Biolabs Commission Concluded That US Ready to Produce Weapons Abroad: Moscow
Sputnik – 22.03.2023
MOSCOW – The Commission on the biological program in Ukraine has come to the conclusion that the United States is ready to produce and use biological weapons outside its territory, Deputy Speaker of the Federation Council (upper chamber of the Russian parliament) Konstantin Kosachev said on Wednesday.
“Based on all that has been said, our commission comes to the conclusion… the United States supports and develops the ability to create components of biological weapons, and, if necessary, to produce and use them outside the national territory,” Kosachev said during a meeting of the commission.
The US violates almost all the provisions of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), Kosachev said.
“The Commission comes to the conclusion that by their actions in the field of global biological security, the United States violates almost all the fundamental provisions of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction,” Kosachev said.
March 22, 2023 Posted by aletho | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | United States | Leave a comment
Irreversible Fake News At The Washington Post
Tony Heller | March 17, 2023
March 22, 2023 Posted by aletho | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Washington Post | Leave a comment
The depopulation agenda, Part 2: Creating food scarcity
By Stephen McMurray | TCW Defending Freedom | March 21, 2023
This is the second in a series tracing the history of population control through to present day depopulation ambitions and intent. You can read Part 1 here.
Henry Kissinger, one of the most influential politicians of the last 50 years, who said ‘the elderly are useless eaters’, considered the idea of using food to control the population. In his 1974 ‘National Security Study Memorandum 200’ he outlined a number of countries of strategic importance for the US that he claimed had problems with population growth that might give them more economic and military strength. He advocated birth control programmes for those countries and suggested that if they did not do this willingly, withdrawing food aid to them may act as an incentive to make them comply.
Using food as a weapon is not just an idea. Russia did it in Turkestan in 1917, where they took control of food production and distribution, resulting in starvation and a drastic reduction in the indigenous population. The US and Canadian governments slaughtered the buffalo population to starve the indigenous people into submission.
Now there is concern among many including economists, Wall Street veterans, farmers and citizen groups that controlling the food supply is once more being implemented to control and reduce the population. The FBI have warned that there are cyber-attacks designed to shut down farms.
It is claimed by powerful groups like the UK’s Climate Change Committee and the International Panel on Climate Change, and the governments they influence, that the main factor exacerbating the so-called ‘climate crisis’ is CO2. In reality, CO2 is essential to all life. If CO2 levels are drastically reduced, plant life, which requires CO2 for photosynthesis, will be reduced and therefore the whole food chain will be affected. In fact a recent report claims that pursuing Net Zero could lead to half the world suffering from starvation.
Is this why so many governments in the world are intent on achieving Net Zero?
In addition to the fake ‘climate crisis’, we now have the fake ‘nitrogen crisis’. Nitrogen is one of the main elements of commercial fertilisers and is an essential nutrient for plant growth but at excessive amounts can be a pollutant and, according to the climate crisis zealots, can cause global warming. The EU’s Integrated Nutrient Action Plan aims to reduce nitrogen fertiliser by 20 per cent. The UN want to reduce all nitrogen ‘waste’ by 50 per cent by 2030. Some of the people targeted by the plan to reduce fertiliser usage are the Dutch farmers. The tyrannical government in the Netherlands plans to compulsorily purchase up to 3,000 farms in order to reduce nitrogen emissions and to cut cattle numbers by 50 per cent. As the Netherlands is the biggest food exporter in Europe, it won’t affect only the Dutch but have a devastating impact on the food supply for the rest of Europe.
But is there actually a nitrogen crisis? Just like the so-called climate crisis, the evidence is ambiguous at best but the statistics are manipulated by those in power to suit their own ends. It’s not as if they aren’t aware of the consequences of drastically reducing the use of commercial fertiliser: they only have to look at Sri Lanka. Food prices rose by 80 per cent and there were massive shortages resulting in thousands of desperate people laying siege to the president’s palace and the president having to flee the country.
Analysing current events, is it all just due to a set of unrelated circumstances that there appears to be a threat to the availability and cost of our food, or is there something more disturbing going on?
It may be worth noting that as farmland is being forcibly sequestered from farmers, Bill Gates is now the single biggest owner of farmland in the US. As the elite are trying to reduce meat consumption, Gates has investments in synthetic meat. As the US suffered severe baby formula shortages, Gates had invested in artificially produced breast milk. It would certainly appear that the elite are determined to monopolise and therefore control the food supply.
Other events suggest a planned assault on the food supply. In the US, since 2021, 96 facilities involved in food production have been damaged or had their poultry or livestock destroyed. The destruction of food processing plants is not limited to the US. In the UK fires have broken out at facilities in Ealing, Gillingham, Bury St Edmunds, Bradford, Stoke-on-Trent, Harlow and Kilkeel, Northern Ireland. In fact, it appears to be a global phenomenon.
