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Ex-UN Rapporteur Reveals 8 Ways Int’l Nord Stream Probe Can Be Pursued Despite UNSC Stonewalling

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 28.03.2023

The failure of a Russian-Chinese Security Council resolution to set up an international probe into the Nord Stream attacks is not the end of the road, and Moscow has over half a dozen avenues to pursue the matter, both at the UN and at other venues, says Dr. Alfred de Zayas, a former UN rapporteur and veteran expert on international law.

Moscow expressed confidence Tuesday that the truth about the Nord Stream explosions would eventually “break through” in spite of the United Nations Security Council’s failure to adopt a Russian-Chinese resolution demanding a formal international investigation into the sabotage.

“Any tribunal would convict the US on the basis of the available information today, a fortiori in the absence of any credible evidence to the contrary. In the United States, any grand jury would find that the evidence already in the public domain suffices to indict the suspect for the crime and open formal criminal proceedings,” de Zayas told Sputnik.

The resolution received support from Russia, China, and Brazil. The US, the UK, France, and rotating Security Council members Albania, Gabon, Ghana, Malta, Mozambique, the UAE, Switzerland, Ecuador, and Japan abstained. Russian Deputy Permanent representative to the UN Dmitry Polyanskiy told Sputnik the resolution failed thanks to “big pressure” on the part of the West.

Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose bombshell reporting revealed that US Navy divers assisted by the Norwegian military were responsible for the pipelines’ destruction, said he was not at all surprised the resolution failed. “What else did you think they would do? If they did do anything else that would be news,” Hersh told Sputnik.

De Zayas characterized Hersh’s reporting as “thorough, coherent and prima facie credible,” and said his investigations “constitute a solid basis to commence an independent international investigation, which would require the consent of those countries whose territorial sovereignty extends over the area where the explosions took place, namely Sweden and Denmark.”

Unfortunately, the legal expert said, Sweden has so far stonewalled on the issue and hasn’t shared its own probe’s findings with the UN. “Sweden’s silence can only be interpreted as a cover-up, because the consequences of revealing proof of US violation of Swedish and Danish sovereignty, and the colossal violation of international law and the laws of war, would have exploded NATO in the same way as the US exploded the pipelines,” he suspects.

The international legal expert emphasized that to be credible, any probe by the Nordics into the Nord Stream attacks will have to be open to all interested parties, including Russia. Otherwise, “bearing in mind that all three countries have ganged up against Russia, the great danger is that their investigations might be a cover-up or a white-wash operation.”

8 Tools at Russia’s Disposal

Luckily, de Zayas says, there are a number of avenues Russia and other countries can pursue at the international level. These include:

  • For starters, countries could turn to Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which gives all persons the right to access information, and to seek and impart information of all kinds, particularly when the information withheld concerns criminal acts such as terrorism.
  • Secondly, de Zayas notes, because the Security Council has failed to establish an international Commission of Inquiry, or Fact-finding Mission – tools for examining potential serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights law, the General Assembly may do so. “The General Assembly should go beyond the mere condemnation of the Nord Stream sabotage and adopt a resolution under Article 96 of the UN Charter requesting an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on the question of the legal consequences of the blowing up of the pipelines, in particular the civil and penal liabilities involved,” the lawyer explained.
  • Third, the legal expert says, since the Nord Stream explosions fall under the definition of international terrorism, they are under the remit of the UN’s Vienna Office on Drugs and Crime, which should conduct its own investigation.
  • Fourth, de Zayas argues, an investigation could be started by the UN’s Environmental Program office in Nairobi, given that its purview extends to investigating the adverse ecological impacts the blasts may have had on fisheries in the Baltic Sea.
  • Fifth, de Zayas proposes filing a so-called “inter-state complaint” under Article 41 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, saying violations of Articles 1, 2, 6, 19, and 26 of the document could be argued.
  • Sixth, the lawyer says the UN’s Human Rights Council could set up a Fact Finding Mission to investigate “the adverse human rights impacts in the region and the world” of the Nord Stream blasts, “as indeed, the attack on energy supplies has widespread consequences, especially for the enjoyment of economic and social rights.”
  • Seventh, there are the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council – independent human rights experts with mandates to report and advise on human rights matters, which have their own avenues for investigating the Nord Stream attacks. “Surely it is within the remit of three Rapporteurs – the Rapporteur on Terrorism, the Rapporteur on the Right to Truth, Justice, and Reparation, and the Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression” to investigate, de Zayas suggested.
  • Finally, the expert suggests that Russia and other countries could argue the Nord Stream attacks constitute a violation of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. “And even if the US never ratified [the treaty], nothing stops the UNCLOS Secretariat from establishing a working group to study the implications of the sabotage of undersea pipelines,” he explained.

‘Double Standards’

De Zayas stressed that the failure of the UNSC to condemn the terrorist sabotage of Nord Stream in the same way it condemned the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001 signals “the application of double-standards.”

“The silence of the UN with regard to the terrorist sabotage of Nord Stream is as deafening as its silence with regard to the 40 US biolabs in Ukraine,” the lawyer said.

Fortunately, de Zayas argues, pressure on the US is building, not least because of US officials’ proven hostility to Russian pipeline infrastructure long before it was destroyed.

“It was certainly careless of Joe Biden to have threatened that if Russia invaded Ukraine, Nord Stream would be no more. This was repeated by officials of the State Department.

Moreover, the US had already done everything in its power to frustrate the completion of Nord Stream II, as evidenced by the illegal unilateral coercive measures imposed on businesses throughout the world to intimidate enterprises such as the Dutch-Swiss Allseas and a Swiss insurance company with colossal penalties. Such actions were illegal, constituted interference in the internal affairs of states and illegal extraterritorial application of US laws, but the world somehow tolerated them. Still they contribute to the growing legal dossier against the US,” de Zayas concluded.

March 29, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

China wants Nord Stream attackers ‘brought to justice’

RT | March 28, 2023

The Chinese Foreign Ministry has said the saboteurs of the Nord Stream pipelines must face consequences, as it condemned America’s failure to support a UN-led investigation into the incident. A Russian-sponsored resolution for an international probe did not pass a vote at the UN Security Council earlier this week.

Speaking at a media briefing on Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning claimed that Washington is “keen to carry out so-called ‘investigations’ of developing nations, yet is secretive on this incident.” The diplomat argued that the US attitude was an example of “obvious double standards,” and suggested that officials in Washington were “afraid of” something. Mao added that China hopes the perpetrators will be “brought to justice” as soon as possible.

China, Russia, and Brazil backed the draft resolution for an international Nord Stream investigation in a UN Security Council vote on Monday, although 12 other members abstained. If adopted, the resolution would have requested the secretary general to establish a commission to conduct a “comprehensive, transparent, and impartial international investigation” of the incident, which happened in September last year.

