The details of torture in an Israeli-run prison in Lebanon, including the electrocution of a female detainee and denial of medical care, have been uncovered in newly declassified Israeli documents.
Arab prisoners were subjected to inhumane treatment at the Khiam Prison run by Israel in Southern Lebanon, which operated for fifteen years until the occupation state withdrew from its northern neighbour in 2000. Details of the torture and serious human rights violations were found within the archive documents released by Israel’s internal security agency, Shin Bet.
The documents were released following a petition to the High Court of Justice by human rights activists including lawyer Eitay Mack, who over recent years has uncovered Israel’s questionable ties to rogue human rights abusing regimes. The materials, the activists say, record “torture and cruel and inhumane punishments” in the prison.
“Together with the South Lebanon Army, the Israel Defence Forces and Shin Bet ran a detention and torture facility like those in the military dictatorships in Latin America,” Mack told Haaretz. The Israeli paper reported the gruesome details at length.
“The torture inflicted in Khiam Prison is a crime against humanity,” Mack said. “The documents that were revealed due to the petition are shocking, and constitute only a miniscule glimpse into the hell that they ran there. We will continue to fight until all the documents are made available to the public and those responsible for the horrors are brought to justice.”
Khiam Prison was opened in 1985 near the eponymous village, which is located in South Lebanon, a few kilometres north of the Israeli border. It was originally built as an army barracks in the 1930s.
Only a tiny fraction of the documents has been released. Legal proceedings are underway to obtain all of the material. The full scale of the torture is likely to be even more shocking.
Nevertheless, the small sample of declassified documents still paints a horrific picture. Between 250 and 300 detainees were said to have been held in the prison at any given time. They belonged to various organisations and political parties, including Amal, Hezbollah, the Communist Party, Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
According to one document, a female detainee being interrogated on suspicion of being “connected to Hezbollah” was electrocuted. The victim “received electricity in her fingers”, which is another way of saying that she was tortured during the interrogation.
A document dated 1988 testifies to the hunger from which the prisoners suffered in the jail. “This morning, the manager of the local prison reported that yesterday a hunger strike erupted in the prison due to a shortage of food,” it says.
Another document, from 1997, discussed medical problems from which the detainees suffered. In summary, the document says that there exists “a painful problem” and that the source who warned about it feels “that he has no support in the event that a detainee dies in prison due to medical problems or a failure to administer treatment recommended by the doctor.”
According to Amnesty International, during the prison’s fifteen years of operation, 11 detainees died. With the full scale of the torture still to be unveiled, the death toll may actually be much higher.
The past two days have seen sorties from scientists desperate to shore up the lockdown version of history. Lockdowns were necessary, and anyone who disagrees does not care about society or equality. This version of history is so fraudulent that it cannot be allowed to triumph.
Writing in the Guardianyesterday, Devi Sridhar asks: ‘Why can’t some scientists just admit they were wrong about Covid?’ Why indeed? Sridhar notes that scientists have divided into opposing camps, taking ‘particular pandemic positions… eventually building a base of followers that organise around that position and defend it viciously.’ She just doesn’t seem to recognise that this neatly describes her own approach.
Sridhar’s piece is a craven attempt to rewrite history by claiming that the Zero Covid position was only ever intended for the pre-vaccine era. Can this be the same Sridhar who said in a New Statesmaninterview in January 2021 that ‘the better option is to eliminate the virus’ – even after vaccines had started to be rolled out? Or who tweeted in June 2020 that ‘the fastest way to get economy & normal life back is to push for a ZERO Covid Britain. Clear virus, build domestic economy’? Still, as far as Sridhar’s concerned, if anyone got anything wrong, it wasn’t her.
Sridhar’s efforts to rewrite history were joined by a prominent member of Independent SAGE, Kit Yates. Writing in the British Medical Journal on Wednesday, Yates penned an op-ed on the theme “Was lockdown necessary?” Lockdowns, according to Yates, were necessary to protect the NHS and the vulnerable members of society — and yet at the same time ‘no one is in favour of lockdowns’. This sleight of hand followed his tweet in February that ‘everyone is lockdown sceptic’.
Have we all been dreaming about the vituperative onslaught on sceptical voices in the last two years? The answer becomes clearer in the last paragraph of the BMJ piece, where Yates concludes:
Whether you view [lockdowns] as necessary depends on your value system. Many people would place the lives of the most vulnerable high on their list of priorities. Many people would value a functioning NHS with equal access for all at the point of need. Many would place a high worth on the long term health of their population. But not everyone. – KIT YATES, BMJ
Sadly for Yates, his article was published on the very day that Sir Chris Whitty admitted that the long-term health of children had suffered and their life expectancies were lower through increasing obesity brought on by lockdowns. With NHS cancer backlogs projected to last for a decade, it doesn’t seem that this “long-term health of the population” and “protecting the NHS” works out very well for Yates and his ilk.
This is why the strongest advocates of lockdowns such as Sridhar and Yates cannot be allowed to set the tone of the debate as we move away from the pandemic. Strong lockdowns promoted policies that were utterly uncaring of the young, the elderly in care homes, women in abusive situations, the poor whose work disappeared, let alone the hundreds of millions of people whose livelihoods have been destroyed in the Global South.
Meanwhile, 40% of Covid deaths in the West took place in care homes. Far from protecting the vulnerable, lockdown policies did not even protect the most vulnerable. Meanwhile, they have rendered hundreds of millions of people newly vulnerable. That is their legacy, and those who advocated hardest for them must not be allowed to escape it.
