAT DRAGGED ON
About fifteen years ago, the then-President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, repeatedly claimed that Western powers (under American influence) were “stealing” rain from Persia and much of the Middle East (including Iraq). Naturally, at that time, almost everyone in the West considered the strongman of Tehran a crackpot, a conspiracy theorist who, moreover, had the misfortune, it was assumed, of being a notorious historical revisionist.
Westerners continue to silence or deny what Mahmoud had calmly stated. In 2018, Iran officially accused the United Arab Emirates and Israel of stealing its rains, when the senior official of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali, declared: “Israel and another country are working together to prevent Iranian clouds from raining.”
The New York Times reported that the country Jalali did not name was the United Arab Emirates, which has launched a cloud seeding program by injecting chemicals into clouds in an attempt to induce rain in its favor, but also to prevent rainfall in Iran.
Today, however, many Middle Eastern elites are talking about the extreme drought and equally abnormal heat that have plagued the region for ages. We also recall that before the war against Iran, the country had suffered for years from a dramatic water shortage that directly endangered the people, especially the nation’s capital, whose inhabitants (and first and foremost the government) were ready to flee rather than become parched or dry out like old stones.
THE RETURN OF THE RAIN
And then, suddenly, a miracle amidst the misfortunes! In Iran, the clouds finally wept, abundantly and regularly, and temperatures returned to normal (dropping by an average of five degrees Celsius). A few days after the first Iranian strikes against American bases located in the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere on the Arabian Peninsula, the regional climate changed completely.
Initially stunned, the population could observe over the following weeks the gradual filling of natural and reservoir lakes, the return of life to rivers, streams, and springs, the greening and re-greening of meadows, and the return of flora and fauna familiar from the past. In five or six weeks, enormous water reservoirs were filled, and large hydroelectric facilities had to release water to prevent overflows.
The authorities finally called on all Iranian farmers to sow as much wheat as possible and to plant without worry, since water would certainly not be lacking during the summer season. The return of a “normal” spring was not an accident, and this understanding is now shared by everyone in Tehran, Baghdad, and Afghanistan.
According to Iranian officials, including ambassadors (stationed in the greater region), this new rain that has nourished the land is not providential but the result of Iran’s bombings of the gigantic American radars which were simultaneously being used as HAARP systems, tools quite capable of locally modifying the climate.
The Iranian embassy in Kabul posted this unambiguous tweet: “Iran, after destroying a secret cloud seeding and climate manipulation center in the United Arab Emirates, saw everything change overnight. Once this secret center was destroyed, the region’s weather map completely reversed, and now it rains every week in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, with temperatures dropping by 5 degrees. I don’t know if what they’re saying is true, but there’s a change that everyone is noticing, and temperatures in Iraq haven’t been like this for decades.”
Before the war, and Tehran’s audacious response, two major American activities were likely to alter the climate of the Middle East, not inadvertently but intentionally.
CHEMTRAILS AND WAVES
Until the outbreak of the conflict, military aircraft of the United States and their allies released daily, or several times a week (there are many testimonies on this point), trails which are aptly called chemtrails which covered the sky in a few hours with a milky coating generating a scientifically proven greenhouse effect.
Those with a bit of curiosity observe this same phenomenon in Europe and recall that the contrails left behind by all the planes in the last century lasted no more than a few dozen seconds. Never before had these contrails remained in our atmosphere for more than a minute; never had the sky turned whitish after a flurry of flights. Never.
This has been the case regularly since the 2000s, particularly since the deadly heatwave of 2003. Summers have been hotter, all seasons have suddenly been hotter, sometimes extraordinarily dry, to the point of a telluric change in some regions which has caused the fracturing of tens of thousands of houses built on clay soil.
Most of the hundreds of thousands of daily flights around the world do not produce chemtrails. Just a few hundred aircraft (not commercial airliners, of course) are enough to locally alter the climate, here or there, and cause temperatures to skyrocket. Keen observers will have noticed that these trails crisscross the sky in very calm weather, when their sponsors are certain they won’t be too widely dispersed and therefore ineffective.