The US claimed the proposal was intended to undermine the national investigations being run by Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. Germany was the intended recipient of Russian natural gas pumped through the sabotaged pipelines. Denmark and Sweden are conducting probes as the explosions which ruptured the energy link occurred in their territorial waters.

China’s deputy representative to the UN, Geng Shuang, argued that there was no obstacle to holding an international investigation in parallel with national ones.

Geng also noted that the trio of European nations had already had six months to conduct their probes. Beijing expects them “to increase their sense of urgency, report the progress of the investigations to the Security Council in a timely and regular manner, and find out and announce the results of the investigations as soon as possible,” the Chinese delegation said in a statement.

Veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh claimed last month that the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines was ordered by US President Joe Biden and was conducted jointly by America and Norway. Both nations have denied those allegations. Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week that he “fully agreed” with Hersh’s conclusions.

March 29, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

The depopulation agenda, Part 3: Vaccines and infertility

This is the third in a series tracing the history of population control through to present day depopulation ‘aspirations’. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here. The question raised today is whether vaccines could have impacted on fertility and reproduction.

By Stephen McMurray | TCW Defending Freedom | March 28, 2023

For the last 70 years, fertility rates have decreased worldwide, with a total 50 per cent decline, according to the World Economic Forum. The reasons given typically include women’s ’empowerment’ in education and the workforce, lower child mortality and the increased cost of bringing up children. What is not mentioned by this pro-vaccine body is the possible impact of vaccines.

This however has been brought into sharp focus by the now well documented adverse reactions to the Covid vaccines. A recent Project Veritas undercover report revealed Pfizer executive Jordon Trishton Walker confirming there were specific concerns about the Covid vaccines interference with women’s menstrual cycles: ‘There’s something irregular about their menstrual cycles. We will have to investigate that down the line, because that is a little concerning.’

His comment turned out to be an understatement. According to Pfizer’s own records, at least 82 per cent of pregnant women who were vaccinated lost their babies. Since this was known before the vaccines were given emergency approval by the US Food and Drug Administration, how it was that they recommended them to pregnant women is alarming.

Dr James Thorp, who has 44 years of obstetrics experience and served on the board of the Society for Maternal Foetal Medicine, has stated that vaccinating pregnant women with the covid jab is an ‘egregious violation of ethics’. He and other experts analysed the reports from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) in the US and found some alarming results. When they compared adverse reactions to the Covid jab with those of the flu jab they found there were 57 times more reports of miscarriages from the covid vaccination than the flu vaccination and 38 times more reports of foetal death and stillbirths.

An Australian fertility specialist has also reported an increase in miscarriages from 15 per cent to 74 per cent in women who received the Covid jab. Overall birth rates in Australia declined by 72 per cent approximately nine months after the vaccine roll-out compared with the same month in the previous year.

Dr Mike Yeadon, a former vice-president at Pfizer, believes the reason for increased infertility is due to antibodies being formed against synctin-1, a protein in the placenta, which is similar to the spike protein, and has noted that the lipid nanoparticles of the vaccine accumulate in the ovaries. After noting the high rate of pregnancy and menstrual abnormalities, one study concluded: ‘A worldwide moratorium on the use of Covid-19 vaccines in pregnancy is advised until randomised prospective trials document safety in pregnancy and long-term follow-up in offspring.’

Yet the Covid jab has been consistently pushed on pregnant women by governments worldwide, not least in the UK.

But what of ‘traditional’ vaccines? There are reasons to question them too, particularly those added ingredients reported elsewhere to be associated with fertility issues. What then are the sources of evidence that indicate this could be a problem, and that raise questions about vaccines’ possible injurious effect on reproduction?

For people who want access to this evidence what follows is a review of research on the impact of ‘adjuvants’ added to vaccines for the purpose of increasing the immune response (the scientific justification for which is given here).

One of these is aluminium, which is added despite the separate evidence that exposure to it impacts on male fertility: this study for example finds a statistically significant inverse relationship between the aluminium content of semen and the sperm count. The fact that it is used in the form of aluminium chloride to induce infertility in laboratory animals, begs the question of why it is permitted in vaccines?

Another is polysorbate 80, also known as Tween 80, used as an emulsifier in vaccines, has been shown to inhibit the production of testosterone, causing damage to the uterus and ovaries in rats. A patent for a vaccine exists that deliberately causes infertility in animals and Tween 80 is specifically mentioned as a preferred ingredient.

Triton X-100, another adjuvant, also known as Octoxynol 9, has a similarly drastic effect on sperm. In a test on rams’ sperm, it completely immobilised them whilst also destroying their plasma membranes. Triton X-100’s major application is its use as a spermicide in contraceptives. It has also been identified as an allergen in the mRNA Covid vaccines.

How did such ingredients ever come to be added to vaccines? The scientific justification is that they improve vaccine efficacy and that whatever the side effects found, these are offset by the view that ‘the huge worth of vaccines remains unquestionable’.

Formaldehyde is another adjuvant, used to inactivate live viruses and bacteria in vaccines. Apart from being a carcinogen, there is also evidence of its potential deleterious effect on fertility. A paper published in the Mutation Research journal found a positive association between formaldehyde and reproductive toxicity and concluded: ‘Human reproductive and developmental toxicities resulting from formaldehyde exposure could potentially be a threat to human health.’

Chinese study concluded that exposure to formaldehyde increased the risk of miscarriage. Even the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) accept that working with formaldehyde could increase fertility problems or the chances of having a miscarriage. However, the same CDC remain uncritical supporters of vaccines, promoting them as safe and recommending some even to pregnant women, like the flu vaccine, which contain formaldehyde.

Powerful antibiotics such as neomycin, gentamicin and polymyxin B are frequently used in vaccines to prevent the contents from becoming infected with bacteria. Yet a study using neomycin on rats concluded that its administration resulted in a marked reduction in sperm count, motility and viability.

The antibiotic drugs streptomycin and neomycin are ‘suspected to have caused or may be expected to cause, an increased incidence of human fetal malformations or irreversible damage’.

Another antibiotic, gentamicin, has been shown to have various adverse effects on male fertility, including reduced weight of reproductive organs and a negative effect on sperm. The medicines.org website states that gentamicin should be given to pregnant women only in life-threatening situations because it can cause nerve and renal damage to the foetus. Yet it is found in flu vaccines which are routinely given to expectant mothers.

This article purporting to bust the myths and misinformation surrounding the side effect impacts of adjuvants in vaccines does not mention fertility.

Yet there are causes for concern that the authorities, in their adherence to vaccines, seem insufficiently interested in. Take the HPV vaccine: in addition to the serious health issues associated with it detailed in TCW here, it reportedly can adversely affect fertility, cause ovarian failure and, according to a study in Nature, menstrual irregularities and early menopause. The flu vaccine too has been associated with spontaneous abortions.