In addition, we have the UK and other governments ordering the slaughtering of millions of poultry due to alleged outbreaks of bird flu. Supposedly there have been 174 outbreaks of bird flu in the UK since October 2022. They are diagnosed using PCR tests that we know from the Covid era are totally unreliable. On the subject of Covid, the world’s government-imposed lockdowns also had a negative and totally foreseeable impact on the food supply chains.
Recently, UK supermarkets suffered from shortages of an ever-expanding list of fresh fruit and vegetables. The media initially tried blaming it on adverse weather in Spain and Morocco from where we import the produce. However, other reports have suggested it is also because UK farmers, who grow their produce in greenhouses, can’t afford to heat them because of the high cost of fuel. It’s interesting, therefore, that the government has been giving farmers lump sum payments to leave farming altogether and to give up their land so it can no longer be used for agricultural purposes – thereby reducing the amount of land available for food production – when they could have been offering more financial help to farmers and food producers to increase our food security.
We must also ask why the energy costs are so high. Contrary to the mainstream media blaming it and everything else on the war in Ukraine, it is because of the government’s obsession with Net Zero. They have been drastically reducing our coal production and planning to close all coal-fired electricity plants by October 2024, and no longer encouraging any investment in fossil fuels. Instead, we are relying ever more on the totally unreliable renewables sector.
Our coal production dropped by 44 per cent between the third quarter of 2021 and the third quarter of 2022 but our imports increased by 34 per cent. So the government are deliberately reducing our own coal supplies to reach Net Zero targets whilst importing more to make up the shortfall, making a mockery of their environmental claims while ensuring the British public pay more for their energy. For the same period, gas exports increased by 369 per cent: why wasn’t this used domestically instead to reduce the soaring energy bills everyone, included, food producers, faced last year? Moreover, our electricity exports increased by 771 per cent and yet we were being warned of potential blackouts, and electricity bills for both businesses and households were exorbitant.
The cost of energy is inextricably linked to the price of food as high energy costs for the farmers and transporters equals high food prices and now shortages. At this point it is worth highlighting another quote form Henry Kissinger: ‘Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.’
The question must be: are all these events that are negatively impacting the food supply being orchestrated? A recent paper published by Leeds University may be enlightening. It is entitled ‘Rationing and Climate Change Mitigation’. The authors suggest that rationing of both food and fuel would be helpful to prevent climate change. They praise how successful rationing was during the war and believe it would be a great idea to re-introduce it. They admit that the public are unlikely to go along with this idea if they think resources are plentiful, so what do they suggest? If there is no scarcity of resources then the illusion of scarcity of something else must be created. To this end they claim there is a scarcity of carbon sinks. So we won’t be permitted to use all our resources, not because they are not plentiful, but because our planet cannot absorb the carbon produced by humans utilising them.
The authors realise that the public will need to be re-educated to believe in this fake scarcity: ‘Rationing in this context may require a public information campaign to help people to recognise the scarcity of carbon sinks, to make it clear that we would not be introducing rationing-in-the-face-of-abundance.’
They will also need to make us feel guilty: ‘Second, this may also need to be supported by moral argument – highlighting the moral imperative to consider future generations or at least the current younger generations.’
It sounds suspiciously like the behavioural psychology from the Covid era. This time, though, instead of making us believe that we must comply with restrictions in case we kill granny, they want us to believe that carbon dioxide will kill everyone and if we don’t comply, we will kill young people.
Of course, their plan would be made a lot easier if the government created a real scarcity, which is what they go on to suggest. They want the government to close all coal mines, stop all oil exploration and severely restrict any sale of fossil fuels. They admit that this will cause scarcity and it will be a problem initially. To overcome this, they suggest the government resort to the usual propaganda about saving the lives of future generations and eventually the gullible public will buy it.
They also advocate deliberately creating food shortages: ‘In addition to stricter regulations on fossil fuels, regulation could also target other areas. For example, carbon-intensive farming methods and factory-farmed livestock could be banned – which would clearly have impacts on food supplies.’
Does this not sound more like our current reality than a mere suggestion for the future?
In Part 3 we will examine how vaccines are causing fertility issues.
March 21, 2023 Posted by aletho | Deception, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | European Union, UK, United Nations, United States | Leave a comment
Putin: Russia Will be Forced to React if West Starts Using Weapons With Nuclear Components
By Fantine Gardinier – Sputnik – 21.03.2023
UK Minister of State for Defense Annabel Goldie said on Tuesday that London would provide Ukraine with armor piercing shells for the Challenger 2 main battle tanks it has decided to send to Kiev, including depleted uranium ammunition.
“Today it became known that the United Kingdom, through its deputy head of the ministry of defense, announced not only the supply of tanks to Ukraine, but also shells with depleted uranium,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said, adding that “it seems that the West really decided to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian, not in words, but in deed.”
“I would like to note in this regard that if all this happens, then Russia will be forced to react accordingly – I mean that the Collective West is already starting to use weapons with a nuclear component,” Putin added.
His comments came after meetings with a delegation of high-level Chinese officials, including Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Depleted uranium is a byproduct of the uranium refining process composed of uranium-238, which is not useful for generating nuclear chain reactions but which is extremely dense and used to make armor-piercing ammunition. However, it still possesses radioactive properties that can be very harmful to humans and is highly toxic, making it a dangerous weapon long after the engagement in which it was fired.
Sites in Iraq and Yugoslavia which US forces used depleted uranium to attack have been associated with increases in birth defects and rare forms of cancer associated with exposure to radioactive materials, including depleted uranium and related radioactive isotopes.
While Moscow has repeatedly warned about the creeping danger of some kind of nuclear exchange as a result of NATO’s support for Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, Western governments and media have tried to spin such warnings as being threats about the use of nuclear weapons. Putin has since made it explicitly clear that Moscow intends to maintain its no-first-use policy regarding nuclear weapons.
Russia launched its special operation in Ukraine in February 2022 after months of negotiations with Kiev and NATO failed to yield a situation that respected Moscow’s security red lines, most especially regarding Ukraine’s prospective membership in the alliance and the possibility of NATO weapons being stationed on Russia’s borders. The operation aims to neutralize that possibility.
Lavrov: Such Actions Undermine Stability
The decision of the United Kingdom to provide Kiev with depleted uranium tank ammunition undermines stability in the world, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Tuesday.
“I will not be surprised by this, because they have already lost perspective in terms of how these actions undermine strategic stability around the world,” Lavrov told a Russian broadcaster.
The minister added that this decision shows that the UK is ready to not only just take risks, but also commit war crimes.
“If this is true, then they [UK authorities] are ready to not only just take risks, but violate the international humanitarian law, as it was in 1999 in Yugoslavia, and many other things, including war crimes, crimes against humanity,” Lavrov said.
March 21, 2023 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | NATO, Russia, UK | Leave a comment
UK to Hand Depleted Uranium Ammunition to Kiev Alongside Challenger 2 Tanks: Deputy Defense Minister
Sputnik – 21.03.2023
The British government will give Ukraine radioactive depleted uranium ammunition for the tanks it has promised the Kiev regime.
“Alongside our granting of a squadron of Challenger 2 main battle tanks to Ukraine, we will be providing ammunition including armour piercing rounds which contain depleted uranium. Such rounds are highly effective in defeating modern tanks and armoured vehicles,” Deputy Defence Minister Annabel Goldie said in an answer to a Parliamentary question on Tuesday.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government has already pledged 14 of its Challenger 2 main battle tanks (MBTs) to Volodymyr Zelensky’s regime in Kiev. The tanks have been out of production for over 20 years and only 227 remain in service with the British army.
March 21, 2023 Posted by aletho | Environmentalism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | UK | Leave a comment
Ron Unz: 9/11 Conspiracy
Iranian Channel Four TV (IRIB)
March 21, 2023 Posted by aletho | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, Video | Israel, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment
The depopulation agenda, Part 1
By Stephen McMurray | TCW Defending Freedom | March 20, 2023
This is the first in a series tracing the history of population control through to present day depopulation ambitions and intent.
Population growth and the consequent need for population control and even ‘depopulation’ has long been a concern of the elites. Thomas Malthus, an 18th century economist, was one of the first people to voice concerns that there was insufficient farmland and therefore insufficient means to grow enough food to feed the burgeoning population.
Ironically, as we shall see in part 2, today’s government policies could be making this scenario more likely with some academics even suggesting deliberately creating the scarcity that Malthus feared in order to alleviate the ‘climate crisis’.
The idea of population reduction was embraced by the eugenics movement who sought to improve the human race by eradicating undesirable characteristics. One of the main proponents of this was Sir Francis Galton. He was a Victorian polymath who believed intelligence was inheritable and resorted to meticulously taking body measurements, including skull size, in a failed attempt to find a defining characteristic which would be an indicator of intelligence. This pseudo-science of craniology was later adopted by the Nazis in their quest to prove they were the superior race.
Whereas these early proponents of population control targeted races and other minority groups to promote their racist ideas, today’s advocates for depopulation target the whole of humanity to promote their environmental ideology. One of the favoured options of the eugenicists was forced birth control or sterilisation of the undesirables. It may just be that today’s environmental zealots, who appear to have their hands on all the levers of power, and who view us all as undesirables, will have their dreams fulfilled as birth rates are falling dramatically in many countries. This is hardly surprising as vaccines, food, water and the air around us are laden with anti-fertility substances, as will be explored in parts 3 and 4.
Just as the anti-human, pseudo-scientific ideas of the net-zero zealots are accepted by our so-called ‘educated’ class today, the unscientific and racist theories of yesterday’s eugenicists were once common among the intellectual classes, particularly after Charles Darwin, the cousin of Galton, gave them a gloss of scientific responsibility when he developed the idea of the ‘survival of the fittest’.
In his 1871 book The Descent of Man Darwin wrote: ‘Thus, the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.’
Julian Huxley, whose great-grandfather was a friend of Darwin, was president of the British Eugenics society and was embraced by academia and the elites, being a Fellow of the Royal Society and president of UNESCO. In 1944 he wrote: ‘The lowest strata are reproducing too fast. Therefore . . . they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilisation.’
George Bernard Shaw, another favourite of the intelligentsia, was an admirer of Stalin and a rabid eugenicist. He frequently advocated the extermination of those who did not benefit society proclaiming that the only justification needed was their ‘incorrigible social incompatibility’-
He re-iterated this philosophy when he said: ‘If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent, human way.’
H G Wells, beloved by the intellectuals of his day, promoted the killing of alcoholics, people with physical and mental illness and sterilisation of ‘inferior’ people.
Wells was a friend of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, an organisation founded on eugenics. Her contempt of people she deemed inferior is well known. She said: ‘The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.’ Another one of her many sickening quotes is: ‘Feeble-minded persons, habitual congenital criminals, those afflicted with inheritable disease, and others found biologically unfit by authorities qualified judge should be sterilised or, in cases of doubt, should be so isolated as to prevent the perpetuation of their afflictions by breeding.’
Planned Parenthood is a ‘pro-choice’ advocate that performs over 350,000 abortions every year. It was recently found to be selling aborted baby parts for profit, which tells you all you need to know. To emphasise how important this group is, one has only to see the companies that donate to it – Microsoft, General Electric, Bank of America, Shell, Pfizer, Starbucks, American Express, PayPal, Boeing and the Temple of Satan. The last of these organisations openly supports abortion because it is part of their satanic rituals. Planned Parenthood is also a big hit with celebrities, receives vast amounts of money from the US government and one of its previous board members was Bill Gates’s father.
After the Second World War, eugenics could not be openly embraced so another reason to justify depopulation had to be created – the environment.
The clarion call for the elites to promote their depopulation agenda came in 1972. That year, the Club of Rome, founded by David Rockefeller and consisting of world leaders and businessmen, had a meeting with the purpose of uniting the world behind a common crisis that could be solved only by the globalist elite and, at the same time, would advance their depopulation plans. After the meeting they said: ‘In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.’
Thus was born the global warming myth, promulgated with the assistance of the mainstream media and used to justify depopulation, with the whole of humanity now the target.
Prince Philip was a big supporter of culling the population. He said: ‘In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.’
Paul Ehrlich, an environmentalist renowned for making apocalyptic predictions about the end of the world due to overpopulation, wrote in his 1968 book The Population Bomb: ‘We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.’
Ted Turner, founder of CNN, is another great fan of depopulation and once said: ‘A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95 per cent decline from present levels, would be ideal.’
Jacques Cousteau, the oceanographer and film-maker was another supporter of wiping out vast swathes of humanity. In a 1991 interview he proclaimed: ‘World population must be stabilised and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day.’ The following year he was invited to the Rio Earth Summit and became a consultant for the United Nations.
John Holdren, President Obama’s Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, is a staunch supporter of forced sterilisation, even advocating putting sterilising chemicals in our drinking water. This is interesting as fluoride and chlorine, already introduced to the water supply in various parts of the world, do cause fertility issues as will be discussed in part 4.
He has also said: ‘The development of a long-term sterilising capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.’
David Brower, founder of various environmental movements and three times nominated for the Nobel peace prize, suggested that only the select few should be allowed to have children: ‘Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government licence . . . All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.’
The following is one of the most horrific and disturbing quotes of all, from a 2012 paper by Italian professors published in the British Medical Journal. The authors propose that murdering new-born infants is totally acceptable as they are not really human: ‘By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled. ‘
It would appear that California is now wanting to make this scenario a reality. A recently created Bill would allow the mother of an unwanted baby to kill it up to a number of weeks after birth without fear of prosecution. In Maryland, a similar Bill would prohibit any investigation into a baby’s death is if it born healthy but is allowed to die by starvation or by freezing to death for example within the first few weeks after birth.
And it’s not just infants they want to kill. The authors of a Lancet report claim that ‘death is healthy’ and want to let people with life-threatening illness die to reduce their carbon footprint. Naturally, the elderly are also targets. Recently a Yale professor has suggested that elderly Japanese should commit suicide to stop them being a burden on society.
As previously stated, Thomas Malthus feared food scarcity due to overpopulation. Part 2 will examine how government policies may lead to this very eventuality.
March 20, 2023 Posted by aletho | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment
Multipolarity was triggered by the 2003 US invasion of Iraq
By Karin Kneissl | The Cradle | March 20, 2023
On the night of 19-20 March, 2003, the US air force began bombing the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. The EU and NATO were deeply divided on whether to join the aggression: While newer NATO members from Central and Eastern Europe were in favor of the war, European heavyweights Paris and Berlin opposed it.