As unpleasant as they may be, heat waves, droughts, and mild winters are messages meant for the brainwashed Westerners. They must admit that everything is out of whack because of their own activities, that the Earth is dying because of the carbon dioxide they emit with their diesel cars, their gas boilers, their incessant flatulence, and their horrendous meat-based diet.
The message is crystal clear: you small-time European consumers, you see the damage you’re causing, you careless fools! There are no seasons anymore, you bunch of idiots! The carp have no oxygen in the ponds, the trout have no current in the rivers, the grass is yellow in June, Grandma is suffocating in July, we’re dying of heat in Nantes, everything’s gone to hell. Scrap your gas-powered car, scrap your gas appliances, buy an electric car or a heat pump as soon as you can, install solar panels, demand the energy transition for everyone!
THE IRANIAN TARGET
In the Middle East, there was no message. No one was urging its inhabitants to abandon oil and internal combustion engines. Iran and its surrounding regions were simply a target. A target to be weakened, starved, and destabilized. So that only discontent could flourish, so that hatred against the regime could explode. In addition to the countless economic sanctions imposed upon it, Iran had thus been the target of climate attacks for many years.
For decades, military scientists have known how to dry out and heat entire regions by dusting their airspace with tiny metallic particles (aluminum and others) and water vapor. These particles are agitated by radar waves (which travel at the speed of light) and thus heat up. This temperature increase at the core of the clouds prevents the suspended water from freezing, thus preventing precipitation.
By preventing the movement of crop-dusting aircraft and by neutralizing giant radars (by destroying them), Iran has freed itself (momentarily?) from this “climate” trap.
BETWEEN CONSPIRACY AND CONSPIRACY THEORIES, A TRAP AGAINST IRAN
Tehran, long convinced of the existence of this plot orchestrated by the American-Zionist axis, could not, however, intervene sooner. It would have had to attack both the Americans and the United Arab Emirates first. And no one, apart from the Iranian elite and those in the know, would have believed the motive for its attack: a return to normalcy.
In its self-defense, the Persian regime was able to destroy the massive radar systems in a seemingly, ostensibly, rational move. It was the radars themselves that were eliminated, not radars also used as instruments projecting microwaves to deplete Iran’s resources. The damning accusation of conspiracy could not be leveled against it.
By holding out for so long, by resisting for so long the sanctions and social unrest orchestrated by the enemy, by enduring for so long this extraordinary drought, Iran has won the battle against “conspiracy theories” by avoiding appearing as one of its most obsessive proponents.
We know that Iran quite legitimately believed in this conspiracy, but a war waged to officially combat it would not have been accepted by everyone in a world saturated in the media (even outside the West) and the demonization of “conspiracy theories.” Climate warfare could have brought Iran to its knees, but it was its enemy, who needed this war (which it tried by all means to provoke), who struck first. This is Iran’s greatest success to date.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to believe that the American-Zionist axis has surrendered in this war. Is it trying, or will it try, to rebuild radars designed to manipulate the climate in the same way, or will it use other radars located on other continents? Will it use drones to spray its chemical potion? In short, is the climate war truly over?
If it is not already doing so, Iran now has every interest in communicating on this issue so that it is taken seriously by people around the world. A difficult but vital task.
Leftist commentators consistently push a shallow and economically reductive narrative that frames American foreign policy as the sole domain of greedy White capitalists while choosing to ignore the obvious Jewish power structure directing these events. When the veneer of this supposed corporate imperialism is stripped away, it becomes clear that the United States has often served as a vehicle for the specific goals of organized Jewry. The life of Samuel Zemurray stands as prime evidence of this hidden mechanism.
Few figures in American business history wielded power as ruthlessly or as secretly as Zemurray. Born Schmiel Zmurri on January 18, 1877, to a poor Jewish family in Imperial Russia, this teenage immigrant would rise from peddling rotting bananas off railroad cars in Alabama to become the controlling force behind the United Fruit Company, the most powerful agricultural corporation on earth. Along the way he overthrew governments, bribed presidents, hired mercenaries, and played a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in the creation of the State of Israel.