Worryingly, a scientific paper published in 2017 claimed that a widespread tetanus vaccine programme in Kenya in 2014 was a cover for trying to sterilise the female population of the country. It said that the tetanus toxoid (TT) vaccine used by the World Health Organisation in Kenya also contained human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG); together these can cause spontaneous abortions and infertility. This had been known for years as a TT and hCG vaccine had already been proposed for birth control. Was this a deliberate attempt at forced birth control or just an appalling and casual medical mistake?

The infamous and hard to explain 2010 speech by Bill Gates, one of the world’s foremost pro-vaccine zealots, in which he lists vaccines as one of the measures used to reduce the population, raised more questions than it answered. Was it a Freudian slip? Vaccinating malnourished children can have fatal results.

The sum total of this evidence suggests there may be cause for concern. Platitudes stating that ‘the huge worth of vaccines is unquestionable’ is no answer to the quite specific question raised by the routine addition to vaccines of apparently dangerous adjuvants – that of their possible impact on fertility.

Part 4 will examine how our food, water and air are also laden, intentionally, carelessly or for profit motive, with anti-fertility substances.

March 29, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Israeli forces use Palestinian boy as a human shield in Nablus

Defence for Children Palestine | March 28, 2023

16-year-old Anas Al-Khalili was used as a human shield by Israeli forces in the northern occupied West Bank town of Nablus earlier this year. In this video, he describes his terrifying experience.

Palestinian child lives with lifelong injuries after an Israeli soldier shot him in the head

Defence for Children Palestine | March 23, 2023

13-year-old Abdul-Rahman was shot in the head by Israeli forces while collecting grapes near his home in the village of Kafr Qaddoum in the occupied West Bank. An expanding bullet struck him in the forehead and doctors were unable to remove all the bullet shards, leaving Abdul-Rahman with lifelong injuries.

These bullets used by Israeli forces are designed to expand inside the body upon impact, causing massive internal injuries. Customary international law prohibits the use of expanding bullets, or any bullets that expand or flatten easily in the human body, though DCIP regularly documents fatalities and injuries seemingly as a result of expanding bullets, also known as dumdum bullets.

March 29, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Autopsy Studies of COVID-19 Illness Rule Out Extensive Myocarditis

Systematic Review of 50 Studies with 548 Hearts Does not Find Heart Inflammation as Significant Contributor to Death

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | March 28, 2023

From the original Baric study demonstrating beta-coronavirus loading in laboratory models can cause myocarditis to the first year of the COVID-19 crisis there has been a concern that SARS-CoV-2 infection in humans could cause heart inflammation. Epidemiologic studies relying on ICD codes triggered by routine cardiac troponin testing and or results implied that hospitalized patients were developing myocarditis with the respiratory illness. None of these studies were confirmed with clinical adjudication or autopsy. In 2020 the NCAA Big Ten athletic conference, US Military, and many other organizations screened for myocarditis on clinical grounds—handful of cases were found without any reported hospitalizations or deaths. Tuvali, et al from Israel, demonstrated that myocarditis in 2020 was not any more common that the low levels of baseline myocarditis from parvovirus, giant cell, and other conditions.

Almamlouk et al performed a systematic review of 50 autopsy studies and 548 hearts of patients who died of or with COVID-19. Usual post-mortem findings of tissue edema and necrosis were reported commonly. About two thirds of hearts had SARS-CoV-2 found in the tissue. However, none of the hearts had extensive myocarditis as the cause of death.

Almamlouk R, Kashour T, Obeidat S, Bois MC, Maleszewski JJ, Omrani OA, Tleyjeh R, Berbari E, Chakhachiro Z, Zein-Sabatto B, Gerberi D, Tleyjeh IM; Cardiac Autopsy in COVID-19 Study Group; Paniz Mondolfi AE, Finn AV, Duarte-Neto AN, Rapkiewicz AV, Frustaci A, Keresztesi AA, Hanley B, Märkl B, Lardi C, Bryce C, Lindner D, Aguiar D, Westermann D, Stroberg E, Duval EJ, Youd E, Bulfamante GP, Salmon I, Auer J, Maleszewski JJ, Hirschbühl K, Absil L, Barton LM, Ferraz da Silva LF, Moore L, Dolhnikoff M, Lammens M, Bois MC, Osborn M, Remmelink M, Nascimento Saldiva PH, Jorens PG, Craver R, Aparecida de Almeida Monteiro R, Scendoni R, Mukhopadhyay S, Suzuki T, Mauad T, Fracasso T, Grimes Z. COVID-19-Associated cardiac pathology at the postmortem evaluation: a collaborative systematic review. Clin Microbiol Infect. 2022 Aug;28(8):1066-1075. doi: 10.1016/j.cmi.2022.03.021. Epub 2022 Mar 23. PMID: 35339672; PMCID: PMC8941843.

In summary, this review should be the nail in the coffin in ruling out COVID-19 illness as a cause of fatal myocarditis. Despite the virus being found in heart tissue, it was not causing significant inflammation. The explosion of fatal myocarditis by report of unexplained cardiac arrest, adjudication, and at necropsy must have another explanation than SARS-CoV-2 infection. The only new proven cause of heart damage in human populations is COVID-19 vaccination. Vaccines used in America (Pfizer, Moderna, Janssen, Novavax) have been demonstrated to cause myocarditis as published in the peer-reviewed literature.

These observations call for immediate access to the CDC COVID-19 vaccine administration database for physicians and other providers who are managing the burgeoning caseload of myocarditis. This will be the only way the epidemiology of COVID-19 vaccine induced myocarditis can be studied and patient outcomes can be improved.

Daniels CJ, Rajpal S, Greenshields JT, Rosenthal GL, Chung EH, Terrin M, Jeudy J, Mattson SE, Law IH, Borchers J, Kovacs R, Kovan J, Rifat SF, Albrecht J, Bento AI, Albers L, Bernhardt D, Day C, Hecht S, Hipskind A, Mjaanes J, Olson D, Rooks YL, Somers EC, Tong MS, Wisinski J, Womack J, Esopenko C, Kratochvil CJ, Rink LD; Big Ten COVID-19 Cardiac Registry Investigators. Prevalence of Clinical and Subclinical Myocarditis in Competitive Athletes With Recent SARS-CoV-2 Infection: Results From the Big Ten COVID-19 Cardiac Registry. JAMA Cardiol. 2021 Sep 1;6(9):1078-1087. doi: 10.1001/jamacardio.2021.2065. PMID: 34042947; PMCID: PMC8160916.

Tuvali O, Tshori S, Derazne E, Hannuna RR, Afek A, Haberman D, Sella G, George J. The Incidence of Myocarditis and Pericarditis in Post COVID-19 Unvaccinated Patients-A Large Population-Based Study. J Clin Med. 2022 Apr 15;11(8):2219. doi: 10.3390/jcm11082219. PMID: 35456309; PMCID: PMC9025013.