The Iraq war also marked the onset of diplomatic coordination between Moscow and Beijing at the UN Security Council (UNSC). The two countries began in 2003 to apply similar voting patterns in the Council, first on Iraq, then on Libya in 2011, and over Syria in several key votes. That early Russia-China UN coordination has, 20 years later, transformed into a determined joint policy toward “guarding a new world order based on international law.”
Looking back at March 2003 from the vantage point of March 2023, the invasion of Iraq unleashed geopolitical consequences far beyond the obvious ones, like the proliferation of terrorism, a decline of US power, and regional chaos. In 2003, a foundational, global shift in the balance of power was surely the last possible consequence envisioned by the war’s planners in Washington and London.
Disconnecting the dots
The destruction of Iraq, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army by the first “US Consul” Paul Bremer in May 2023, the outflow of refugees to neighboring states such as Syria and Jordan, and the exponential growth of extremism and terror attacks are among the consequences of this misguided war.
The flimsy reasons for the war, such as non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and Baghdad’s alleged support of terror groups like Al Qaeda, were debunked extensively in the following years. By the spring of 2004, evidence was already rife – whether from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) or from the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group (ISG) – that Iraq had no WMD program at all.
Rarely before had disinformation campaigns – what is now commonly referred to as “fake news” – been so meticulously executed. The “with us or against us” narrative had firmly taken hold: Western think tanks were out in full force promoting regime change and “democracy” (not a stated goal of the US-led invasion) in Iraq, while those who opposed it were labeled anti-Israel or anti-America.
Despite unprecedented, massive public protests across western capitals in opposition to the Iraq war, the US and its allies had already set in motion their considerable war machine, led by figures such as British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar.
A false narrative linking Baghdad and the September 11 attacks had already been well-seeded, despite there being no connection whatsoever between the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the bombers. It should be noted that there were no Iraqi or Afghan citizens among the terrorists who piloted the 9-11 planes, who were predominantly Saudi nationals.
Unfinished Business
In the autumn of 2001, war scenarios for an invasion of Iraq and regime change were already being laid out in Washington. Johns Hopkins University dean Paul Wolfowitz – an avid supporter of regime-change and US military expansion into Iraq – was named deputy secretary of defense in February 2001, a full seven months before the 9-11 attacks. Wolfowitz’s working hypothesis was that Iraq, with the liberalization of its oil industry, would be able to finance a post-war reconstruction from its own petroleum exports.
The group around Vice President Dick Cheney, which included Wolfowitz and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, was influential in shaping President George W. Bush’s position on Iraq. Unlike his father, George H. Bush, who was an experienced CIA director and analyst, the younger Bush lacked a distinct personal worldview on foreign policy, which he outsourced to his hawkish coterie.
Nevertheless, he was determined to finish what he saw as his father’s “unfinished business” from the 1991 ‘Gulf War’ aimed at expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait. That conflict was executed under a UN Security Council resolution, authorizing legal measures against Iraq as a state, but which did not constitute a war under international law.
In 1991, only Jordan‘s King Hussein took a position supporting Saddam Hussein, with all other nations backing the coalition assault against Baghdad. The US government adhered to the UN resolution, which aimed to restore Kuwait‘s territorial integrity – but not to overthrow the Iraqi government.
Instead, the US supported Iraqi Kurds in the north of the country and encouraged them to revolt against Baghdad. The Iraqi army crushed that rebellion, as it did an uprising in the Shia-dominated south. Perhaps the rebels had hoped for more concrete military aid from the US, but regardless, Hussein remained firmly in power despite military defeat elsewhere.
From Washington’s perspective, the US had failed to unseat Hussein, and within the Bush family, there was a desire to settle a score. For George W. Bush, the invasion of Iraq provided an opportunity to step out of his powerful father’s shadow by executing the elusive regime-change goal. The September 11 attacks provided a justification for this obsession – what remained was to connect Iraq to the US terror attacks and galvanize public and political support for a war, both domestically and internationally.
The UN Security Council in turmoil
In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, there was a great deal of division among UN Security Council (UNSC) members. US Secretary of State Colin Powell presented questionable evidence of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, while the foreign ministers of Germany and France publicly opposed the aggression, for which they occasionally received applause in the Council.
China and Russia, who vehemently opposed the war, began coordinating their decisions and responses, in part because of their respective oil interests in Iraq. This cooperation between Moscow and Beijing set the stage for a coordinated multilateral approach between the two nations. Both governments understood that a war would open Pandora’s box, leading to the collapse of Iraqi institutions and resulting in widespread regional disharmony.
Unfortunately, this is precisely what happened. The subsequent years saw weekly attacks, an expansion of Salafi terror groups like Al Qaeda, the rise of ISIS in 2014, and perpetual internal Iraqi conflict. Anyone familiar with the country‘s conditions was aware of the looming catastrophe when the illegal invasion of Iraq began on 20 March, 2003.
China and Russia and the multipolar order
Twenty years to the day, Chinese President Xi Jinping will embark on a three-day state visit to Moscow, and the focus will extend beyond bilateral energy relations, which have been a consistent priority since 2004.
As previously stated in their joint declaration in Beijing in February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart aim to coordinate their foreign policy and advance it together. Their discussions may also touch on the Ukraine dossier, although media expectations in the west may be overestimated.
It may be pure coincidence that the meeting coincides with the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion. Yet it also highlights how extensively Russian and Chinese strategies have intertwined over the past two decades.
Today, increasingly, “orientation comes from Orient.” Cooperative geostrategic leadership and sound alternative propositions to resolve global conflicts are being shaped in Beijing and Moscow – because the old centers of power can offer nothing new.
Twenty years after the US invasion of Iraq, a failed ‘war on terror,’ the proliferation of extremism, millions of dead and displaced in West Asia, and never-ending conflict, China and Russia have finally teamed up to systematically advance their view of the world, this time with more resolve and global clout.
As catastrophic as it was, the Iraq war ended the practice of direct US military invasions, ushering in a war-weary era that desperately sought other solutions. That global division of opinion that began in 2003 over Iraq is, 20 years later, being institutionalized by emerging multipolar powers that seek to counter forever wars.
March 20, 2023 Posted by aletho | Deception, Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | China, Iraq, Russia, United States | Leave a comment
Setting the record straight on the teeming media swamp that supported Iraq war
By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos | Responsible Statecraft | March 20, 2023
In his doubling down of support for the war in Iraq, David “Axis of Evil” Frum all but exonerates the architects and promoters of the war (which would include himself, being a speechwriter for President Bush until 2002, then a media cheerleader) as such:
To my mind, the most important lessons regard government decision making, offering a warning against groupthink and self-deception. Crucial decision makers started with an assumption that regime change in Iraq would be cheap, easy, and lightly contested. They then isolated themselves from all contrary information—until it was too late.
Frum, like his contemporary Eli Lake, is an interesting case because each has in the last few weeks attempted to both acknowledge the conventional wisdom after 20 years that the war was a failure, while still arguing best intentions and look, “Iraq really is better off without Saddam Hussein.” On the latter, I will let my colleague Connor Echols’ heartbreaking interviews with actual Iraqis answer that. What I’m keen to explore is Frum’s assertion that: “I don’t believe any leaders of the time intended to be dishonest. They were shocked and dazed by 9/11. They deluded themselves.”
It is highly doubtful that Frum vulcan mind-melded with each of the architects, or saw into their souls a la Bush and Vladimir Putin. We know from highly documented accounts that, contra Frum’s simplistic summation, the Bush administration was influenced by a vanguard of well-placed neoconservatives who had set regime change into motion back in the Clinton administration. This was no 9/11 hangover. As Jim Lobe pointed out in these pages in 2021, the 2001 attacks enabled leaders and operators like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Scooter Libby, Robert Kagan, and Bill Kristol to have the war they wanted long before those planes flew into the Twin Towers.
Frum’s flimsy rationalization conveniently ignores that the mainstream media was totally and willingly co-opted into this “delusion” too, and without it, the invasion and aftermath, which included eight years of occupation and then another two years of military assistance to help the Iraqis roust ISIS (which the U.S. invasion created) wouldn’t have carried on in the manner that it did.
I say that because as the polling showed the American people losing faith in the war by January 2005, the mainstream media backgrounded all of the bad news (like military massacres, civilian deaths, torture, sectarian violence, PTSD) while foregrounding Pentagon talking points that said new counterinsurgency methods and tactical wins meant victory was “right around the corner.” They lied about reconstruction progress, too, as Peter Van Buren points out right here.
An entire ecosystem of information management ensured that the major networks, newspapers and radio, owned by only a handful of conglomerates, were singing the same tune, all of the time.
Frum, Lake, and columnists like Max Boot, who now, conveniently, says he regrets it, were what Spock would call top “lifeforms” in that ecosystem.
We must talk about this because these men and their compradores in the Washington swamp want to dismiss any comparison to how we view Ukraine and how the media is covering U.S. policy in that war. They have not learned any lessons about meddling and the limits of American power writ large, just in failed wars of the past.
March 20, 2023 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Iraq, Middle East, United States | Leave a comment
Heavily Criticised Pro-lockdown Paper Cited Far More Than Anti-lockdown Papers
BY NOAH CARL | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | MARCH 13, 2023
Formal scientific institutions took a battering during the pandemic, and deservedly so. From the wildly inaccurate predictions of SAGE modellers to the denial of natural immunity by signatories of the John Snow Memorandum, ‘Science’ (uppercase ‘s’) has not had a good three years.
A particularly striking illustration of this is citation patterns in the scientific literature. If things were working well, the best studies would get cited the most. Unfortunately, that appears not to be the case: citations have flowed disproportionately to studies that uphold The Narrative.
In June, 2020, researchers from Imperial College London (including our old friend Neil Ferguson) published a paper in the prestigious journal Nature titled ‘Estimating the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe’.
They concluded – on the basis of a complex model-fitting exercise – that lockdowns had saved the lives of 3.1 million people across 11 European countries. That’s right, 3.1 million lives saved, and during the first three months of the pandemic alone.
Doesn’t sound very plausible, does it? After all, Sweden didn’t lock down, and they saw about as many deaths – or even fewer – than the countries that did lockdown. So how did the researchers get to the figure of 3.1 million lives saved?
As Philippe Lemoine notes, they just assumed that death numbers would have been far greater in the absence of lockdowns, and then took the difference between those numbers and the ones that were actually observed, and concluded the difference was due to lockdowns. Okay, but what about Sweden?
Well, the researchers fit a model in which the effect of different interventions could vary from country to country. And while Sweden didn’t have a lockdown, they did have a ban on public gatherings (of more than 500 people). So in the researchers’ model, Sweden’s ban on public gatherings ended up having the same impact as lockdown in all the other countries.
They were effectively claiming that, in France, Italy, the UK etc., lockdowns succeeded in preventing hundreds of thousands of deaths, but in Sweden, the same effect was achieved by simply banning public gatherings. Like I said, not very plausible. In fact, it’s preposterous.
The paper has been heavily criticised. However, that hasn’t stopped it being cited 2779 times! Most researchers don’t get that many citations in their entire career, let alone on a single paper.
Now let’s look at the number of citations accrued by papers finding that lockdowns didn’t have much effect.
Simon Wood’s paper ‘Did COVID-19 infections decline before UK lockdown?’ concluded that “infections were in decline before full UK lockdown”. It has been cited a total of 40 times (across two different versions).
Christian Bjørnskov’s paper ‘Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison’ found “no clear association between lockdown policies and mortality development”. It has been cited a total of 57 times.
Eran Bendavid and colleagues’ paper ‘Assessing mandatory stay-at-home and business closure effects on the spread of COVID-19’ did “not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs”. It has been cited a total of 205 times.
Christopher Berry and colleagues’ paper ‘Evaluating the effects of shelter-in-place policies during the COVID-19 pandemic’ did “not find detectable effects of these policies on disease spread or deaths”. It has been cited a total of 68 times.
While none of these papers is perfect, they’re all vastly more rigorous than the Imperial College study published in Nature. Despite this, none of them has garnered even 1/10th as many citations as that study.
Something has gone seriously wrong when a flawed study gets almost three thousand citations, while more rigorous studies only pick up a few dozen. As to what explains this disparity, I can only speculate that most scientists haven’t come to terms with the fact that the ‘experts’ dropped the ball.
March 19, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights | Leave a comment
Courage of the teacher who refused to make his pupils wear masks
By Harry Hopkins | TCW Defending Freedom | March 14, 2023
Right from the outset of the ‘plandemic’ there have been those who recognised the evil in what was going on and who, in their own ways, have been making every effort to resist. Across the world many people have lost their jobs and their businesses, but perhaps giving up one’s livelihood on principle is the supreme act that a person with moral courage can do to oppose the enemy that confronts us.
There have been many such brave souls and Mark (not his real name) is such a person. A teacher at a large secondary school in Yorkshire, he realised that he would have difficulty doing his job when testing and then masking of his pupils was mandated. These instructions came from the local authority and were expected to be introduced without question. There were other teachers, too, who had grave misgivings, but they were in the minority and were openly mocked.
All teachers were given instructions about the distribution of testing kits and to organise pupil seating plans which had to be adhered to. All staff were expected to wear a face covering; there was no consultation about this. In the spring term of 2021 a box of testing kits arrived in Mark’s classroom, which he left untouched as the holiday was just about to start. On return from holiday he decided to write to the head teacher about his concerns, and you can read his email here.
Not only did the head not reply to this letter, but he didn’t speak to Mark again. Instead, he sent a teaching assistant, who was full on-narrative and was wearing two masks plus a visor, to admonish him for not complying. In Mark’s own words:
‘She commenced by bellowing instructions to maskless pupils to cover their faces. She glanced at me, clearly expecting a reaction. How could I possibly allow these potential vectors of death to be in school without covering their faces? I had never, and still have never instructed a child to obstruct their airways. It is a line I simply cannot cross. I suspect my response was neither wanted nor expected, since it appeared to make her address the children with yet more venom. I turned and smiled at the children instead who smiled back me. These confused souls seemed to prefer my smile to this clown’s anger, despite not being able to see her face.
‘I’m not seeking praise or recognition or anything at all here, I simply cannot in good conscience do it. As the school year progressed, things didn’t improve. Every few weeks she would arrive to carry out the task, a task that she clearly felt I should be doing and one I had no grounds to refuse. After she left the room, the masks would come down and an ever-increasing number of testing kits were discarded by the kids into the bin each time. My attitude was clearly causing an issue for some members of staff; many would blank me as we crossed in the corridor, and entering the staffroom sometimes felt like the scene from the movie An American Werewolf in London when the tourists walk into the Slaughtered Lamb pub and everyone suddenly stops talking to stare.’
When you read these words, describing the experience of a dedicated teacher who was untouched by the brainwashing that resulted in utter cruelty being inflicted on children across the country, it makes you shudder in disbelief. For Mark to maintain his moral stance in the face of such disgraceful behaviour from his colleagues surely speaks volumes for his strength of character. How on earth he managed to carry on, day after day, in the face of such hostility is a credit to his courage and steadfastness, not to mention his dedication to his pupils.
In July the headmaster was off work because he had tested positive for Covid. In his absence his deputies, clearly relishing the authority, upped the ante from passive-aggression to a decidedly more unpleasant tack. Mark’s pupil-centred teaching technique was deemed unsafe because he was not wearing a mask, did not sport PPE and was doing his best to help the kids in his charge by behaving in a ‘normal’ manner. He was told to go home, take a test or, if he preferred not to get tested, then allow other teachers to cover his classes for two weeks.
Confronted with such stupidity and total lack of any humanity regarding the care of pupils, Mark was pushed over the edge when another masked deputy began haranguing him about following ‘the science’. An argument ensued. It was the final straw and he collected his belongings and left for good.
It’s interesting to note that the decision to impose masks on schoolchildren in England was not ‘following the science’ at all but rather was purely for political expediency: ‘Face masks introduced in English secondary schools to avoid “argument” with Sturgeon’.
Mark gave up a career that he enjoyed tremendously because he would not subject his pupils to the Covid madness. The welfare of the children in his charge was always at the centre of his actions and he could not, in all conscience, inflict the insanity of masks, tests and distancing on his young charges.
As a conclusion, it is heartening to say that Mark now works as a supply teacher and devotes much time to opposing the narrative with practical actions. The wonderful thing from his point of view is that he stood by his conscience and has the satisfaction of going forward knowing that he kept his soul intact. One wonders how his headmaster, his deputies and other teachers who inflicted these despicable practices on young, impressionable youngsters justify their behaviour now that the truth about the Covid crimes is breaking by the day. Did they keep their souls intact? I think not.
March 19, 2023 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights, UK | Leave a comment
Homelessness and Hardiness to COVID-19
Toronto Study Indicates Homeless Managed Just Fine Through Pandemic
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | March 16, 2023
It is well known that homeless populations have much higher rates of hospitalization for a variety of reasons including drug abuse, alcoholism, aspiration, pneumonia, and neuropsychiatric reasons. I have always wondered how they fared during COVID-19 having heard little about severe outcomes among those who live outside.
Lucie Richard and coworkers reported on 736 homeless individuals in Toronto, Ontario during 2021 and 2022. The majority managed through the illness with no reported difficulty over the time period, most with the Omicron variants. There were no reported severe cases, hospitalizations, or deaths.
Despite approximately two thirds taking a COVID-19 vaccine, the shots appeared to be useless in this population with no statistically significant vaccine efficacy. While the public has watched the relentless pursuit of well-employed adults, college age students, and children down to 6 months of age, the most economically deprived and vulnerable in society appear to be of little interest to the Biopharmaceutical Complex, and like the other groups, have no theoretical benefit from vaccination. As a general rule if the highest risk derive no reduction in hospitalization or death, then even lower risk individuals are not worth the effort for public health interventions such as vaccines.
March 19, 2023 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Canada, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine | Leave a comment
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From the Archives
Neocons confess: “We did 9/11-anthrax”
By Kevin Barrett | Press TV | September 6, 2014
As the 13th anniversary of the crimes of September, 2001 approaches, the neoconservatives are shrieking from the rooftops – and effectively confessing that they were the real perpetrators of the 9/11-Anthrax false flag operation. (The neocons, you may recall, openly called for a “new Pearl Harbor” in September, 2000 – and got one exactly one year later.)
Every year at this time, the neocons orchestrate and hype a series of public relations stunts designed to magnify fears of “radical Islam” and reinforce their crumbling 9/11-Anthrax cover story. But this year’s propaganda campaign is so extreme that it represents a tacit confession: The neocons know that the truth about the 9/11-Anthrax operation is slowly closing in on them; so they are over-reacting by desperately trying to stoke the dying embers of the so-called War on Terror, in order to maintain the myth that Muslims (rather than neoconservative Zionists) attacked America in the autumn of 2001.
When a hysterical person exhibits guilty demeanor by trying too hard to blame a crime on someone else, that person is almost certainly the real perpetrator. As the neocons try much too hard to blame Islam for 9/11 and “terrorism” in general, their hysteria inadvertently reveals their own culpability. Like Shakespeare’s Lady MacBeth, the neoconservative movement has blood on its hands and “doth protest too much.” … continue
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