The man who would topple presidents arrived with nothing but a steamer ticket and family connections in the Deep South. After his father died, the 14-year-old Zemurray emigrated to the United States in 1892, traveling in steerage class and landing in New York before making his way to Selma, Alabama, where relatives had settled. He worked as a chicken catcher, carpenter’s assistant, delivery boy, traveling merchant, and housecleaner, eventually saving enough to bring his mother and 6 siblings over from Europe. Standing approximately 6 feet 3 inches tall with enormous energy and hustle, Zemurray was described as a man who could swear fluently in 5 languages. He encountered his first banana around 1893 in Selma, at that time an exotic and expensive delicacy in the United States, and the fruit became his life’s obsession.
Zemurray brought to the banana trade the same scrappy, rule-bending hustle that had carried him from steerage to a Selma general store. In 1895, at age 18, Zemurray traveled to the docks of Mobile, Alabama, and built a niche specializing in what the industry called “ripes” — bananas that were nearly overripe and being discarded by importers. He bought them for pennies and rushed them inland by rail before they spoiled, famously bribing Western Union telegraph operators to wire ahead with sales offers to towns along the route. Starting with just $150, he had saved $100,000 by age 21 and earned the lifelong nickname “Sam the Banana Man.” By selling bananas directly off moving trains, Zemurray turned minimal investments into substantial profits and was soon selling over one million bananas annually.
In 1903, Zemurray signed a contract with United Fruit giving him rights to distribute the company’s ripest bananas. He partnered with Ashbell Hubbard to form the Hubbard-Zemurray Company and by 1905 had moved to New Orleans, acquired the Thatcher Brothers Steamship Company, and taken control of the Cuyamel Fruit Company. By 1910, he had bought 5,000 acres along the Cuyamel River in Honduras near Omoa and borrowed aggressively to expand into plantations, railroads, and bridges. Unlike the patrician executives of United Fruit who ran operations from their offices in Boston, Zemurray spent months each year working directly on his Central American plantations, learning conversational Spanish, mapping land, clearing fields with a machete, killing snakes, and supervising construction in person.
Zemurray’s appetite for direct action soon extended far beyond plantation supervision. The most audacious act of Zemurray’s early career was his personal financing and orchestration of a coup d’état in Honduras in 1910 and 1911. The crisis arose when U.S. Secretary of State Philander C. Knox attempted to resolve Honduras’s large debt to British banks by having J.P. Morgan buy the bonds, in exchange for which a Morgan bank official would collect customs duties on Honduran imports. This arrangement would have obliterated the tax concessions Zemurray had privately negotiated with Honduran officials, effectively threatening to destroy his business. After lobbying the State Department unsuccessfully and being told directly to “butt out” of U.S.-Honduras relations, Zemurray devised an alternative.
While under surveillance by U.S. Secret Service agents enforcing neutrality laws, Zemurray recruited mercenaries in the French Quarter of New Orleans, hired the flamboyant soldier of fortune Lee Christmas and the notorious mercenary Guy “Machine Gun” Molony, and purchased a former U.S. Navy vessel called the Hornet. The conspirators evaded Secret Service surveillance, slipped away from New Orleans, and sailed to Honduras with rifles and ammunition Zemurray had stashed on Ship Island. They joined forces with Manuel Bonilla, the former Honduran president whom Zemurray supported as the preferred replacement. Through a combination of military action, bluffing, and recruiting local rebel forces, the coup succeeded. Bonilla was inaugurated as president of Honduras on February 1, 1912, and immediately rewarded Zemurray with extensive land concessions, duty-free import privileges, and favorable tax arrangements.
The spoils of that intervention elevated Zemurray from ambitious importer to regional kingmaker. Zemurray became known as “the uncrowned king of Central America.” After Bonilla’s death in 1913, he controlled a string of Honduran presidents and in 1925 secured exclusive lumber rights to 1/10 of Honduran territory. The episode established the template for what came to be called “banana republic” politics.