Almamlouk R, Kashour T, Obeidat S, Bois MC, Maleszewski JJ, Omrani OA, Tleyjeh R, Berbari E, Chakhachiro Z, Zein-Sabatto B, Gerberi D, Tleyjeh IM; Cardiac Autopsy in COVID-19 Study Group; Paniz Mondolfi AE, Finn AV, Duarte-Neto AN, Rapkiewicz AV, Frustaci A, Keresztesi AA, Hanley B, Märkl B, Lardi C, Bryce C, Lindner D, Aguiar D, Westermann D, Stroberg E, Duval EJ, Youd E, Bulfamante GP, Salmon I, Auer J, Maleszewski JJ, Hirschbühl K, Absil L, Barton LM, Ferraz da Silva LF, Moore L, Dolhnikoff M, Lammens M, Bois MC, Osborn M, Remmelink M, Nascimento Saldiva PH, Jorens PG, Craver R, Aparecida de Almeida Monteiro R, Scendoni R, Mukhopadhyay S, Suzuki T, Mauad T, Fracasso T, Grimes Z. COVID-19-Associated cardiac pathology at the postmortem evaluation: a collaborative systematic review. Clin Microbiol Infect. 2022 Aug;28(8):1066-1075. doi: 10.1016/j.cmi.2022.03.021. Epub 2022 Mar 23. PMID: 35339672; PMCID: PMC8941843.

March 28, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Use of Depleted Uranium in Ukraine Could Spark Global Health Crisis: Here’s Why

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 28.03.2023

The US and Britain expended over 2,000 tons of depleted uranium (DU) in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Syria. Now, London plans to hand DU shells to Ukraine. British and US officials insist the weapons are safe, but what does the evidence say? Sputnik investigates.

The political fallout over the United Kingdom’s decision to send DU anti-tank shells to Kiev for use along with its Challenger 2 tanks continues to spread. On Saturday, President Putin said he didn’t buy Britain’s assurances that the munitions wouldn’t cause any health effects, and that taking into account the toxic radioactive dust generated by the shells, they “of course amount to a weapon of the most dangerous kind.”

Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defense (RCBD) Troops, echoed the president’s concerns, predicting that the weapons’ use would “cause irreparable harm” to the health of soldiers and the civilian population alike, with DU compounds expected to remain in the soil and affect people, animals and the environment for many years to come.

Russia’s concerns are not unjustified. Throughout the past year, Russian intelligence and the RCBD Troops issued report after worrying report regarding Kiev’s ambitions to build nuclear weapons, scenarios involving false flags using radioactive dirty bombs, and a long list of evidence of dangerous US and European-funded and coordinated experiments with biological weapons at Ukraine-based biolabs.

But depleted uranium poses a special kind of danger, due both to its availability and record of use.

Discovered during the Cold War by US and British scientists as an effective but controversial armor-piercing weapon, DU tank and artillery shells and air-dropped bombs are stuffed with the uranium byproducts left over from the production of nuclear energy.

The militaries of NATO, the USSR, China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and South Africa stockpiled hundreds of thousands of tons of DU materials, but the WWIII scenario they were training for never became a reality.

But having acquired the weapons, the US and its NATO allies quickly found places to use them, overlooking all potential international legal and moral barriers. DU shells and bombs were deployed during the Gulf War in 1991, in the bombardment of Bosnia and the rump state of Yugoslavia in 1995 and 1999, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the 2001-2021 occupation of Afghanistan, the dirty war against Syria, and, allegedly, the 2011 NATO air campaign in Libya.

Iraq and the former Yugoslavia were hit the hardest, with upwards of 2,300 tons of DU used in the Middle Eastern country in 1991 and 2003-2005, and as much as 30 tons strewn across the Balkans between the mid-to-late 1990s. Almost every country in which DU has been used has reported a surge in deadly ailments, including cancers, strokes, and birth defects. In Iraq, cancer rates in DU-affected areas jumped from 40 cases per 100,000 in 1991 to 800 per 100,000 in 1995, and 1,600 per 100,000 by 2005. Serbs, Bosnians, Kosovar Albanians, Montenegrins and other peoples of the former Yugoslavia suffered a similar fate, with Serbia today facing some of the highest cancer rates in Europe, with many attributing the spike in illness to NATO’s DU deployment two-and-a-half decades ago.

‘Anecdotal Evidence’ Claiming Real Lives

The US and UK governments have bent over backwards to avoid admitting that depleted uranium is the cause of the epidemic of cancers facing Iraqis, Serbs and others, suggesting evidence regarding their effects is “anecdotal” and “circumstantial.”

In 2021, British and US researchers released a much-cited study which concluded that low-level exposure to pesticides and sarin nerve gas, not depleted uranium, were the “most likely” causes of Gulf War Syndrome – the chronic disorder faced by about hundreds of thousands of US vets who took part in the 1991 Gulf War, and who now face a heightened incidence of cancers, respiratory and neurological illnesses, and other diseases.

“The British Army has used depleted uranium in its armor piercing shells for decades,” Britain’s Defense Ministry said in a statement last week meant to “debunk” Moscow’s concerns. “Russia knows this, but is deliberately trying to disinform. Independent research by scientists from groups such as the Royal Society has assessed that any impact to personal health and the environment from the use of depleted uranium munitions is likely to be low.”

But independent academics and researchers who have studied the weapons’ use and impact tell a very different story, as do those who know victims of depleted uranium poisoning, including Iraqi and Balkan civilians, but also NATO troops tasked with handling and deploying the toxic weapons.

“[Coalition forces] used depleted uranium shells in Baghdad, Karbala, Najaf, Baqubah and Fallujah; they were extensively used in Fallujah in 2004, and today, about 15 percent of the children born in this city suffer from congenital deformities, which is a very high rate. About 5 percent die from these deformities,” Dr. Souad Naji Al-Azzawi, a prolific Iraqi researcher specializing in hazardous waste contamination, told Sputnik in an interview.

“They completely destroyed Fallujah with these and other weapons,” the academic said, noting that radioactive contaminants spread by DU munitions have polluted the entire region’s food supply.

Al-Azzawi said there are roughly 5,000 DU-contaminated tanks and other armored vehicles destroyed by the coalition in the 1991 war and after the 2003 invasion spread across nearly two dozen large tank grave yards around Basra. “Whenever a sandstorm blows through the area, an additional dose of radiation moves from these sites towards the civilian population,” she noted.

Srjan Aleksic, a Serbian lawyer who represents victims of the 1999 NATO bombings, says DU has killed and sickened many of his relatives and clients.