Russia wants to hear comments from the US regime on the alleged involvement of Hunter Biden into financing a network of biolabs in Ukraine, which Moscow suspects of conducting bioweapons research, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday. The embattled presidential son was financially linked to the Ukrainian labs by the Russian military this week.
“We will certainly demand explanations. And not us alone. You know that China has asked for explanations, demanded transparency over this program and this situation,” Peskov said.
He was commenting on a connection, which the Russian military claimed to have discovered between the embattled son of President Joe Biden and biolabs in Ukraine.
Hunter Biden used to head the now-defunct DC-based Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, a branch of the Rosemont Seneca investment fund. The Russian military claimed that the fund had close ties to the Pentagon and helped finance bioresearch in Ukraine.
The labs drew public attention after US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland said under oath this month that Washington didn’t want research materials from the facilities to fall into the hands of Russia.
Washington denied that facilities in Ukraine – and other parts of the world – which the Pentagon funds through its Defense Threat Reduction Agency, had anything to do with germ research. Russia and China complained that the operation was shrouded in secrecy and called on the US to open the labs to international inspections.
Peskov dismissed statements coming from the White House, which alleged that Russia was talking about the biolabs to pave the ground for a false flag attack in Ukraine with weapons of mass destruction.
“The Americans are trying to switch attention … from the unfolding scandal,” the Russian official assessed.
While Washington refuses to give answers about its scandals in biological weapons research in clandestine laboratories in Ukraine, other facts are revealed, which point not only to inappropriate conduct on the part of the American government, but also to the Biden family itself. Hunter Biden, son of the US president, who is proven to be involved in several corruption schemes in Ukraine, is now suspected of being one of the main financiers of US laboratories on Ukranian soil. The suspicion is already generating strong international repercussions, with Moscow demanding an immediate response from Washington. With this situation, once again the Biden administration is approaching a crisis of legitimacy.
Rosemont Seneca Partners has been accused of being a major financier of US laboratories in Ukraine. The company would sponsor the entire Pentagon’s biomilitary program, sending more than 2 billion dollars in resources for the maintenance of several laboratories abroad, including more than thirty facilities in Ukraine. The company would be acting in partnership with other key military companies, such as Metabiota, in addition to many NGOs and international foundations.
The head of Russia’s Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defense Troops, Igor Kirillov, commented on the report: “Incoming materials have allowed us to trace the scheme of interaction between US government bodies and Ukraine’s biolabs. The involvement in the financing of these activities by structures close to the current US leadership, in particular the Rosemont Seneca investment fund managed by Hunter Biden, draws attention to itself (…) At the same time, a close relationship has been established between the fund and key contractors of the US military, including Metabiota, which alongside Black & Veatch is one of the main suppliers of equipment for Pentagon biolaboratories around the world”.
Hunter Biden, who has accumulated several crimes of corruption and financial scandals in Ukraine during his time working in Kiev, is the chairman of the Rosemont Seneca financial fund. This fund receives money from a wide range of companies, banks and philanthropic organizations around the world, including George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. These connections reveal the real dimension of the Pentagon’s program, which involves many of the key names of the global elites.
“The scale of the [American biomilitary] program is impressive. Along with the Pentagon, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are directly involved in its implementation (…) Scientific supervision is carried out by leading research organizations, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which developed nuclear weapons for the Manhattan Project. All of this activity has been carried out under the direct control of the Pentagon”, Kirillov adds.
It is important to note that the Russian allegations are made on the basis of official documents captured by Moscow intelligence on Ukrainian soil during the Special Operation, which guarantees credibility for the pronouncements of Russian officials. Several accusations on the existence of research on biological weapons had already been made previously, mainly by the US, which accuses China of having created the new coronavirus. However, none of these accusations were elaborated justified on scientific evidence and official documents, being just unsubstantiated narratives – which is not the case now.
According to data contained in documents captured by the Russians, about 16,000 biosamples have been exported from Ukraine in recent times, supposedly with the aim of reporting the results of military research in those laboratories to their funders in other countries. Kirillov reports that there are real risks of a new pandemic to start soon, considering that US forces are indeed in possession of advanced biological weapons, which include diverse pathogenic biomaterials, from coronavirus mutations to anthrax variants.
It is impossible to say in advance whether or not the West will use the biological weapons it currently possesses. The risks of a new pandemic are real, and this scenario would have negative impacts on the whole world. It is possible that the fact that research data have become public is reason enough to prevent the use of such weapons, as this would harm the international image of the US government and the private agencies that finance these laboratories. However, the very existence of this type of illegal and unethical activity must be reason for strong condemnations against the US and Ukraine on the international organizations and courts.
Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov demanded answers from the US government about Hunter Biden’s involvement in funding biomilitary research. China’s previous demands also remain. The White House’s stance is one of total silence – while, at the same time, other American officials give ambiguous and contradictory answers, either confirming or denying the existence of the biolabs.
In fact, this scenario also tends to have a major internal impact on the American electorate, intensifying the current legitimacy crisis of the Biden administration. In addition to several domestic and international management mistakes, Biden has to deal with family scandals due to his son’s criminal activities, which complicates his acceptance by the American people. Indeed, a strong wave of disapproval and protests is about to come soon in America.
Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.
IF YOU are British and of a certain age, you’ll remember the doomily portentous 1986/7 Aids warning campaign promoted by the UK government.
The slogan ran ‘Aids: Don’t Die of Ignorance.’