In 1929, Zemurray sold Cuyamel to United Fruit for $31.5 million in stock, becoming one of the wealthiest men in America and the single largest individual stockholder in the company. He nominally retired and moved to an estate outside New Orleans. But the Great Depression devastated United Fruit. The company’s stock collapsed by roughly 90 percent, wiping out most of Zemurray’s fortune. After his written suggestions were dismissed and his proposals ignored at board meetings, Zemurray took extraordinary action — traveling personally to visit individual shareholders and collecting their proxy votes. At a dramatic board meeting in 1932 or 1933, Zemurray placed the collected proxies on the table and reportedly declared to the assembled executives, “You’ve been fucking up this business long enough. I’m going to straighten it out.” He became managing director immediately and then formally president of United Fruit in 1938, serving until 1951.
Under Zemurray’s leadership, United Fruit became a behemoth. It owned rail transportation monopolies, radio communications infrastructure, steamship lines, and port facilities across 13 nations. In some Central American countries, the company operated as what critics described as “a state within a state.” Zemurray openly admitted that bribery was the foundation of his operations.
The most historically catastrophic action tied to Zemurray and United Fruit was the 1954 CIA-backed coup that overthrew Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz, a democratically elected leader who had introduced agrarian land reforms. Árbenz’s land reform law, Decree 900, expropriated uncultivated United Fruit land for redistribution to landless peasants. Under Zemurray’s influence, United Fruit launched one of history’s most consequential corporate lobbying campaigns.
Edward Bernays, known as “the father of public relations,” orchestrated press tours, planted stories, and produced films painting Guatemala as a Soviet beachhead in the Western Hemisphere. Both Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles had prior connections to United Fruit as former partners at Sullivan and Cromwell, the company’s main law firm. President Eisenhower authorized Operation PBSUCCESS with a $2.7 million budget. The CIA armed and trained a force under Carlos Castillo Armas, conducted psychological warfare operations, and engineered Árbenz’s resignation on June 27, 1954. Castillo Armas installed a military dictatorship that reversed land reforms, eliminated labor rights, and initiated decades of U.S.-backed military rule that led to over 200,000 deaths in a decades-long civil war.
While Zemurray built his banana empire in public view, he pursued another project almost entirely in the shadows. Beginning in the 1920s, he became personally close with Chaim Weizmann, the leader of the World Zionist Organization and Israel’s eventual first president. At the end of World War II, Zemurray was approached by Zionist leaders and asked to help procure ships for the clandestine network transporting Jews from displaced persons camps in postwar Europe to British Mandate Palestine. Working entirely behind the scenes, he raised money and used his connections to facilitate logistics.
The Jewish corporate magnate was instrumental in obtaining the ship that became the Exodus 1947 for the Haganah, which would explain its Honduran registration — Zemurray’s United Fruit Company effectively controlled much of Honduras. The Exodus carried over 4,500 Jewish refugees toward Palestine in 1947 before being intercepted by the British Royal Navy. The incident became an international cause célèbre and accelerated international support for Jewish statehood.
Zemurray’s most consequential contribution to the founding of Israel was his behind-the-scenes lobbying effort that helped secure passage of UN Resolution 181 on November 29, 1947, the Partition Plan that divided Mandatory Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The resolution required a 2/3 majority to pass. According to author Rich Cohen, Zemurray made calls from his New Orleans home to Latin American heads of state, pressing for affirmative votes or abstentions. Haiti switched from a “no” vote to an abstention. Nicaragua switched from an abstention to a “yes.” In total, 13 of the 33 “yes” votes came from Latin America, including countries where United Fruit operated.
Samuel Zemurray died in New Orleans on November 30, 1961, at age 84. His philanthropy included major donations to Tulane University, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Audubon Nature Institute, and Jewish refugee relief efforts. He also contributed financially to The Nation magazine.
If we look closely at the history of 20th century American interventionism, the shadow of the Jewish hand becomes impossible to ignore. Zemurray was not an outlier but a precursor to the modern reality where the United States operates as a private military company for the advancement of Jewish interests abroad.
The multitude of seemingly perpetual interventions of the past century were not driven by the abstract greed of villainous, White American billionaires but by the deliberate orchestration of a distinct group with its own tribal loyalties. We are destined to remain powerless subjects in our own land as long as we fail to unmask the true masters of our state and break free from the suffocating grasp of Jewish supremacy.