“My mother died from depleted uranium, as did many of my relatives from the village of Bushtranje. NATO officials themselves admitted that they bombed Plackovica Mountain, overlooking the city of Vranje, and four villages near the border with Macedonia. There were large numbers of troops and equipment near Vranje, and NATO bombed these villages with depleted uranium every day,” Aleksic recalled in an interview.

“In 2005 alone, an area of about two square kilometers was cleared of depleted uranium. Our army did that. They put up a wire fence and wrote ‘Hazard to Life: Do Not Approach’. But nobody knew about that until 2005,” the lawyer added.

Aleksic hopes to take a case against NATO to Belgrade’s Higher Court later this year, representing a Serbian officer who filed to sue the alliance in early 2021, but subsequently died, with a health checkup finding levels of uranium contaminants in his body to be off the charts. NATO claims immunity from prosecution, but the attorney hopes to win compensation for the victim’s family anyway, saying the court could reach a verdict without the alliance’s participation.

“There is no immunity from criminal responsibility, especially when it comes to responsibility to civilians. My mother got sick, my relatives got sick, my clients got sick. They had nothing to do with the war; I am not getting into politics. I’m just talking about the consequences,” Aleksic stressed.

The lawyer explained that his efforts to defend victims of the 1999 bombings got started after working with Angelo Fiore Tartaglia, a Rome-based attorney who has spent some 20 years of his life representing Italian soldiers injured by DU, and their families.

“He has been very successful. Many Italian soldiers have cancer, especially those who were in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995 when NATO bombed it with depleted uranium, as well as Kosovo and Metohija. To date, he has obtained 330 [favorable] final judgements – 400 Italian soldiers have died from the effects of cancer – and he has proven a causal link between depleted uranium and their adverse health effects,” Aleksic said.

Domenico Leggiero is a retired Italian military pilot and weapons inspector who saw firsthand how many of his colleagues began to “fall ill with cancers, just like falling leaves,” after service in the former Yugoslavia. Leggiero now heads Osservatorio Militaire, an Italian military watchdog that seeks to shed light on the consequences of DU use on Italian troops.

“We couldn’t figure out where the cancers were coming from until we and our medics started taking biopsy samples from troops that had gotten sick, or even died. So we would take the primary biopsy of tumors and look at them not as medics, but as physicists, and realized that within these biopsy samples, there were materials that shouldn’t have been there,” Leggiero told Sputnik.

“We’re talking cadmium, we’re talking mineral substances, heavy metals. Furthermore, these heavy metals all had a well-defined shape and size – a very small size – 10-100 times smaller than PM-10 [particles with a diameter of 10 microns or less, ed.]. They basically had a spherical shape,” the soldier explained.

In research, Leggiero and his colleagues discovered that these particles were so minute and numerous that they were could disburse in the air over long periods of time, get inhaled by exposed civilians and military personnel, and enter the food chain after being deposited on crops.

The veteran said the Italian military’s commanders “knew” about the health risks associated with DU munitions since they were provided with this information by the Pentagon, but ordinary soldiers “were not warned.”

“I am in possession of all possible and imaginable documentation, including the rules on how to treat material contaminated with uranium. These rules were established at the level of the general staff; they were never issued among the troops, and therefore we essentially had a massacre,” Leggiero said.

‘Depleted Uranium Makes No Distinction Between Nationalities’

Dr. Hans-Christof von Sponeck, a former UN assistant secretary-general and UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq who resigned in 2000 in protest against the UN’s sanctions regime, which he said constituted a violation of the Geneva Conventions, has no doubt in his mind about the consequences of the US and Britain’s use of DU on Iraqi civilians.
“I will not pronounce on the question of whether the use of depleted uranium is legal or illegal – this debate is still taking place elsewhere. What I can state without hesitation is that I have seen the victims of depleted uranium munitions used by the US military in southern Iraq. On several occasions, I visited the Mother and Child Hospital in Basra in 1999 and saw young mothers with their horrifically deformed babies, something that had not existed before the 1991 war,” Sponeck told Sputnik.

“Let me also add that depleted uranium does not make a distinction between different nationalities. British and American soldiers deployed to southern Iraq and their families, also became the victims of depleted uranium, as court cases in the UK and the US confirm…Should depleted uranium munitions be used in Ukraine, it would mean that people in the area, soldiers and civilians alike, would be victimized even though the dangers of such munitions are well known in 2023,” the veteran German diplomat stressed.

What Makes DU Charges Difficult to Pursue?

“Based on what we know, depleted uranium will be bad for health and likely cause cancer. However, linking depleted uranium exposure to its effects using epidemiology is extremely difficult,” says Dr. Keith Baverstock, a veteran University of Eastern Finland biologist and former head of the Radiation Protection Program at the World Health Organization’s European office.

For one thing, Baverstock said, “exposure is very local to where a depleted uranium munition impacts but the depleted uranium, particularly in arid conditions, persists on the surface of the ground, so defining an exposed population is also difficult.” On top of that, the security situation in some affected countries, particularly Iraq, makes meaningful epidemiological research next to impossible, according to the scientist.

“However, we have information from animal and laboratory studies that tell us that DNA will be damaged if inhaled depleted uranium dust crosses the blood/air barrier in the lung (it can become systemic), and thus the normal functioning of cells, including germ cells, could be impaired and thus health effects, including cancer and birth defects, are likely risks in persons exposed to depleted uranium dust via inhalation,” the academic said.

“As a public health scientist, I regard these weapons as illegal, as do some EU countries,” Baverstock added.

Cancer Rates Double Those of Hiroshima

Chris Busby is a physical chemist, internal ionizing radiation expert and former senior researcher for a 2000s UK Ministry of Defense study examining the effects of DU weapons on veterans of the First Gulf War.

In an extensive, wide-ranging and highly illuminating interview with Sputnik, Dr. Busby explained how he and a group of British and Iraqi colleagues carried out extensive, first-hand, on-the-ground research into oncological diseases and child mortality in Iraq in the mid-to-late 2000s. Research led them to discover that cancer rates in Fallujah – specifically those associated with radiation, like leukemia and lymphoma, were higher than those in Hiroshima, the Japanese city hit with a US atomic bomb in 1945, and not just by a little, but by a factor of two or even more, depending on the cancer type.

“We found out the high level of infant mortality within the first year of life and the cause of these deaths were congenital malformations. We also [found a] skewed birth sex ratio, which is another sign of genetic damage associated with radiation exposure. We put all of these results together and concluded that there had been some very large genetic damage event which occurred around the time of the Fallujah [campaign],” the academic said.

Smoking Gun

Busby recalled how at the time, the Americans denied using DU munitions, prompting him and his colleagues to examine the hair of Iraqi women whose children suffered birth defects. That’s when they found what looks like smoking gun evidence of a direct correlation between the genetic mutations and DU use.