Here’s the most memorable ad. It featured the gravelly voice of John Hurt warning: ‘There is now a danger that has become a threat to us all. It is a deadly disease and there is no known cure. The virus can be passed during sexual intercourse with an infected person. Anyone can get it, man or woman. So far it has been confined to small groups. But it’s spreading . . . so protect yourself.’
I remember it well because I was at exactly the right age – early twenties – for it to mess up my sex life. It didn’t kill sexual activity, quite. But it definitely put a dampener on it. You still did the deed, when you could find a willing partner. But you worried about it afterwards especially if, like me, you had hypochondriacal tendencies. Clearly there was a serious risk: there had to be! Why else would the government spend millions on this lavish, in-your-face campaign if Aids wasn’t a major problem?
But it wasn’t. Every word of that campaign was either a lie, an exaggeration or a misdirection. ‘Don’t die of ignorance!’ it declared. Yet ignorance was exactly what it was promoting.
How do I know this? Well, it has been a long, long journey.
The first stage was gentle cynicism. After the initial shock of those ads, it became increasingly clear that the government had been overstating the case. Yes, Aids did indeed appear to be taking a terrible toll among those ‘small groups’: haemophiliacs, intravenous drug users and homosexual men, primarily. But there was no evidence that the disease was spreading significantly to the broader community.
At the time, those of us who realised this tended to give the government the benefit of the doubt. Yes, the government had, strictly speaking, been lying to us. But it was a good lie. A noble lie. It was pretending Aids affected everyone in order to spare the blushes of those it did affect. If you were gay or a haemophiliac or an intravenous drug user you wouldn’t feel isolated, marginalised. You could feel that the whole country was united with you, sharing some of your pain and anxiety.
I can’t remember how far I subscribed to this argument myself. Probably, knowing me, not greatly. I’ve never been a fan of ‘unless one of you owns up you’re all going to suffer’ collective punishments. And this felt very much like one of those: as if we were being treated like children who couldn’t be trusted to be told the whole truth lest we misuse that information for our own selfish ends. It was collectivism, communism basically, and I’ve never been into any of that, not even in my youthful idealism phase.
The second stage of my Aids awareness didn’t come till much later. It’s so recent, in fact, that if you had told me two years ago that Aids didn’t really exist and wasn’t caused by a virus called HIV, I would probably have rolled my eyes and changed the subject. What converted me was first my experience of the ‘pandemic’ and my recognition of the obvious parallels with the ‘Aids crisis’, which – from the Fauci connection to the suppression of effective drugs and the promotion of dodgy ones – was a dry run for Covid-19. And secondly, the informed wisdom of Robert F Kennedy Jr and of my most recent podcast guest Jon Rappoport.
Rappoport is the author of a 1988 book we all should have read (it would have spared us so much bother) called AIDS Inc. He began his researches in good faith, assuming – as any rational person would – that Aids was a genuine phenomenon. Little by little, though, he came to realise – as his subtitle put it – that this was the Scandal of the Century: a scam, effectively concocted by Big Pharma, the US Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, to push unnecessary, expensive and dangerous medical treatments on desperate, captive victim groups in the guise of ‘public health’.
Unless you’re very open-minded, impossibly cynical or irredeemably red-pilled, it’s a hard thesis to swallow. Among the obvious questions it raises are: ‘So what were all those people dying of?’ and ‘C’mon, if Aids was a fiction, surely we’d all know by now?’
The answer to the first question is it depends what victim category you are talking about. In Africa, for example, ‘Aids’ was – and still is – rebadged malnutrition. Its original nickname (as fans of Bob Mould and Sugar will know) was ‘The Slim’. With the diabolical genius we’ve since come to expect of Big Pharma, millions upon millions of starving Africans were turned into a problem the industry could lucratively solve simply by pretending that their emaciation was the result of a deadly new virus (probably spread from having sex with monkeys: nice dose of cheap racism there, Big Pharma liars!) rather than from not getting enough to eat.
With gay men, according to Rappoport (who was told this by front-line community workers) it was the bath houses. These were the orgiastic dens of iniquity, popular at the time, where you could take any number of drugs, have sex with any number of men, and stay up partying any number of hours till your immune system finally gave up the ghost and left you prey to all manner of fatal infections.
But what about the gay men who didn’t go to the bath houses? This is where the story gets truly shocking. Many of them were killed by the very drug that was supposed to save them, the much-lauded AZT. Designed as a cancer drug (but abandoned because it was so toxic, killing more people than it cured), AZT was heavily pushed by Anthony Fauci as the solution to the Aids crisis. In fact it made it much worse. As RFK Jr reports in his book The Real Anthony Fauci, once AZT was introduced the death rate ‘from Aids’ rose precipitously.
What’s particularly sad is that a lot of these victims were not even sick before they moved on to their fatal courses of AZT (the average survival time for those taking it was four months). They’d simply taken the test, been found to be ‘HIV-positive’ and had been frightened by the general hysteria into imagining that this would save their life. Among those who made this mistake were ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev and tennis player Arthur Ashe.
A treatment more dangerous than the disease itself. Shrill public health campaigns dispensing misinformation. More effective, cheaper treatments being deliberately suppressed. An obsession with case numbers over fatality rates. Whistleblowing scientists, such as Peter Duesberg and Claus Köhnlein, silenced and proscribed by a corrupt medical establishment. So much of what happened during the Aids crisis seems with hindsight so eerily familiar. And with good reason: it was organised by the same people.
What’s frustrating is that even when you lay out the information as clearly as RFK Jr and Rappoport have done, there will be those – and perhaps they are even the majority – who prefer to believe the fabricated narrative to the uncomfortable truth. This is understandable. To comprehend fully what happened during the Aids crisis you must inevitably abandon many of the cosy assumptions that make our world seem nicer and friendlier than it actually is. These assumptions include some of the following notions: that doctors are all in the healing business; that the regulatory authorities are there to protect you; that drugs are not released on to the market without rigorous testing. The idea that medical doctors and scientists, in collusion with government agencies and the pharmaceutical industry, would make up a disease in order to push a cure which killed you but made them rich is such a hard thing for most of us to grasp that we find it easier to believe the reassuring lie than accept the reality.
There’s another reason too, why the inventors of Aids have never been properly found out, let alone brought to justice: gaslighting. We’re talking about an entire system – the media, Hollywood, publishing, TV, schools, academe, the scientific institutions, big business, the political class, finance etc – all pushing the same message. Try questioning the Aids/HIV narrative as a specialist science or health journalist and see how far you get: you’ll find that ‘experts’ will no longer wish to speak to you, institutions no longer prepared to co-operate with you. Or try to get funding for a movie blowing the whistle on what really happened . . .
No one likes to think that they’re the hapless dupe of a massive psy-op. But the evidence is all around us, if only you know where and how to look. For example, I suspect it’s probably not coincidental that, at the height of the ‘pandemic’, the BBC treated us to a period drama series about the UK experience of Aids, written by Doctor Who showrunner/reviver Russell T Davies, called It’s A Sin.
Now I happen to think Davies is a hugely talented and watchable screenwriter, brilliant at creating likeable, believable characters, snappy, memorable dialogue and entertaining story arcs. But this, where an issue such as Aids is concerned, is what makes his fiction so dangerous. Of course, as an Establishment figure, Davies is going to promote the Establishment narrative. It’s A Sin achieved various nefarious objectives: it reinforced the notion that Aids was a thing; it got audiences talking once more about their memories and experiences of that era; it enabled politicians and commentators to pontificate about the period, drape themselves in rainbow flags and so on; and it hinted at contemporary parallels – that Covid-19 too is a genuine health crisis that we would do well take seriously and which the government really should do more to address . . .
When you analyse how the system works it just sounds like yet more conspiracy theorising. But it’s precisely this level of attention to detail by the progenitors of the Aids scam which explains why so many of us still think, against all the evidence, that it wasn’t a scam.
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
THAT QUESTION troubled many of our greatest philosophers over generations. Last month, however, the question was finally answered. The sturdy and tough Canadian Maple tree fell in plain sight. The fall barely making a sound.
Democracy ended overnight – with little to no fuss, and some encouragement from neighbours and friends.
To deal with an old fashioned, “grease under your fingernails” workingman’s protest, Trudeau, Canada’s Prime Minister, invoked the Emergencies Act on the 14th of February.
Barely a week later, his party, with the support of the New Democratic Party, ganged-up to pass the measure by 185 votes to 151. The Conservatives and Bloc Québécois voted against the use of the sweeping enforcement measures, accusing the prime minister of overreach. The Canadian government granted itself powers it did not have before.
The police were given the ability to arrest without warrant those who were directly or indirectly “assisting others” in what it considered “criminal activities” – no justifications required. Added to physical restrictions, the Emergencies Act allowed banks and financial institutions to freeze accounts, again without court order, of those suspected of supporting the blockades – that is to say, directly or indirectly.
To make sure the message was understood, he clarified – anybody involved in this protest, will live in fear from the State “for months to come”. From losing access to personal bank accounts, to professional licences, to criminal charges and municipal breaches of court order, those who protested against the government’s narrow vaccine mandate and broader Covid policy, joined the new caste of the damned.
The Emergencies Act, as written by the Canadian Department of Justice, was rather specific. It stated that a national emergency “is an urgent, temporary and critical situation that seriously endangers the health and safety of Canadians or that seriously threatens the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada”.
Importantly, it added that it must be “a situation that cannot be effectively dealt with by the provinces and territories, or by any other law of Canada”.
Over its first four weeks, none of these prerequisites for the act even to have been considered were met. The Freedom Convoy seemed at worse an inconvenience; at best a carnival. To some it was incommodious; to others emancipating. As it was, the embarrassment for an administration that too quickly resorted to slander and opprobrium, seems to have been that the truckers and their followers were too well behaved and reassuringly civilised.
It was, by any measure, very peaceful.
Had there been acts of violence, looting or property destruction of any kind, the entire world would have been told with alacrity. Honest Constable Steve Bell would have delighted in telling us who the thugs were, had there been any. But, thugs there were none – or too few to mention.
He knew it, so when asked about them and about protestors allegedly in possession of firearms, he waffled and swiftly moved on to generalities and threats. The contrast between the celebratory mood on the ground and the paranoid, Bourbon-type, response from Trudeau and his administration is and will remain the greatest of all mysteries.
The Truckers demands were clear and simple: an end to Covid restrictions, in particular vaccine mandates for Truckers who work the cross-border route between the United States and Canada.
He added that the Emergencies Act was “introduced for no good reason”.
Trudeau panicked and overreacted “with this use of extreme powers”, Kenney continued. He ended his piece to camera by saying that “the chief enforcement officer of Canada has said that if he disagrees with your opinions”, he “might freeze and seize your bank account without going to court”.
Where lies Canada now?
How can Canada still be considered a democracy in such circumstances?
Protest, in particular when respectfully conducted, as the Freedom Convoy seems to have been, is the sine qua non of democratic governance – as are the twins of consent and compromise.
Trudeau never deigned to seek to understand the protesters. The ordinary world is too distant, quaint and old fashioned for him. To spend time trying to understand the yearning for normalcy and freedom would have required wasting it speaking to people, who are not included in the Progressive Programme.
Of note, and perhaps most worryingly of all though, is, when it happened, how silent the fall of Canada’s democracy was. No Western country bore witness to the euphemistically titled “overreach”. Perhaps, they were too distracted with troubles on the Ukraine-Russian border. Or perhaps not.
Be that as it may, the take-away is that in the UK, as in other Western countries, we really could well be just one election – or Act – away from a Trudeau-type coup against the people. And that should keep us up at nights.
On March 23, PM Justin Trudeau was called a dictator in front of the entire European Union over his response to the Freedom Convoy.
Addressing both the European Parliament and Trudeau specifically, Member of the European Parliament Mislav Kolakusic proceeded to deliver Trudeau perhaps the most humiliating international thrashing of his political career.
“Freedom, the right to choose, the right to life, the right to health, the right to work for many of us are fundamental human rights for which millions of citizens of Europe and the world have laid down their lives,” Kolakusic began.
“…. Canada, once a symbol of the modern world, has become a symbol of civil rights violations under your quasi-liberal boot in recent months. We watched how you trample women with horses, how you block the bank accounts of single parents so that they can’t even pay their children’s education and medicine, that they can’t pay utilities, mortgages for their homes.”
“To you,” he continues, speaking to Trudeau, “these may be liberal methods; for many citizens of the world, it is a dictatorship of the worst kind. Rest assured that the citizens of the world, united, can stop any regime that wants to destroy the freedom of citizens, either by bombs or harmful pharmaceutical products.”
Kolakusic, having once lived under a Communist regime in Croatia, is more than likely only too familiar with authoritarian regimes, their consequences, and the grievances of everyday citizens. And like many who have survived Communist dictatorships, it is apparent that he shares the disdain over Trudeau’s use of Emergency Powers to target peaceful protesters who only wanted their rights back.
And indeed, Kolakusic isn’t the only MEP to suggest Trudeau is acting like a dictator.
“[Trudeau’s] exactly like a tyrant, like a dictator. He’s like Ceaușescu in Romania,” said Romanian MEP Cristian Terhes last month.
In England, too, the response has been no better. During his first trip to the UK following the Freedom Convoy, Trudeau was greeted by protesters brandishing “F*** Trudeau” flags in front of PM Boris Johnson’s office, forcing him to sneak in through the back.
While it appeared that Trudeau was headed back to the EU for more PR after his first successful glam tour, the global community is done with his façade. Trudeau is a joke on the international stage.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced on March 21 the imposition of visa restrictions on a group of Chinese officials accused of being involved in or responsible for human rights violations against religious and ethnic minorities. The US official said he would use diplomatic and economic means to “promote accountability” for human rights abuses, such as alleged efforts by Chinese officials to “harass, intimidate, surveil and abduct” members of minority groups, including some individuals who had sought shelter in the US.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said a day later that Beijing will reciprocate a response if the sanctions against Chinese officials are not lifted. The spokesperson expressed strong opposition to sanctions that seriously violate China’s sovereignty and stressed that Washington needs to “stop slandering China for no reason,” pointing to “political prejudices and lies” in many of Washington’s statements against China.
The US is essentially outraged at China for its clear and consistent stance on the Ukraine crisis, which has not changed despite sustained pressure. In fact, it shows more desperation on the part of Washington, especially as traditional allies like Saudi Arabia and the UAE have snubbed both Blinken and US President Joe Biden whilst maintaining close ties with Moscow.
Biden wants China to abandon its balanced policy towards Kiev and Moscow, even though Washington makes no such demand on Turkey, a NATO member that has not closed its airspace or sanctioned Russia as it too opts to balance its relations. What is more absurd is the belief that Washington thinks Beijing would abandon Moscow despite maintaining pressure on the country through the AUKUS and QUAD military formations.
Essentially, due to Biden’s failure to even control traditional allies like Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Turkey, he wants to somehow save face by trying to show his country that he will punish the Chinese for their defiance of not turning against Moscow. In this way, the visa restrictions are essentially meaningless for Chinese officials who never planned to travel to the US to begin with, and therefore they just look all the more ridiculous.
Even if there was no political pretext to accuse Beijing of human rights violations, then another pretext would have been elevated as the current sanctions are motivated by nothing more than making Biden appear that he is punishing China. Beijing will undoubtedly commensurate countermeasures, but the question is whether they will be reciprocated in equal measure or escalate the situation further.
What is certain though is that China will continue to act consistently on the Ukraine issue despite US attempts to push China against Russia whilst simultaneously pressuring the Asian country through the two multilateral military blocs.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on March 21 that a “verbal condemnation” of Russia by China is “vital.”
“Our view is that verbal condemnation of the actions of President Putin and the actions of [the] Russian military is important and vital, and it’s about what side of history you want to stand on at in this point in time,” Psaki said, adding: “where [do] you want to be as the history books are written.”
However, as former US diplomat Alberto M. Fernandez wrote in his MEMRI column, “Rather than an appeal to history, or even to morality, American policymakers would have been better served by an appeal to Chinese national interests (the same applies, in different circumstances, to understanding Saudi or Indian national interests).” As he highlights, Chinese history does not write about the Americans favorably to begin with, which is why such an appeal to history is naïve.
In fact, a bigger concern for China than appealing to the US’ writing of history are the allegations of chemical weapon laboratories in Ukraine, especially after the White House accused Beijing of repeating “these conspiracy theories.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed that it obtained evidence that the US spent more than $200 million on biological laboratories in Ukraine. It can be assumed that Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov presented their evidence to the Chinese Ambassador to Russia Zhang Hanhui during their meeting on March 21. China has repeatedly demanded that the US be fully transparent about the operation of biological laboratories abroad, yet the Americans continue to deny the charges.
None-the-less, the very fact that the US believes it can turn China against Russia whilst maintaining pressure via AUKUS and QUAD demonstrates a White House far removed from political realism. Despite snubbing’s from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, NATO member Turkey defying sanctions against Russia, and India open to ruble-rupee payments for oil, Washington is increasingly frustrated that it cannot completely isolate Moscow. In this way, a young country like the US appealing to the multi-millennia Chinese civilization to consider history is nothing more then a desperate, if not pathetic attempt to woo Beijing away from Moscow.
Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
On Wednesday, former Bill and Hillary Clinton regime secretary of state Madeleine Albright passed away at age-84.
She won’t be missed.
Paul Craig Roberts noted that she “escape(d) the hangman’s noose” — for the worst of high crimes too grievous to ignore.
Years earlier, retired academic John Ryan called her a “baleful specter who haunted us almost as destructively as the current crop of malevolent functionaries” infesting Washington.
Instead of having “the decency to disappear…she (collected) honorary degrees” from academia in the empire of lies and abroad.
“(N)o one (took) time to put an effective spoke into her wretched wheel of legacy.”
As Clinton crime family UN envoy and secretary of state, she was complicit in a near-decade of crimes of war and against humanity.
It included the rape, destruction and dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia.
Notably, 23 years ago on March 24, 1999, the Bill and Hillary Clinton regime’s so-called Operation Noble Anvil (sic) began.
For 78 days, it continued relentlessly through June 10.
Around 600 aircraft flew about 3,000 sorties.
Thousands of tons of ordnance were dropped, as well as hundreds of ground-launched cruise missiles.
The ferocity terror-bombing over the time it lasted was unprecedented.
Nearly everything was targeted for maximum destruction and disruption, including:
power plants
factories
civilian transportation
telecommunications facilities
roads, bridges and rail lines
fuel depots
schools
a TV station
China’s Belgrade embassy
hospitals
government offices
churches
historic landmarks and more.
The former Yugoslavia ceased to exist.
The bloody hands of the Clinton crime family and Albright were all over what happened.
Commenting on the atrocity, the late Nobel laureate Harold Pinter called it “barbaric (and despicable), another blatant and brutal assertion of US power, using NATO as its missile (to consolidate) American domination of Europe.”
Throughout their time in office, the Clintons and Albright were indifferent to human suffering while consistently supporting wrong over right.
On her watch, the Clinton regime installed US-trained Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) General Paul Kagame in power.
Notably it was to use country as a platform to plunder neighboring resource-rich Congo (DRC).
The Clintons and Albright bore full responsibility for the 1994 Rwandan massacre that was unrelated to a fabricated Tutsi/Hutu conflict.
Enforcing genocidal sanctions on Iraq throughout the 1990s, Albright shared guilt with the Clintons for the deaths of about 1.5 Iraqis.
Most were young children. Around 7,000 died monthly.
Former UN humanitarian coordinator Dennis Halliday resigned in protest.
So did his successor Hans von Sponeck for the same reason, as well as World Food Program head in Iraq at the time, Jutta Burghardt.
They refused to be part of what they called “genocide.”
Notably in his resignation remarks, Halliday said the following:
“We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral.”
Two days before resigning, von Sponeck said the following:
“As a UN official, I should not be expected to be silent to that which I recognize as a true human tragedy that needs to be ended.”
“How long should the civilian population, which is totally innocent on all of this, be exposed to such punishment for something they have never done?”
Throughout the 1990s to the 2003 Iraq war and its aftermath, the cradle of civilization was erased.
“Shock therapy” followed “shock and awe.”
So did repression, daily killings, deprivation, mass detentions, torture and other crimes against humanity.
Iraq was destroyed in similar fashion to what happened to the former Yugoslavia.
Albright shared blame for two of history’s greatest crimes.
Supporting aggressive use of NATO in defiance of international law, she was part of a regime that prioritized war-making and its mass slaughter and destruction.
In 1996, 60 Minutes host Lesley Stahl asked her the following:
“We have heard that a half million children have died” in Iraq since 1991.
“(That’s more children than died in Hiroshima…(I)s the price worth it?”
Albright replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.”
Support for genocidal high crimes defined her involvement in the Clinton regime’s war on humanity.
In her 2003 memoirs, Albright said the following about her 60 Minutes remarks:
“I should have answered the question by reframing it and pointing out the inherent flaws in the premise behind it.”
“Saddam Hussein could have prevented any child from suffering simply by meeting his obligations.”
Not only were the above remarks made 7 years after her 60 Minutes interview, “reframing — as she put it— wouldn’t have infused life into the corpses of 1.5 million Iraqis who perished on her watch by sanctions war.
As Clinton regime UN envoy in 1993, she was also infamous for saying the following to General Colin Powell during a White House situation room session:
“What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”
Later in his own memoir, Powell said:
“I thought I would have an aneurysm” on hearing what she said, adding:
Albright advocated use of US military personnel as “toy soldiers to be moved around on some global chessboard.”
Powell had his own cross to bear in the run-up to the Bush/Cheney regime 2003 Iraq war.
Knowing that Saddam eliminated all WMDs in the country years earlier, he lied, saying:
“(F)acts and Iraq’s behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction (sic).”
“(E)very statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources (sic).
“What we’re giving you are the facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence (sic).”
“The gravity of this moment is matched by the gravity of the threat that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction pose to the world (sic).”
Intelligence about Iraqi WMDs revealed their elimination. Powell pretended otherwise.
As the saying goes, the rest is history.
The same reality applies to Albright’s bloodstained hands.
Commenting on her death, the infamous NYT suppressed all of the above damning facts.
It failed to reveal the true measure of the woman behind the phony facade of diplomatic dignity — an unapologetic war criminal to the day she passed.
President Biden is accusing Russian forces in Ukraine of committing war crimes by engaging in brutal attacks on civilians. What he is referring to is a longtime principle of warfare in which military forces battle military forces and do not knowingly target civilians with death and destruction.
Meanwhile, the media is reporting that Russian forces are becoming increasingly stalemated on the battlefield, unable to complete their conquest of Ukraine and effect the regime change that they seek within the Ukrainian government. If Russia fails in its effort to bring regime change to Ukraine, that would enable Ukraine to be absorbed into NATO, the corrupt dinosauric bureaucratic entity from the old Cold War racket. That, in turn, would enable the Pentagon to achieve its goal of installing its nuclear missiles pointed at Russia along Russia’s border.
WIth the relentless pressure that the U.S. government and its NATO cohorts are putting on Putin, including with sanctions that are designed to kill Russian civilians, a question must be asked: If Putin’s back is to the wall, if Russia is faced with defeat in Ukraine, if the Russian economy is disintegrating, if the Russian people are faced with death by starvation or massive impoverishment, and if the Russian government is close to collapsing, would Putin resort to dropping a nuclear bomb on Kiev in order to bring a quick end to the war?
If he were to do so, there is no doubt what the response of U.S. officials, the mainstream press, and American statists would be. They would exclaim, and rightly so, that Russia had just committed a massive war crime by targeting and killing a massive number of civilians with a nuclear bomb.
But there would be one big problem staring U.S. officials and the mainstream press, along with American statists, in the face: The U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which knowingly and intentionally targeted, killed, and injured an untold number of Japanese civilians during World War II.
Ever since those bombings, U.S. officials, the U.S. mainstream press, and American statists have maintained that the bombings were justified because they “shortened the war.” Their argument has always been that the lives of thousands of American soldiers were saved by bringing about a quick surrender by Japan.
Here at FFF, we have always opposed that reasoning. In war, soldiers die. That’s just the way of war. To knowingly and intentionally kill innocent women, children, seniors, and other civilians so that soldiers could live was, well, quite immoral and, yes, a war crime.
But given the continued support by U.S. officials, the mainstream press, and American statists of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what would they say if Russia were to say the same thing — that its nuclear bombing of Kiev saved the lives of Russian soldiers by bringing about a quick surrender of Ukraine?
My hunch is that U.S. officials, the mainstream press, and American statists would take a different position than they do with the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think they would say, “Our atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a good thing but your atomic bombing of Kiev was a bad thing. That’s because we are good and you are bad.”
Why do I reach that conclusion? Well, for one, isn’t that what they are saying about the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan compared to the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Aren’t they essentially saying, “Our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were good while your invasion of Ukraine is bad. That’s because we are good and you are bad”?
Or consider the dark-side activities engaged in by the U.S. national-security establishment, such as state-sponsored assassinations, torture, kidnappings, secret torture-and-prison camps, indefinite detention, coups, massive secret surveillance, military tribunals, and alliances with dictatorial regimes. Don’t U.S. officials, the mainstream press, and American statists say to the Russians (and the Chinese, North Koreans, Saudis, Cubans, etc.): “Our dark-side activities are good while yours are bad. That’s because we are good and you are bad”?
The crisis in Ukraine provides the American people with a tremendous opportunity to engage in some serious soul-searching by looking at ourselves and our very own government. Looking at what the Russian regime (and other totalitarian, authoritarian, or communist regimes) can provide a revealing mirror into our own government, specifically the national-security establishment part of the government.
There is no greater benefit we could provide ourselves, our families, our nation, and the world than to lead the way toward a free, peaceful, harmonious, and prosperous society here at home. That necessarily entails restoring our nation’s founding principles of a limited-government republic, a non-interventionist foreign policy, and a restored regard for the principles in the Bill of Rights.
A reader sent me this opinion piece published in the British Medical Journal last week. The authors argue that evidence based medicine (EBM) has been corrupted by corporate interests, failed regulation and commercialisation of academia.
The article begins by discussing how EBM was meant to improve medicine but as pharmaceutical documents have been released we realise that this remains an illusion.
The advent of evidence based medicine was a paradigm shift intended to provide a solid scientific foundation for medicine. The validity of this new paradigm, however, depends on reliable data from clinical trials, most of which are conducted by the pharmaceutical industry and reported in the names of senior academics. The release into the public domain of previously confidential pharmaceutical industry documents has given the medical community valuable insight into the degree to which industry sponsored clinical trials are misrepresented. Until this problem is corrected, evidence based medicine will remain an illusion.
They then look at how large corporations have dominated the market and in doing so have slowed scientific progress by supressing information and data and failing to report adverse events.
The philosophy of critical rationalism, advanced by the philosopher Karl Popper, famously advocated for the integrity of science and its role in an open, democratic society. A science of real integrity would be one in which practitioners are careful not to cling to cherished hypotheses and take seriously the outcome of the most stringent experiments.5 This ideal is, however, threatened by corporations, in which financial interests trump the common good. Medicine is largely dominated by a small number of very large pharmaceutical companies that compete for market share, but are effectively united in their efforts to expanding that market. The short term stimulus to biomedical research because of privatisation has been celebrated by free market champions, but the unintended, long term consequences for medicine have been severe. Scientific progress is thwarted by the ownership of data and knowledge because industry suppresses negative trial results, fails to report adverse events, and does not share raw data with the academic research community. Patients die because of the adverse impact of commercial interests on the research agenda, universities, and regulators.
Universities were once respected institutions but by seeking funding from the pharmaceutical industry, they have become corrupted.
The pharmaceutical industry’s responsibility to its shareholders means that priority must be given to their hierarchical power structures, product loyalty, and public relations propaganda over scientific integrity. Although universities have always been elite institutions prone to influence through endowments, they have long laid claim to being guardians of truth and the moral conscience of society. But in the face of inadequate government funding, they have adopted a neo-liberal market approach, actively seeking pharmaceutical funding on commercial terms. As a result, university departments become instruments of industry: through company control of the research agenda and ghostwriting of medical journal articles and continuing medical education, academics become agents for the promotion of commercial products.6 When scandals involving industry-academe partnership are exposed in the mainstream media, trust in academic institutions is weakened and the vision of an open society is betrayed.
Academics no longer succeed because of their achievements but because of what they can offer to the pharmaceutical industry.
The corporate university also compromises the concept of academic leadership. Deans who reached their leadership positions by virtue of distinguished contributions to their disciplines have in places been replaced with fundraisers and academic managers, who are forced to demonstrate their profitability or show how they can attract corporate sponsors. In medicine, those who succeed in academia are likely to be key opinion leaders (KOLs in marketing parlance), whose careers can be advanced through the opportunities provided by industry. Potential KOLs are selected based on a complex array of profiling activities carried out by companies, for example, physicians are selected based on their influence on prescribing habits of other physicians. KOLs are sought out by industry for this influence and for the prestige that their university affiliation brings to the branding of the company’s products. As well paid members of pharmaceutical advisory boards and speakers’ bureaus, KOLs present results of industry trials at medical conferences and in continuing medical education. Instead of acting as independent, disinterested scientists and critically evaluating a drug’s performance, they become what marketing executives refer to as “product champions.”
Ironically, industry sponsored KOLs appear to enjoy many of the advantages of academic freedom, supported as they are by their universities, the industry, and journal editors for expressing their views, even when those views are incongruent with the real evidence. While universities fail to correct misrepresentations of the science from such collaborations, critics of industry face rejections from journals, legal threats, and the potential destruction of their careers. This uneven playing field is exactly what concerned Popper when he wrote about suppression and control of the means of science communication. The preservation of institutions designed to further scientific objectivity and impartiality (i.e., public laboratories, independent scientific periodicals and congresses) is entirely at the mercy of political and commercial power; vested interest will always override the rationality of evidence.
They discuss how the regulators have been captured without any questions raised by governments.
Regulators receive funding from industry and use industry funded and performed trials to approve drugs, without in most cases seeing the raw data. What confidence do we have in a system in which drug companies are permitted to “mark their own homework” rather than having their products tested by independent experts as part of a public regulatory system? Unconcerned governments and captured regulators are unlikely to initiate necessary change to remove research from industry altogether and clean up publishing models that depend on reprint revenue, advertising, and sponsorship revenue.
Their suggested reforms are probably what most naïve people already think happens but unfortunately doesn’t.
Our proposals for reforms include: liberation of regulators from drug company funding; taxation imposed on pharmaceutical companies to allow public funding of independent trials; and, perhaps most importantly, anonymised individual patient level trial data posted, along with study protocols, on suitably accessible websites so that third parties, self-nominated or commissioned by health technology agencies, could rigorously evaluate the methodology and trial results. With the necessary changes to trial consent forms, participants could require trialists to make the data freely available. The open and transparent publication of data are in keeping with our moral obligation to trial participants—real people who have been involved in risky treatment and have a right to expect that the results of their participation will be used in keeping with principles of scientific rigour. Industry concerns about privacy and intellectual property rights should not hold sway.
Overall, a scathing opinion piece which highlights some truths which many of us recognise but which the majority would call you crazy for suggesting. Whenever I have tried to discuss how the pharmaceutical companies “mark their own homework”, the common response I get is “rubbish, the regulators conduct their own trials to see how safe and effective the vaccines are”.
If more people understood how the system worked then we wouldn’t be in the situation we are today. However, that is easier said than done when governments and the media have also been captured along with the regulators and academia.
For quite some time the British have accepted that British Jewish organizations have hijacked the political discourse. As has happened in other Western countries, the British political establishment has engaged is a relentless rant against antisemitsm. Sometime the focus drifts for a day or two. An alleged ‘Russian nerve gas attack’ provided a 48 hour pause. Occasionally we bomb Arabs in the name of ‘human intervention’ only to realize a day or two later that we have, once again, followed a premeditated foreign agenda. But, somehow, we always return to the antisemitism debate, as if our media and politicians are a herd of flies gravitating to a pile of poop. … continue
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On March 23, PM Justin Trudeau was called a dictator in front of the entire European Union over his response to the Freedom Convoy.
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