Recognizing the crimes of devious figures like Samuel Zemurray is a necessary first step in this process to reclaim our polities from the machinations of organized Jewry.
A newly published study in Cell reports that the genetic sequence associated with the 1977 influenza pandemic carries clear, measurable patterns consistent with laboratory handling.
Meaning it appears man-made.
The analysis was led by scientists at UC San Diego, UCLA, Temple University, Cornell University, the University of Arizona, and The Scripps Research Institute.
It was funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Sequence Matches Known Laboratory Signatures
The researchers identified a specific pattern embedded in the sequence.
One that aligns with laboratory conditions rather than uncontrolled external processes.
They state:
“the reemergence of H1N1 influenza A virus in 1977 was preceded by a shift in selection intensity, consistent with the hypothesis of passage in a laboratory setting.”
The study makes clear that these types of patterns are not random.
They are:
“distinct evolutionary signatures” produced through laboratory passage.
The 1977 sequence carries that signature.
That means the sequence behaves like something that has been handled, worked on, or preserved in a lab.
Not something that developed continuously on its own.
Sequence Does Not Follow a Natural Timeline
The study also identifies a major break in the expected timeline of the sequence.
Researchers found:
only 48 substitutions over roughly 27 years,
and strong similarity to strains from the 1950s.
Under normal conditions, far more change would be expected.
Instead, the sequence appears to have been:
held in a stable, nearly unchanged state, then
reintroduced with minimal differences.
Meaning the sequence does not reflect a continuous passage through time.
It looks paused, preserved, and then brought back.
That pattern is consistent with storage or maintenance under controlled conditions.
Statistical Patterns Align With Controlled Environments
Beyond the timeline anomaly, the sequence shows a distinct pattern in how changes occur.
The study detected:
a shift in selection pressure,
and a pattern associated with reduced constraints compared to typical conditions.
The authors note:
“we consistently found evidence for a change in the selection regime of passaged viruses”
These same patterns are observed in:
laboratory-passaged material,
attenuated vaccine development,
and controlled experimental systems.
In plain terms: the way this sequence changes matches laboratory conditions.
Not uncontrolled external conditions.
Direct Link to Laboratory Activity
The study connects these findings to known laboratory practices, stating:
“consistent with the reemergence of H1N1 in 1977 being due to an escape during an influenza vaccine trial.”
Researchers also identify temperature sensitivity, a known outcome of laboratory-based attenuation techniques.
All of this points to:
controlled handling or passaging,
storage under laboratory conditions,
and release following that handling.
The sequence aligns with known lab processes.
What the Study Is Actually Showing
The analysis is entirely sequence-based.
It does not rely on observing a pathogen directly.
Instead, it examines:
mutation patterns,
statistical signals,
and structural characteristics of the sequence.
And those characteristics, according to the study, align with laboratory-associated handling.
That means the conclusion comes from what the sequence objectively looks like and what those patterns indicate.
Bottom Line
The Cell study identifies multiple independent indicators that the genetic sequence associated with the 1977 influenza pandemic does not follow a continuous, uncontrolled pattern.
Instead, it shows:
a break in expected timeline,
minimal change over decades,
and a statistical signature matching laboratory conditions.
This means the defining sequence tied to the 1977 influenza pandemic carries the same detectable signature seen when something has been handled in a laboratory.
The 1977 influenza pandemic sequence does not look naturally derived.
It looks man-made.
That raises a direct question: if the sequence at the center of a pandemic appears man-made, what role did laboratory systems play in the event itself?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has encouraged President Donald Trump to carry out a regime change operation in Iran for many years, former US National Security Adviser John Bolton has told Afshin Rattansi, host of ‘New World’.
West Jerusalem wanted Trump to launch an attack on Tehran already during his first presidential term and continued lobbying for it during his second one, Bolton said, who served between 2018 and 2019.
“I urged that our objective be regime change, so did Netanyahu,” he told Rattansi, explaining that “There is no change in what Trump has been hearing from” the Israeli prime minister over the years. He nevertheless denied that Trump’s decision to launch the attack in late February was influenced by Israel.