“There’s a method called ICP-MS, Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry, in which you can take a hair sample and you can dissolve it in acid, and then you can measure the atoms inside the hair sample and see what the concentration of all these different elements are. So we looked at 52 elements in the hair of 20 mothers of children with congenital malformations, and we found that there was an anomalously high level of uranium. The only anomaly we found associated with an element which can cause congenital malformations was uranium. And we found that. Arab women have very long hair. We know the rate at which hair grows, so we cut the hair into little slices and measured the uranium in each of the slices going back to the first bit. So we [could] get a graph of the uranium in the hair going right the way back to about 2005. And what we found is that the uranium went up, when we went back in time. So clearly there was an increase in uranium round about the time just after Fallujah battle, which then reduced as time went on, obviously because it got excreted from the system. So we had more or less proof, that uranium was the cause of all of these congenital malformations, genetic damage, sex ratio and extraordinary high level of cancer,” the scientist said.

Busby says that one of the factors making DU so deadly is its ability to bind strongly to DNA – a factor the scientific community has known about since the 1950s. As uranium burns, it produces microscopic volatile particles which behave like a gas and can contaminate wide swathes of territory, not only the environment surrounding battlefields, but neighboring countries or even distant regions. The academic pointed out, for example, that filters in the UK looking out for uranium picked up contamination from Iraq in 2003.

Another issue, which Dr. Busby said he discovered mostly independently, and which he presented to the MoD’s Depleted Uranium Oversight Board in 2004, is uranium’s very high atomic number (the number of protons in the nucleus of an atom), which he said turns it into “a sort of amplifier for normal radiation.”

“We all live in an environment where we get gamma rays that come through our body and go out… If you’ve got uranium inside you, then it intercepts this [radiation] because of its high atomic number and all its electrons. In my opinion, and I’ve written quite a lot about this, this is the reason why uranium is very dangerous. First of all, it binds to DNA. Secondly, it causes these photo electrons to be omitted into the DNA. And all studies that have been done of people exposed to uranium showed massive chromosome damage. So when they look to see the chromosomes in their cells, in the peripheral blood cells, they find massive amounts of chromosome damage that leads to genetic effects – cancer, birth defects and so forth. So that’s the reason why uranium is so dangerous,” the academic emphasized.

‘There’s Nothing to Do Except Wait for Them to Die’

Busby noted that once uranium contaminant particles enter the body, they don’t go away. Instead, they sit inside the victim, “shooting off little cannonballs all the time, close into the cells,” into the DNA, until a tumor is formed.

Recalling visits to Iraqi hospitals and conversations with local doctors treating people suffering from the DU usage after the First Gulf War, the scientist recalled how doctors told him that there was nothing they could do to combat the disease thanks to the tough sanctions regime against Iraq.

Busby emphasized that even with access to the right medicines and medical care, “to be honest, there’s not much you can do” for those affected.

“If you’ve got the sorts of pictures that we see and that I have, of the children with congenital malformations, there’s nothing you can do except throw your hands up and wait for them to die. I talked to a number of families while I was in the hospitals and looking at the poor children with leukemia lying there in beds. They were going to die, that’s it. There’s nothing you can do. And the contamination of the area is a public health nightmare, because the doctors can’t do anything,” the academic said.

Putin ‘Absolutely Right’ to Be Concerned

Saying that he’s familiar with President Putin’s remarks on the dangers posed by the potential use of DU weapons in Ukraine, Busby said the Russian leader was “absolutely right” to be upset and concerned.
“President Putin has accurately identified this as a weapon of mass destruction, a weapon of indiscriminate effect. The British and the Americans continue to cling to their crazy theory that these radioactive substances which bind to DNA are effectively harmless and have no genetic or indiscriminate effects on populations. In this case, I just have to say that the British are wrong, that this substance is contaminating Europe and it will cause all of the effects that it caused in Iraq that I have shown. It will cause all those effects in Germany, and Luxembourg, and France, and Sweden, and the Baltic States and long list of countries which stand between Ukraine and the United Kingdom,” the observer stressed.

The problem today, according to Dr. Busby, is that the military planners in Washington and London see DU as a “magic” anti-tank weapon. “It’s inconceivable that the military would allow anyone to stop them using [DU] in a real war where you want to win, and they don’t really care about the people that die as a result of all of this, the collateral damage…the cancers downwind, the congenital malformations, the weeping parents and all the rest of it,” the scientist summed up.

March 28, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Japan’s Opposition Blasts PM Kishida’s Silence on Depleted Uranium Ammo to Ukraine

By Svetlana Ekimenko – Sputnik – 28.03.2023

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida paid a surprise visit to Ukraine to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin hosted his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in Moscow. Both visits came as the announcement of future DU ammo supplies to Ukraine hit the headlines.

Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has been condemned by the opposition for staying tight-lipped on the UK’s announced delivery of depleted uranium ammunition to the Kiev regime, according to media reports.

Taro Yamamoto, leader of the opposition party Reiwa Shinsengumi, is said to have raised the issue at a budget committee meeting in the Japanese parliament’s upper house.

“Mr Prime Minister, do you intend to encourage the UK not to send such shells?” the politician is cited as asking Kishida.

The head of the Japanese government ostensibly dodged giving a direct answer, saying something to the effect that, “despite studies on the negative effects on human health, no concrete results have been obtained”. However, Yamamoto would not let up, pressing further:

“Actually, such munitions could already be classified as nuclear weapons, … and it was found that there is a risk of cancer … Mr. Prime Minister, during your meeting with Zelensky, did you ask him not to use ammunition with depleted uranium?”

Kishida is said to have responded by saying that, “As for depleted uranium weapons, I didn’t say anything specific about it in my meeting with Zelensky.”

The opposition leader then slammed this response as sending a “bad message,” and added, as a parting “broadside”, that the Prime Minister himself was “from Hiroshima.”

The US dropped two atomic bombs – plutonium Fat Man and gun-type uranium Little Boy – on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August 1945. The bombings killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, mostly Japanese civilians. Neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki hosted any key military installations whatsoever.

Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who will chair the Group of Seven (G7) summit scheduled for May, visited Ukraine on March 21. He met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a day after Chinese leader Xi Jinping visited Moscow to meet with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.

Kishida’s visit was seen by analysts as tailored to demonstrate that Japan is “the West’s reliable ally”. Even though Kishida embarked on his Kiev visit to show solidarity with Ukraine, Tokyo has been contributing less economic help to Ukraine than other countries of the so-called collective West. Japan has limited itself to sending things like bulletproof vests, helmets and some humanitarian aid. Exports of arms and military equipment in Japan is regulated by the Japanese Arms Export Ban, known as the Three Principles on Arms Exports that prohibit the provision of lethal weapons to other countries.

Earlier, London announced its intent to supply depleted uranium (DU) munitions to Kiev to be used in the US-led proxy war of the collective West against Russia in Ukraine. The announcement was met with broad condemnation from Moscow. Russia warned that DU compounds that remain in the soil after its use as part of projectiles, may be dangerous to humans, animals and the environment for a lengthy amount of time.

“The use of uranium ammunition will cause irreversible harm to the health of the military and civilian population of Ukraine, but NATO is ready to supply them to Kiev,” Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the head of the radiation, chemical and biological defense troops of the Russian armed forces, said. He recounted that NATO unleashed about 40,000 shells containing over 15 tons of depleted uranium during the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia.

March 28, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

US politicians urge Biden to send cluster bombs to Kiev

By Lucas Leiroz | March 28, 2023

Once again, American politicians are pushing for new escalations in the Ukrainian conflict. Now, lawmakers want the Biden regime to supply cluster munitions to the Ukrainian armed forces. This type of measure would be seen as a serious provocation by Russia and would certainly have strong impacts on the battlefield and in the current diplomatic crisis.

Recently, some Republican senators formally asked the government to “not hesitate” to send cluster arms to Ukraine. James Risch and Roger Wickers, both from Mississippi, led the Congress campaign, and were also supported by Michael McCaul, from Texas, and Mike Rogers, from Alabama. According to them, Washington should ship such bombs as quickly as possible to Kiev, ignoring what they think to be “vague concerns about the reaction of allies and partners and unfounded fears of ‘escalation'”.

The pressure comes amid a context of “despair” on the part of the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev and the more pro-war groups of American domestic politics. Faced with the Ukrainian military failure and the imminent Russian victory, despite the systematic sending of weapons by NATO, the only solution seems to be to resort to the use of “non-conventional” arms. In this sense, the use of cluster bombs would be one of the “alternatives”, which is why Ukrainian politicians have asked US congressmen to increase the pressure for the government to allow the export of such equipment.

Cluster bombs are banned in at least 110 countries by a 2008 UN-brokered treaty. These arms are notorious for their fragmentation power. Cluster munitions include countless small projectiles inside. When launched, these bombs explode ejecting projectiles that injure a much greater number of victims than conventional weapons. The most dangerous thing is that many of these small projectiles do not detonate immediately after being ejected, and can remain inactive for a long time, which is why civilians can be mutilated or killed by bomblets that explode long after a conflict ends.

In addition to the absolutely anti-humanitarian aspect of these arms, it is necessary to emphasize that American law prohibits their export in any situation. For the US government to authorize the shipment of cluster munitions to Ukraine, it would be necessary to change national legislation – or simply act illegally. Also, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby had already made it clear that there was no possibility of sending these arms to Kiev, stating that “according to our own policy, we have concerns about the use of those kinds of munitions”.

However, for warmongers, no limits should be respected. Failing to convince the US government directly, the Ukrainians appealed to parliamentarians, who then used their power of political mobilization to form pro-war coalitions and encourage the violation of the country’s laws. Parliamentary pressure is one of the most frequently used mechanisms by Western powers to promote institutional changes in other countries. Now, the US government itself is under pressure from Congress, which echoes the interests of pro-war elites.

On the part of Ukrainians, there is no interest in respecting any humanitarian limits. There are already several reports stating that the Ukrainian armed forces used Soviet-era cluster weapons in civilian residential areas in Donbass since 2014. In March last year, for example, a Tochka-U missile containing cluster munitions killed more than 20 people and injured dozens of civilians in Donetsk. Faced with the collapse of the Ukrainian arsenals, what interests the neo-Nazi regime now is to obtain cluster arms from American stockpiles.

It is important to emphasize that the pressure in Washington comes in parallel with the British decision to send depleted uranium radioactive weapons to Kiev. This reinforces that Western pro-war elites are interested in raising the level of aid to Kiev, openly promoting the shipment of illegal weapons banned by international treaties. The practical result of this will obviously be an unprecedented escalation.

Commenting on the case at a recent press conference, Russia’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Ryabkov, said that American lawmakers do not seem aware of the tragic consequences that sending such armaments would generate. According to him, the very security of NATO countries would be threatened if such a measure were taken – since international tensions would escalate to a point of no return. Ryabkov also warned that this would block any possibility of normalization of relations between Moscow and Washington.

Obviously, Moscow will not remain inert while citizens in the special military operation zone are exposed to attacks with illegal weapons with high destructive power. In order to defend the inhabitants of territories reintegrated into the Russian Federation, extraordinary military measures will certainly be taken, which will have high impacts on the battlefield.

Lucas Leiroz is a journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.

You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.

March 28, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

SURPRISE! JORDAN PETERSON’S “ARC” WAS BUILT FOR (AND BY) BILLIONAIRES

Amazing Polly | March 20, 2023

There is a new Global Council fronted by Jordan Peterson that promises to save us all from the Woke Dystopian Future. But who is behind it? Can you support this work? To do so, visit: https://amazingpolly.net/contact-support.php

Thank you!

March 28, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Moscow calls out US’ rules-based order in Europe

BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | MARCH 27, 2023 

Baroness Goldie is an experienced Scottish politician and life peer who served as Leader of the Scottish Conservative Party from 2005 to 2011 and as the UK’s Minister of State for Defence since 2019. She is anything but a party girl like Liz Truss who often had to swallow her indiscreet words betraying ignorance. 

Certainly, Baroness Goldie understood perfectly well the implications of what she put down in a written statement at the House of Lords on March 20 in her answer to Lord Hylton’s seemingly innocuous question: “To ask His Majesty’s Government whether any of the ammunition currently being supplied to Ukraine contains depleted uranium.” (By the way, Lord Hylton is one of 92 hereditary peers elected to remain in the House of Lords; he is currently the longest-serving Crossbench member of the House of Lords, since 1968, and is a dynamic campaigner for peace and the interests of the vulnerable and the marginalised.) 

It is a fair guess that the UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace kept 10 Downing Street informed — and even more important, had prior consultations and concurrence with his US counterpart, Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin — before Baroness Goldie made the statement. 

Both Wallace and Austin are military people and understand why ammunition tipped with “depleted uranium” is needed in the current stage of the proxy war in Ukraine if at all Kiev is to launch a “credible counter-offensive” in spring when the tide of the war has distinctly turned in Russia’s favour. 

Equally, both must be well aware that the legality of the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia is still an open issue. In response to NATO’s bombing campaign, former Yugoslavia instituted proceedings before the International Court of Justice on April 29, 1999, against the ten NATO members directly involved in the attack — Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, the UK, and the US — citing a series of violations of the law of nations (which included the obligation not to use prohibited weapons.) 