Bolton criticized the president for what he called the lack of a clear goal in his campaign against the Islamic Republic and said Trump had failed to “make the case to the American people” about “why the regime change in Iran is necessary” – despite it supposedly being a “very compelling one.”
Known for his hawkish foreign policy views, Bolton maintained that the US should continue to pursue regime change in Iran and claimed that the government in Tehran is “crumbling” from within. However, the former White House official came up short on any specific strategy the US could use to unblock the Strait of Hormuz, where shipping remains severely disrupted by the Iran conflict.
The gap between what people experience and what the media and their government describes has become impossible to ignore. It starts with the basics. Officials point to improving inflation data, but families see it in their weekly budgets: rent consuming half their income, groceries costing significantly more than two years ago, car repairs deferred because the bill is too high. When the government celebrates economic progress while households tighten their belts, the message isn’t reassuring, it’s dismissive. People aren’t confused by statistics; they’re alienated by the disconnect.
The Epstein case marked a before and after in this erosion of trust. For years, the story unfolded as a slow demonstration that accountability operates differently for the powerful. Flight logs placed influential figures on the same planes as a convicted sex trafficker. Survivor testimony described a network that extended into politics, finance, and intelligence – names like Bill Clinton, Bill Gates or Prince Andrew, the very pinnacle of society. Yet the legal process moved with conspicuous caution: documents released in fragments, key names redacted, prosecutions narrowly focused. When the public saw that connections could delay, dilute, or deflect consequences, it confirmed what everyone already knew: the system protects its own. Its a big club, and you ain’t in it…
Foreign policy deepens the divide. On Iran, government statements consistently describe a position of strength, but observable facts tell otherwise. U.S. bases in Iraq have been quietly abandoned. Troop levels have dropped without clear explanation. A naval blockade described as eliminating Iranian activity hardly affects commercial shipping, while Iran continues to control access to the Strait of Hormuz. Critical radar systems in the Gulf – expensive, strategically vital assets – have been destroyed with minimal official comment. Then came the reported pilot rescue mission: a dramatic account that unraveled under basic questions. No pilot was ever shown. No family spoke publicly. Open-source analysts concluded the operation served as cover for a botched mission to strike on Iranian nuclear facilities.
Gaza, Ukraine, tariffs, migrants, sexual assault statistics, inflation, transexual politics, Covid, the list goes on…
People’s lived experience and common sense tell them the exact opposite of what governments and mainstream media are saying. And while this reality gap may be most apparent in America, it is by no means just a phenomenon limited to the USA or the Angloshere.
The result is a public across the west that has developed its own methods for assessing truth. Citizens cross-reference official statements with financial records, satellite imagery, court documents, and direct observation. What was once the domain of Conspiracy Theorists, is now simple practical verification. When Conspiracy Theory in many cases turns out to be Conspiracy Fact, deference to institutions and media is lost.
Closing this gap won’t happen through better messaging. It requires alignment: between economic reports and household budgets, between legal principles and their application, between strategic claims and material outcomes. Trust isn’t rebuilt by repeating assurances; it’s earned when words match what people see and experience.
Unfortunately for many in power, and their allies in the mainstream media, the answer is not transparency and respect for the truth. Quite the opposite, questioning the value of freedom of speech, increasing censorship, even cancelling elections, are the order of the day. And where that becomes more difficult, for example due to the notoriety of the case, such as with Epstein, then distractions become the short term solution. Another invasion! UFO’s! An assassination attempt! The Russians are coming! The Chinese cheat!
These strategies may delay accountability, but they cannot reverse the underlying dynamic. A public that has learned to verify claims independently will not unlearn that skill. Distractions fatigue; censorship breeds suspicion; contested elections deepen division. The more institutions rely on control rather than credibility, the more they accelerate the very distrust they seek to manage. The reliance on mainstream media “spin” is undermining its reach, and therefore its power. As more people turn to alternative sources of information, the more distrust in government and the media grows. And information bubbles form, some with a more balanced and grounded view of reality. Some not…
This disconnect between the establishment and the general public will not merely persist, it is hardening into a permanent feature of western political life. And when what citizens see and hear from government and media no longer reflects their lived reality, the question is not whether trust will return, but rather what will replace it.
A recent US Senate hearing has exposed mounting concerns that America’s homeland missile defenses are dangerously misaligned with modern warfare, according to a report.
Assistant Secretary of Defense Marc Berkowitz, speaking before the US Senate Committee on Armed Services during the hearing on the next-generation Golden Dome missile defense system on Tuesday, said that the US relies on a “very limited” ground-based, single-layer defense system designed specifically to counter a small-scale rogue ICBM attack from North Korea.
He emphasized that this architecture provides only “very limited capability” against other ballistic missile threats. Most critically, Berkowitz warned that the US currently has “no defense against hypersonic weapons or cruise missiles today.”
According to a report by Asia Times, Data from the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance indicates that between 1999 and 2023, 21 Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) tests were conducted, resulting in just 12 hits and 8 misses, a success rate of only 57 percent.
A February 2025 American Physical Society report noted that despite more than $400 billion spent since 1957, no missile defense system is effective against realistic ICBM threats.
The Asia Times report said that intercepting even a single nuclear-armed ICBM is “extremely challenging” given short engagement windows and the difficulty of distinguishing warheads from decoys.
The Trump administration’s “Golden Dome” project aims to build a layered “system of systems” integrating space-, air-, ground- and sea-based defenses.
However, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reports that Golden Dome faces severe timing constraints: sensors cannot confirm an ICBM trajectory until about 75 seconds after launch, leaving only 25-35 seconds to decide and engage.
Estimates suggest roughly 40,000 space-based interceptors would be required to counter even a limited salvo of 10 ICBMs.
Costs are projected at about $185 billion for initial deployment, with total costs potentially reaching $3.6 trillion over 20 years.
A May 2025 Scientific American article argued that Golden Dome is “fantasy” rooted in the belief that the US can buy its way out of nuclear vulnerability.
As even relatively unsophisticated missiles and drones have shown in the recent US-Israeli war on Iran, advanced defenses can be saturated and penetrated when attacked in sufficient numbers.
The evidence points to a reality that a US-made defense architecture that must be nearly perfect to work is inherently vulnerable to failure.
The Asia Times report concludes that absent a shift toward fundamentally different technologies, the current US approach to missile defense remains a losing proposition, one that can mitigate risk but not eliminate it.
By portraying Chinese characters as perpetrators of ruthless violence while casting Japanese Self-Defense Forces (SDF) intelligence operatives as defenders, the season 2 of the Japanese drama Vivant has recently drawn criticism from Chinese netizens, who argue that its depiction turns historical reality on its head while ignoring Japan’s wartime atrocities.
The TBS drama series – a spy suspense story in which an alleged unofficial intelligence unit of the SDF operates across the globe — has attracted a passionate fanbase. Its currently airing season 2 opened with a household rating of 18.8 percent, the highest for a TV drama this year, according toa commentary article by Japanese media Toyo Keizai.
What draws attention is the portrayal of the enemies in the series, the article noted. Scenes in which the Chinese organization subjects kidnapped members of the SDF unit to brutal torture are repeated with unrelenting intensity.
It is rare for Japanese TV dramas to explicitly portray a real-life country as the enemy, the article noted.
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi also made a reference to the drama, saying that she has been recording Vivant and hopes to binge-watch it over the year-end and New Year holidays, according to Japanese media outlets.
China’s CCTV News report on Sunday revealed that the drama features scenes in which Chinese personnel cut off the fingers of and stab Japanese intelligence operatives in the abdomen. Such acts bear striking similarities to the torture inflicted on Chinese nationals by invading Japanese troops during the World War II.
The drama distorts the truth by attributing these atrocities to modern Chinese characters. Beneath the surface, it subtly glorifies Japan’s cross-border overseas operations, blurs the functional boundaries of the SDF and implicitly promotes an expansionist narrative, per CCTV News. … continue
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
Aletho News