Although the ICJ rejected Belgrade’s request for provisional measures, it, nonetheless, declared itself profoundly concerned with the use of force in Yugoslavia, which “under the present circumstances … raises very serious issues of international law.” Suffice to say, the cases brought by Yugoslavia against the NATO respondents still remain on the ICJ’s docket although the petitioner got dismembered. 

Make no mistake, Washington and London are consciously repeating the war crime in the former Yugoslavia. The Anglo-Saxon clique’s  core objective is a calculated escalation of the proxy war that is certain to draw forth a robust reaction by Moscow, as predictable as night follows day. 

Indeed, that is precisely what happened when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on Saturday that Russia will deploy its tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. Putin linked this to a request from Belarus in reaction to Baroness Goldie’s statement in London a week ago. 

More importantly, Putin also drew the analogy of the US placing its tactical nuclear weapons on the territories of the allied NATO countries for decades. 

The EU and NATO went ballistic after Putin’s disclosure. EU’s chief diplomat Josep Borrell said on Sunday called out Moscow’s decision  as “an irresponsible escalation and threat to European security.” He threatened to impose “further sanctions” against Belarus! 

A NATO spokeswoman called Moscow’s decision “dangerous and irresponsible.” Interestingly, though, the Biden administration neatly side-stepped the issue, focusing instead that the US has not seen any signs that Russia has moved nuclear weapons to Belarus or anywhere else! 

In good measure, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby added, “We’ve in fact seen no indication he (Putin) has any intention to use nuclear weapons, period, inside Ukraine.” 

But then, Putin also made it clear that Russia would first complete construction on a storage facility in Belarus for the tactical nuclear weapons by July 1. 

Kirby is fudging. What is the game plan? First, the Anglo-Saxon clique would hope that the issue will create further antagonism in Europe against Russia and Putin personally and would rally European countries behind the Biden administration at a time when fault lines were appearing within the transatlantic alliance over a protracted war in Ukraine that might be catastrophic for European economies. 

Washington is hard-pressed to respond to Putin’s remark that Russia is only doing something that the US has been doing for decades. The point is, a mutual commitment not to deploy nuclear weapons in third countries was one of the proposals Moscow made to Washington in December 2021, alongside a commitment that Ukraine would not join NATO. The US ignored it and precipitated the Russian special military operation in Ukraine. 

The crux of the matter is, as with the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the Russian decision on tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus is retaliatory, drawing attention to the US missiles stationed close to its borders. (An estimated 100 nuclear weapons are stored in vaults in five European countries — Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Turkey.) 

Worse still, the US practices a controversial arrangement known as “nuclear sharing”, under which it installs nuclear equipment on fighter jets of select non-nuclear NATO countries and train their pilots to carry out nuclear strike with US nuclear bombs. This is when the US, being a party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), has promised not to hand over nuclear weapons to other countries, and the non-nuclear countries in the NATO’s sharing arrangement have themselves promised not to receive nuclear weapons from the nuclear weapon states! 

NATO declared last year that seven NATO countries have contributed  dual-capable aircraft to the nuclear sharing mission. These countries are believed to be the US, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Turkey and Greece. And all are signatories to the NPT! 

Welcome to the rules based order! What is perfectly permissible to the “collective West” is forbidden for Russia!

Finally, the diplomatic pirouette has yet another dimension: Britain’s decision to send depleted uranium weaponry to Ukraine is confirming its reputation as the most reckless and unscrupulous state in the whole NATO alliance.

For, there is no question that depleted uranium munitions are radioactive and toxic and their heavy use in the Yugoslavia and Iraq wars has been linked to birth defects and cancers. It has been tied to “the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied” in Fallujah, the city subjected to two brutal US sieges during the invasion of Iraq. 

Ironically, the toxicity of depleted uranium munitions has been accepted by many NATO countries and the European Parliament has called for its use to be banned. So, what is Britain up to, behaving like an outlier?

The heart of the matter is that Britain is creating conditions in Europe to base nuclear-armed US bombers in Britain at Lakenheath in Suffolk (which were removed in 1991 in line with the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty.) 

At a time when the peace movement in Britain is moribund, count on the Russian retaliation to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus to trigger calls for yet another tit for tat escalation from warmongers and Russophobes. Expect the US bombers to return to Lakenheath in a near future. 

March 27, 2023 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Best Way to Protect US Troops in Syria

By Ron Paul | March 27, 2023

Last week saw a sharp increase in attacks on US troops occupying northeastern Syria, with a drone strike against a US base blamed on “pro-Iran” forces and a US counter-strike said to have killed at least 19 people. After the US retaliation, another strike by “pro-Iran” forces hit a number of US sites in Syria. It may be just a matter of time before there are more strikes against the 900 US troops based in Syria against Syria’s wishes. One US contractor was killed last time. Next time it could be many more Americans.

What’s behind the sudden escalation? Fundamental changes in the Middle East over the past month have highlighted how indefensible is the continued US occupation of Syria and Iraq.

Take, for example, the recent historic mending of relations between former arch-enemies Saudi Arabia and Iran which was brokered by Washington’s own arch-enemy, China. US policy in the Middle East has long been “divide and conquer,” dating back at least to the Iran/Iraq [“dual containment”] war in the 1980s. US switching sides in that war guaranteed that the maximum amount of blood was spilled and that the simmering hatreds would continue to prevent any kind of lasting peace.

Then the US invaded Iraq twenty years ago and turned Iraq into an Iranian ally. That’s neocon foreign policy for you: a 100 percent failure rate.

So this month China, which is interested in creating a regional transportation corridor that would include Iran, came in and instead of bombing, invading, and occupying – Washington’s modus operandi – actually brokered the restoration of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Republicans and Democrats in the US both love to attack China, but China has achieved what the US has resisted for years: peace in the region. Should we be surprised that the continued US occupation is not welcome in the Middle East?

The United States occupies that huge chunk of Syria where the oil and agriculture is located and the goal appears to be producing profits for US multinational corporations from stolen natural resources and preventing the natural wealth of Syria to be used to rebuild that country. Is it any wonder why the US is so unpopular in the Middle East?

How hypocritical is it that the Biden Administration has spent $100 billion of our dollars to expel Russia from occupying proportionally less territory in Ukraine that Washington occupies in Syria? And Washington claims to stand for the “international rules-based order,” while they decimated an Iraq and Afghanistan that did not attack us, and before that a Serbia that could not have threatened us if it wanted to.

The end of the US occupation of the Middle East is upon us and the sooner we realize that the better. We have no business meddling in their politics, occupying their territory, and stealing their resources. Americans joined the US Military to defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, yet they have been manipulated by corrupt DC officials into occupying foreign lands and stealing their oil. Maybe this is why the US military cannot meet its recruitment goals?

Here’s an easy way to protect US forces in Syria from further “Iran-allied” attacks: Bring them home. Tomorrow. Do not wait another day!


Copyright © 2023 by RonPaul Institute.

March 27, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment