From the 1950s through the 1980s the CIA overthrew democratically elected governments and assassinated leaders in the U.S. and around the world in the name of fighting communism.
After the fall of communism, the CIA pivoted to fighting terrorism. After 9/11 their mission expanded considerably to include a global network of black sites where they conducted torture. They also engage in covert military operations on the ground inside a wide range of countries.
More recently, the CIA has expanded their mission yet again. We have evidence of coordination between the U.S. Department of Defense, Fauci, the EcoHealth Alliance, bioweapons labs in the U.S., and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (a Chinese bioweapons lab) to conduct gain-of-function research. This has all of the hallmarks of a CIA operation.
One could make the case that the CIA is now fighting viruses/pandemics in the name of national defense. But this effort CREATED the chimera virus that has killed more Americans than all foreign wars combined. Since the chimera virus was released, governments across the developed world, Pharma, and Big Tech have all worked together to control the message, surveil and censor the population, and smash any dissent. Again this reeks of CIA involvement.
So my question is, who/what exactly is the CIA fighting these days? My hunch is that the answer is us. Not just the medical freedom movement (although we are certainly targeted) but the general public. This seems like a class war and the CIA’s new mission is not to defend the U.S. per se but rather to defend the global ruling class from the peasants who might overthrow them.
February 10, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CIA, Covid-19, United States |
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) did it again.
The FDA last week granted its seal of approval for a ghost vaccine that is unavailable in the United States — and it did so using a preordained process that made a mockery of “science” and of “regulation.”
Days later, the CDC backed the FDA’s decision, using similarly flawed data and reasoning.
The approval of Moderna’s Spikevax COVID-19 vaccine was an even greater travesty than the FDA’s approval last August of Pfizer’s Comirnaty shot.
That’s because Moderna has been even more secretive than Pfizer about its trial data, and because Moderna’s shot is linked to an even higher rate of heart disease than Pfizer’s.
The FDA’s approval of the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine led people to believe they would get a fully licensed, FDA-approved vaccine — when in fact they were still getting the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine distributed under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).
People can ask for the Comirnaty vaccine as often as they like — but it is not being distributed in the U.S. The Comirnaty vaccine is supposed to be the same formulation as the old Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, but the vials labeled “Comirnaty” are in a legal class of their own.
Why this Kabuki theater?
Because any adult who is harmed or killed as a side effect of an “FDA-approved” vaccine can sue the manufacturer. But if you are harmed in exactly the same way by an EUA vaccine, you are out of luck — the manufacturer and everyone in the chain of delivery has full immunity from lawsuits. The law depends on the label.
Now Moderna has the same legal advantage as Pfizer. Its “Spikevax” is the same formula as the old Moderna vaccine, but only if you are dosed with a vial bearing the “Spikevax” label can you sue for bodily harm. So, of course, the Moderna vaccine continues to be distributed, but Spikevax is not available in the U.S.
The approval of Spikevax is not just a legal sham. It’s also a scientific sham. FDA approval is supposed to include long-term safety testing, but there is no long-term data available for a product that has been in existence less than a year.
The FDA hearings on the licensing of Spikevax were one-sided and dominated by self-congratulatory rhetoric. They also raised more questions than answers.
Questions for the FDA
- Besides offering publicity to the manufacturer and sowing confusion in the public mind, why would the manufacturers want FDA approval for a vaccine that is not available in the U.S.?
- Neither Pfizer nor Moderna explicitly specified the content of their placebos, but a published review claims they were simple saline. If this is the case, why is the rate of medical problems following injection with a “placebo” so much higher with Moderna’s placebo compared to Pfizer’s placebo?
For example, 18 people out of 15,000 in the Moderna placebo group died before the start of the trial (2 weeks from the second vaccination), while only 4 people out of 22,000 who received Pfizer’s placebo dose died in a comparable period. There were 31 “severe adverse events” in the placebo group of the Moderna trial, and zero in the (larger) Pfizer placebo group. What was in that “placebo” that killed 18 people and sent 31 to the hospital?
- The FDA relies on the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) to help assess the safety of vaccines before approval. There was an animated debate at the VRBPAC meeting for the Pfizer vaccine. Why was VRBPAC not invited to convene for the Moderna vaccine? The answer is given in this letter of approval from the FDA to Moderna (January 31, 2022):
“We did not refer your application to the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee because our review of information submitted in your BLA [Biologics License Application], including the clinical study design and trial results, did not raise concerns or controversial issues that would have benefited from an advisory committee discussion.”
- The FDA plainly states that it limited the scope of its analysis to the trial data alone. Why isn’t the FDA interested in the enormous amount of data that has become available in the last year?
Safety: Did FDA cook the books?
Deaths and disabilities associated with the mRNA “vaccines” have occurred with shocking frequency, 90 times as many as the worst vaccine in the past. There have been more than 1 million COVID vaccine reactions reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), compared to 11,000 for the worst vaccine in 2020 (Shingrix).
There were more than twice as many deaths related to the COVID vaccines this year as the sum total of all vaccine deaths in the 30-year history of VAERS.
To rig the approval process in favor of such a product, the FDA needed to rewrite the rule book. The agency did this with a new statistical criterion, masking murder with mathematics. I am grateful to Matthew Crawford for having decoded the algebra and sounded the alarm.
The safety criterion chosen by the FDA is an obscure computation called PRR, which stands for Proportional Reporting Ratio. As the name implies, it is based on RATIOS of different event types and is utterly blind to the ABSOLUTE RATE of such events.
PRR measures the distribution of different kinds of adverse events, e.g. blood clots, heart attacks and deaths. If those ratios are severely out of line with the great variety of vaccine reactions in the past, PRR would detect that.
For example, if the new vaccines caused an extraordinary risk of myocarditis, but everything else was low, then PRR would flag that. But if myocarditis was just one risk among many that have been reported from past vaccines, then PRR would not pick that up.
The real scandal is that PRR is blind to the absolute risk numbers. PRR is defined in such a way as to look for unusual PATTERNS of adverse events, but it is completely insensitive to unusual RATES of adverse events.
Of course, it is the rates and not the patterns that are of primary concern, and the PRR is designed NOT to reflect that.
For example, suppose we have two vaccines:
- Vaccine A has 1 reported death per million vaccinations, 3 reported heart attacks per million, and 20 reported headaches per million.
- Vaccine B has 1 reported death per hundred vaccinations, 3 reported heart attacks per hundred, and 20 reported headaches per hundred.
Vaccine A is quite safe, and vaccine B is extremely dangerous. And yet the formula for PRR will produce the same result for vaccine A and B!
Clearly, PRR is not an appropriate criterion for evaluating the safety of any particular vaccine. Did the FDA use PRR in order to cook the books?
In Moderna’s own trials, 1.3% of vaccine recipients had a reaction to the vaccine that was severe enough to require medical attention. The following possible side effects were listed in information given to doctors:
“Anaphylaxis and other severe allergic reactions, myocarditis, pericarditis, and syncope have been reported following administration of the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine during mass vaccination outside of clinical trials.”
Off with his head! — the CDC’s ACIP hearings
In Alice’s Wonderland, the Red Queen’s justice began with the execution, then there was a verdict — and finally a trial.
The FDA hearing was followed by a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which reports to the CDC.
The committee on Feb. 4 voted to recommend the Moderna Spikevax. Only after that action step had been secured did the committee hear testimony from the Public Health Agency of Canada that Moderna’s vaccine was associated with a myocarditis risk five times higher than Pfizer’s.
Questions for the CDC
- All-cause mortality was equal in both placebo and vaccine groups (16 deaths in each). In the midst of a pandemic, Moderna’s vaccine demonstrated no survival benefit. This should have been enough to end any further consideration of approval.
- We have detailed data on myocarditis from decades of past history. One-fourth of myocarditis patients are dead within 5 years, but the same study reports that if the myocarditis is caused by human immunodeficiency virus, then three-fourths die in the same 5 years.
We have no long-term data on vaccine-induced myocarditis, but we do have some 6-month data, which show 39% of cases still had their activity restricted by their doctors, 20% were still on heart medication, 32% still reported chest pain, 22% still had shortness of breath, 22% had palpitations and 25% still reported fatigue. Thirteen vaccine recipients died. (All these numbers were presented at the ACIP hearing on Feb. 4.)
Why should we have confidence that the course of vaccine-induced myocarditis will be much less severe than other forms of the disease?
- The Moderna trial, like the Pfizer trial, was limited to healthy people, mostly young, with no pre-existing problems. Pregnant women were explicitly excluded. Why is the vaccine being approved as safe for everyone, including diabetics and immune-compromised, elderly and pregnant women?
- When mRNA vaccines were approved on an emergency basis, the FDA promised to track all safety concerns with a new cell phone app called V-Safe. Why are the results of V-Safe being withheld from the public?
- The FDA was considering approval of Moderna’s vaccine in January 2022. There was a full year’s experience with side effects reported from nearly 200 million doses of the Moderna vaccine in the U.S. alone. But the FDA limited its consideration to the 15,000 subjects who were in the Moderna trial, ending March 26, 2021. Why was this huge trove of data on vaccine safety not reviewed by the FDA?
- Yes, we understand that the vaccine doesn’t become fully effective until 2 weeks after the second shot. But is that a reason to exclude from consideration the damage that is inflicted by enhanced vulnerability to disease during those two weeks, or, for that matter, the four weeks between shots? These have been counted as diseases of the “unvaccinated,” but in fact, people in this stage of treatment are much more vulnerable than the truly unvaccinated.
- France and Germany do not recommend Moderna’s vaccination for young people, presumably because the Moderna vaccine is associated with a higher rate of myocarditis than the Pfizer vaccine. How did our FDA come to a different conclusion?
- Anaphylaxis following vaccination is an immediate, life-threatening and an undeniable consequence of the vaccine. The CDC claimed the rate of anaphylaxis is 6 per 1 million.
However, in March of 2021, an examination of anaphylaxis following mRNA vaccines revealed a much higher incidence of this adverse event. In fact, 9 of 38,971 Moderna vaccine recipients suffered documented anaphylaxis. This equates to 230 per million, or 38 times higher than the CDC estimate.
Efficacy — but at what cost?
The proper measure of the efficacy of any medication is how it affects all aspects of a patient’s health. But in evaluating the Moderna vaccine, the FDA looked only at its effect on COVID.
There are early but disturbing indications that vaccination worldwide has had dramatic effects on other aspects of health, unrelated to COVID. Insurance company trade journals report that they are paying life insurance claims for adults 18-64 years of age at a rate 40% higher than during any normal year.
This number from OneAmerica (Indianapolis) has been echoed by other studies in Europe. A leaked spreadsheet from the Defense Medical Epidemiological Database showed that incidences of many medical problems in the U.S. military surged in this year of vaccination. For example, heart attacks were up 343%, cancers up 218%, among many other disorders.
Could it be that the vaccines have had a small benefit for COVID severity and disastrous impact on other aspects of human health?
We now have some real-world experience with the efficacy of vaccines. For example, we know the virus mutated to a more contagious, less lethal form. Omicron is now the dominant form of the virus in the U.S. and most other parts of the world today.
The Omicron mutations are concentrated in the spike protein — the only part of the virus to which the vaccinated population has immunity. This suggests the virus is mutating in response to the vaccine, and mutations are an important factor affecting efficacy in the long run.
Nevertheless, the FDA considered efficacy data predominantly from the first five months of data (through March 26, 2021) in making its decision to fully license Spikevax, with an absolute cutoff in November, before Omicron became dominant.
More questions
- Almost all subjects in the original Moderna trial who received placebo initially were subsequently given the vaccine. How will we ever know the long-term effects of the vaccine if we have no controls with which to compare?
- Why do CDC studies of death rates based on vaccination status differ so markedly from the same question asked by independent groups in other countries?
Here, for example, is a report from Public Health Scotland stating that vaccination increases vulnerability to Omicron. Here is a similar report from England. This study shows countries with higher vaccination rates tend to have higher rates of COVID, and this one confirms the same result for U.S. states.
- We are now in an era dominated by the Omicron variant, against which all the vaccines seem much less effective. But even “follow-up data” was analyzed only through March 26, 2021, nine months before Omicron took over. Why did the FDA base its decision on data only from older variants?
- The secondary efficacy endpoint was the prevention of severe COVID-19. Now that it is accepted that there is little, if any, protective effect of mRNA vaccines from infection, the prevention of severe disease should be the primary focus of approval determination.
Moderna claims its vaccine efficacy is an astonishing 98.2% in preventing severe COVID-19 (Table 8). Pfizer’s was 96.7% (Table S6).
The reason for the calculated difference in efficacy between these two products was not from a lower incidence of severe disease in the vaccine arm of Moderna’s trial (it was lower in Pfizer’s trial). It was because the incidence of severe disease in Moderna’s placebo group was much higher than in Pfizer’s.
Severe COVID-19 in Pfizer’s placebo group occurred in 30 participants out of 23,0379. In Moderna’s, severe disease occurred in 106 participants out of 14,164 that received a placebo. Why was the incidence of severe COVID-19 nearly six times higher in Moderna’s placebo group than Pfizer’s?
Postscript: Failure was never an option
In America, why are clinical trials for new drugs run by the same companies that own the drugs, and will profit from them if the trial is successful?
It’s a glaring conflict of interest, but necessary within a capitalist system. Since the trials cost, typically, hundreds of millions of dollars, only the company that will profit from the drug is motivated to invest such huge sums in testing.
In the case of the COVID vaccines, however, the development and the trials were both publicly funded. There was no excuse for contracting the same organization both to develop and test their own product.
Moderna’s development cost was funded through Operation Warp Speed in the U.S. and Pfizer through the German government. Now, the companies are reaping windfall profits, though they risked no money of their own.
This leaves us wondering, did our government ever want a fair and unbiased evaluation of the COVID vaccines? Or — after a full year of telling the public that vaccines were the only path out of the COVID crisis — did NIH feel they could not risk the possibility that the trials might fail?
There were no animal tests. There was no time to experimentally optimize dosage and delivery. They had to guess right the first time.
Maybe they thought this is what the exigency of a pandemic required — but please don’t call it “science.”
Josh Mitteldorf, Ph.D., has a background in theoretical physics. Since the 1990s, he is best known for his contributions to the biology of aging, including many articles and two books.
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
February 10, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA, United States |
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IN the 1984 Unicef State of the World’s Children report, its director general James Grant talked of how the developing world was lagging 50 years behind the industrialised world in terms of child mortality rates. Explaining how the industrialised world had succeeded in reducing its own child mortality rates, he acknowledged that ‘the mainspring of this great leap forward was rising living standards – better food, water, housing, sanitation, education and income’.
Although the spread of maternal and child health care undoubtedly played an important role, health technology and medical services played only a secondary part, and the report stated that effective vaccines for measles became available only ‘after child deaths from measles had been reduced to almost zero by better nutrition’.
Yet despite malnutrition being the spectre that loomed large in the Unicef reports, Grant was quick to explain vaccines could help with that as well: ‘All infections are nutritional setbacks. Often the climb back to normal weight and growth takes several weeks. Immunisation against the six main infectious diseases of childhood would therefore be a partial “immunisation” against malnutrition itself.’
It was not long after the retirement of Dr Halfdan Mahler, WHO’s director general from 1973-1988, that Unicef, the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) and other ‘partners’ launched the Children’s Vaccine Initiative (CVI) to encourage developing countries to self-finance their Child Survival Revolution vaccination programmes. This was a significant change of direction. No longer would vaccines be interim aid schemes: they were to be elevated to a strategic priority and meagre health budgets would be redirected to pay for them. The justification made was ‘that the development, introduction, and widespread use of vaccines in industrialised and developing countries have resulted in considerable progress against some of the most devastating infections of humankind.’
Today, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), contrary to the admission in the 1984 Unicef report that vaccines had only a secondary impact on child mortality, claims that the improved socio-economic conditions in industrialised countries only had an indirect impact on disease.
It is more than 20 years since the RF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) joined forces, using the World Bank to create the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), now known as GAVI, The Vaccine Alliance. In the mid-1990s, with new leaders at the helm of both Unicef and the WHO, Dr Seth Berkley, the RF’s associate director of health sciences, proposed to James Wolfensohn, the Rockefeller Foundation trustee appointed to the Presidency of the World Bank (WB) in 1995, that the WB and the RF stage ‘a coup’.
Berkley wanted to replace the CVI, which was failing to live up to the expectations of the vaccine manufacturers: ‘We will have an outside body that can bring in industry [which the World Health Organisation cannot legally do], do advocacy and build a truly international alliance’.
GAVI was officially created ‘to save children’s lives and protect people’s health through the widespread use of safe vaccines, with a particular focus on the needs of developing countries’. Structured as a public-private partnership, largely funded by BMGF and vaccine manufacturers, GAVI’s purpose was reverse the stagnation of the vaccine market, shaping it so more new and underused vaccines could be sold to the developing world.
Until 2017, the WHO modelled vaccine impact estimates for GAVI. However as Gavi’s questions became more strategy and policy-oriented, with a need ‘to better account for uncertainty’ and to be able ‘to estimate the vaccine impact more accurately striving for the highest level of scientific rigour’, GAVI and the Gates Foundation outsourced this modelling work to a consortium led by Professor Neil Ferguson.
The unique selling point of vaccines is that, as products targeted at healthy people, virtually every person on the planet becomes a potential customer and, even better, a repeat customer. Vaccines represent opportunities for continuous growth and profit, unrivalled in the pharmaceutical sector even before Covid-19.
In 2011 when Seth Berkley left the RF to become GAVI’s CEO to oversee the implementation of its ‘Decade of the Vaccine’, vaccines accounted for only 3 per cent of all pharmaceutical sales. But they stood apart from all other pharmaceuticals in one significant way: their sales were growing at twice the rate of any other pharmaceutical product, at 10-15 per cent per annum compared with 5-7 per cent for other products.
A 2013 survey of industry trends prepared by WHO health economist Miloud Kaddar predicted that the global market for vaccines would become an engine of growth for the industry, increasing in market value to $100billion by 2025. In a single year the Covid-19 vaccines alone have eclipsed those projections, generating $150billion revenue for the financial year 2021-2022 according to the World Economic Forum (WEF).
The revenue growth that Kaddar’s survey found didn’t, however, come from developing countries. It came from persuading all countries, whether industrialised or developing, to target 90 per cent coverage rates for all vaccines on their national immunisation schedules. When he conducted his survey Kaddar found 82 per cent of all sales were in fact to the 15 per cent of the global population living in industrialised countries where living standards are highest and where well-nourished populations have the lowest disease burden. The portion of the world GAVI was meant to be targeting remained a largely untapped market.
GAVI’s first task was to increase surveillance of vaccination coverage, which is the number of people in a population who have been inoculated with specific vaccines as recommended in the immunisation schedules. In 2004, for example, in an effort to hit coverage targets, the UK introduced financial incentives to encourage GP practices to increase vaccination rates for three childhood vaccines and seasonal influenza for four at-risk groups.
Additional financial incentives were offered to NHS Hospital Trusts in 2016 to increase influenza vaccine uptake by frontline staff. Unlike the threatened Covid vaccine mandate, flu vaccination is not compulsory but strongly encouraged as evidenced by NHS England’s suggested incentives: ‘Staff appreciate recognition for their contributions to the health of others and including an incentive or reward aspect to a staff flu vaccination programme can be effective. A small threat can have a big impact. Even something as simple as a sticker to show they have had their jab can be worn as a sign of pride and signal to others that they should have the flu vaccination.’
It heralded the bribery and coercion to come with the Government’s determination to achieve population level Covid vaccine take up.
February 9, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, Gates Foundation, GAVI, Rockefeller Foundation |
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On the morning of January 25, 1993, a man named Mir Amal Kansi appeared outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where he began assassinating people who were driving their cars into the facility. He ended up killing two CIA employees and wounding three others.
Four years later, FBI agents arrested Kansi in Pakistan and brought him back to the United States.
Kansi was prosecuted in a Virginia state court for murder, where he was convicted and sentenced to die. On November 14, 2002, the state of Virginia executed him.
What I find fascinating in this episode is that under U.S national-security law, when the CIA assassinates people, it isn’t considered murder. But as Kansi’s case shows, when people assassinate CIA officials, it is considered murder.
Kansi gave the reason for his assassinations. No, he didn’t say that he hated America for its “freedom and values.” He said that the reason he was assassinating CIA officials was to retaliate for the fact that the U.S. government was killing people in Iraq and for its role in helping Israel kill Palestinians.
Under U.S. national-security law, U.S. officials can assassinate anyone they want — “communists,” “terrorists,” “bad guys,” “adversaries,” “opponents,” “rivals,” or “enemies.” When they do that, it’s to be called an “assassination” or a “targeted killing.”
Moreover, under the law, U.S. officials can kill whoever they want with economic sanctions, as they were doing with the Iraqi people at the time that Kansi was retaliating. I am reminded of U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright’s infamous statement that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions were “worth it.” Those killings weren’t called “murder” of course. They were called unfortunate deaths arising from the sanctions.
U.S. officials also wield the authority to kill whoever they want with invasions of Third-World countries. The people of Afghanistan and Iraq can attest to that. Again, those killings are not considered to be murder. They are considered to be casualties of war.
If, however, anyone retaliates against the national-security establishment by assassinating officials within the national-security establishment, it’s called “murder,” in which case the assassin will be put to death after being accorded a trial.
Of course, this was the law prior to the 9/11 attacks. After those attacks, the law was implicitly amended to provide that the national-security establishment had the option of taking “bad guys” like Kansi to Gitmo, where they could be tortured, held indefinitely without trial, or executed after a kangaroo trial before a military tribunal.
All this hypocrisy goes to show what the conversion from a limited-government republic to a national-security state has done to the consciences of the American people. Most everyone has come to accept the state-sponsored assassinations and deaths arising from sanctions, embargoes, invasions, occupations, and wars of aggression to just be part of the U.S. government’s “foreign policy tools.”
As I pointed out in a recent blog post, however, the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s assassinations constitute murder, just as Kansi’s assassinations do. Why, even Lyndon Johnson referred to the CIA’s assassination program as “Murder, Inc.,” which is precisely what it is. The same goes for deaths arising from sanctions, embargoes, wars of aggression, invasions, and occupations. It’s just plain murder.
Referring to Kansi, Virginia prosecutor Robert F. Horne stated, “I’ve tried an awful lot of killers in my life, and I think he’s the only one I’ve run into that is absolutely proud of what he did. You get a lot of killers who don’t feel all that bad about what they did, but he’s proud of it.”
Apparently Horne has never met any CIA assassins. Like Kansi, they feel really good about their killings and are absolutely proud of what they do. What Horne fails to realize is that even though Kansi is a “bad guy” for assassinating people, that doesn’t convert the CIA assassins into “good guys.”
It’s probably worth mentioning that after Kansi was executed, four American citizens were assassinated in Pakistan in retaliation.
What we need in America is a great awakening, one that involves a revival of individual conscience. When that day comes, Americans will put a stop to the evil within our midst by converting America back to a limited-government republic and putting an end to state-sponsored murder. It will also make Americans traveling overseas a lot safer.
February 9, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | CIA, Human rights, Iraq, Palestine, United States |
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Defense contractors and program advocates have unusual control over what the public sees, leading to bad oversight, or worse.
Withholding information under the guise of classification “undermine[s] our national security, as well as critical democratic objectives, by impeding our ability to share information in a timely manner,” Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said just last month. The Wall Street Journal, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and the Washington Post all agree. But the Defense Department is going in the opposite direction. It is attempting to mask deficiencies in weapons programs — revealed by their own testing — from the public.
This effectively squashes debate and oversight of their programs. The costs come in the form of more expense, additional delays, and underperforming weapons in the hands of our military, which has and will cost lives.
Nickolas H. Guertin, the Defense Department’s newly installed Director, Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E), wasted no time undermining his own office by going along with a scheme egged on by the military services to bury information about how the weapons they buy with taxpayer money are actually performing. Mr. Guertin endorsed his office’s new FY 2021 Annual Report, required by law, with wholesale deletions of presumably relevant material deemed not classified, but “Controlled Unclassified Information” (CUI), a category created during the Obama administration but not so dramatically exploited in these reports until now.
Last December, Guertin’s immediate predecessor explained that unclassified information was being removed from the new public report because it “shouldn’t wind up in our adversaries’ hands.” Of course any material that will help enemies should be withheld and reported only in the classified version of the Director’s Annual Report to Congress. However, there is an important class of information that is essential to understand the depth and scope of plusses and minuses in how a weapon has performed in testing and how rigorously it was tested. This is essential to public understanding, and it is that comprehension that drives oversight by Congress, and even the Pentagon, to fix the problems. This is how our system attempts to make sure no seriously flawed systems get into the hands of our forces, which would truly aid the enemy, in addition to endangering our own people.
The unclassified-but-not-for-public-eyes information (a preposterous category in itself) is not an effort to keep the enemy in the dark, but to keep the public in the dark. It stems from advocates of programs in the Pentagon bureaucracy and defense contractors seeking to mask deficiencies. They want to make sure no controversies emerge that might endanger the money flow, even when the problems cost more, cause delays, limit the combat effectiveness of these weapons, and endanger the lives of the troops. That is precisely what the DOT&E law was designed to stop when it was created in 1983 by a group of Republicans and Democrats in Congress over the bitter opposition of the Pentagon leadership and fellow travelers in Congress and industry.
Under the new CUI regime, the omissions are serious. Director Guertin’s report discloses that 22 accounts of weapons and their testing saw information removed by the military services. An article from Breaking Defense discusses what has been deleted, such as whether the defense systems on the Navy’s new $13 billion aircraft carrier can or cannot “detect, track, engage, and defeat the types of threats for which the system was designed.” It is one thing to foolishly disclose a technical flaw an enemy can exploit; it is quite another to disclose that system X, Y or Z cannot do its job — and with enough detail to permit an understanding whether the problem is serious and what fixes must be applied. Keeping that information away from the public simply means that Congress and the Pentagon will be under less pressure to act responsibly — and that the pressure that is applied will be less informed and easier to overcome.
Not among the programs that Breaking Defense found to have been watered down by the withholding of unclassified information was the notorious F-35, suggesting there is a second level of information deletion at work here. Reviewing the F-35 report submitted by Director Guertin, compared to predecessors, reveals a fundamental — even profound — problem.
The Annual Report submitted by DOT&E J. Michael Gilmore in his last report in FY 2016 contained 62 pages of analysis of the F-35. Reports by his immediate successor, Robert F. Behler, varied from 30 to 16 pages. The section of the Guertin report on the F-35 is a whole nine pages. The texts of the previous reports were radically different. They contained multiple tables, details, and explanations for how and why the F-35 was failing to meet its performance and reliability thresholds, let alone combat expectations. Under meaningful explanatory discussion were issues such as the inability of the aircraft to be available for a mission, unpredictable performance in a stressful combat environment, and details like un-commanded maneuvers due to aerodynamic flaws and the gun not shooting where the pilot aimed.
Also reported were the efforts of some in the military services and the F-35 Joint Program Office to incompletely test the aircraft or manipulate test results. None of this shows up in the public Guertin report. Multiple issues, such as the gun, have disappeared, and previous manipulations of the hundreds of deficiencies discovered in the F-35 would appear to be less of a concern today.
There are two problems here, not one: there is the information behind the CUI labeling cover, and information never included in the report because the DOT&E office knew what the military services wanted addressed, and what they didn’t. It is the latter —self-censorship — that appears far more serious than the false classification issue. Why? Because it results in not just the deletion of phrases and sentences, but presumably pages and pages of detail and analysis. On the other hand, those with access to the CUI version of the report can make a comparison, should they choose to do so.
Program advocacy in the Pentagon, much of which is done by defense corporations, is exercising control over the previously more independent and objective reports to Congress and the public on weapons testing. Inadequate public reporting means feeble oversight, plain and simple.
The current Director of the Operational Test Office is new to the job, but he is off to a very poor start. His office was created to contend with the forces arrayed against tough testing and complete, honest reporting, not comply with them. If there is any meaningful oversight in Congress, the redactions in DOT&E Guertin’s recent Annual Report should be fully assessed. More importantly, the prior restraint/self-censorship apparent in producing this and any other DOT&E reports needs to be fully investigated and eviscerated.
February 9, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Obama, United States |
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If you’ve ever felt like Google’s watching you, it’s because they, quite literally, are. “The truth is that contrary to Google’s representations it continues to systematically surveil customers and profit from customer data,” Karl A. Racine, the attorney general for the District of Columbia, said in a statement.1
He’s among four attorneys general who have sued Google for its deceptive practices in collecting location data from the public. The separate lawsuits allege that Google continued to track location data of its users even after they had disabled location tracking.
“Google falsely led consumers to believe that changing their account and device settings would allow customers to protect their privacy and control what personal data the company could access,” Racine said.2
Google’s Been Secretly Tracking People Since at Least 2014
Racine initiated an investigation into Google after a 2018 AP News report revealed Google was tracking people’s movements even when they’d opted out of such tracking.3 Google’s misleading claims to users regarding privacy protections available in their account settings have been ongoing since at least 2014, Racine’s investigation found.4
The AP investigation included a real-world example from privacy researcher Gunes Acar, whose location was tracked to dozens of locations over the course of several days, and the data saved to his Google account, even though he had turned “Location History” off on his cellphone.5
Location data collected by Google has been used in criminal cases in the past, including a warrant issued by police in Raleigh, North Carolina, to track down devices in the area of a murder.6 When you use an app like Google Maps, it will ask you to allow access to location, but it also tracks your location during use of apps that you might not expect. According to the AP investigation:7
“For example, Google stores a snapshot of where you are when you merely open its Maps app. Automatic daily weather updates on Android phones pinpoint roughly where you are. And some searches that have nothing to do with location, like “chocolate chip cookies,” or “kids science kits,” pinpoint your precise latitude and longitude — accurate to the square foot — and save it to your Google account.
The privacy issue affects some two billion users of devices that run Google’s Android operating software and hundreds of millions of worldwide iPhone users who rely on Google for maps or search.”
Tracking You Even When ‘Location History’ Is Off
At issue is the company’s continued tracking of its users even when Location History is turned off. “If you’re going to allow users to turn off something called ‘Location History,’ then all the places where you maintain location history should be turned off,” Jonathan Mayer, a former chief technologist for the Federal Communications Commission’s enforcement bureau, told the AP. “That seems like a pretty straightforward position to have.”8
Indeed, it states on Google’s Account Help webpage, “You can turn off Location History for your account at any time.” Only lower down on the page does it explain, however, that location data may still be saved even if Location History is paused:9
“If you have other settings like Web & App Activity turned on and you pause Location History or delete location data from Location History, you may still have location data saved in your Google Account as part of your use of other Google sites, apps, and services.
For example, location data may be saved as part of activity on Search and Maps when your Web & App Activity setting is on, and included in your photos depending on your camera app settings.”
Aside from hiding location tracking under settings users wouldn’t expect, like Web & App Activity — which is turned on by default — Google is accused of collecting and storing location information via Google services, Wi-Fi data and marketing partners, again after device or account settings had been changed to stop location tracking.10
In addition to the District of Columbia, the attorneys general of Texas, Washington and Indiana have also filed lawsuits against Google for their deceptive data collection practices. The suits allege that Google also pressured users to use location tracking more often because it claimed — falsely — that its products wouldn’t function properly without it.11
“Google has prioritized profits over people,” Todd Rokita, Indiana attorney general, told The New York Times. “It has prioritized financial earnings over following the law.”12 Texas, meanwhile, has also filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google that alleges it has abused a monopoly over ad space auctions to marketers. The suit joins those from more than a dozen other states that claim Google has maintained and abused a monopoly over searches online.13
Google Is Even Tracking Children
Google has been called a dictator with unprecedented power because it relies on techniques of manipulation that have never existed before in human history, according to Robert Epstein, a Harvard trained psychologist who is now a senior research psychologist for the American Institute of Behavioral Research and Technology, where for the last decade he has helped expose Google’s manipulative and deceptive practices.
They’re not only a surveillance agency — think about products like Google Wallet, Google Docs, Google Drive and YouTube — but also a censoring agency with the ability to restrict or block access to websites across the internet, thus deciding what you can and cannot see.
Google has also infiltrated education with its Google classrooms, usage of which skyrocketed during the pandemic, but many aren’t aware that even their children are being tracked. The attorney general of New Mexico filed a suit against Google for its educational tools in its classroom suite, helping to “break through the fog,” Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff said:14
“[The suit is] identifying the huge amounts of data that they’re taking about kids, how they track them across the internet are they integrate it with all the other Google streams of information and have it as a foundation for tracking those children all the way through their adulthood.”
The suit was later dismissed, but the attorney general filed an appeal, maintaining that Google’s G-Suite for Education products “spy on New Mexico students’ online activities for its own commercial purposes, without notice to parents and without attempting to obtain parental consent.”15
Google Force Installed COVID-19 Tracking Apps
In another sign of Google’s dictatorial tendencies, it partnered with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and Apple to create a smartphone app called MassNotify, which tracks and traces people, advising the users of others’ COVID-19 status.
While the tool claims to have been developed “with a focus on privacy,”16 the app suddenly appeared on Massachusetts residents’ Android phones out of nowhere, without consent. The feature must be enabled by the user for it to function, but it’s extremely disconcerting that the tool was automatically added to people’s cellphones, whether they intend to use it or not.
In China, COVID-19 tracking apps have been used as surveillance tools in collaboration with its social credit system, raising red flags that this force-installed app could be tracking residents’ movements and contacts without their knowledge and consent. The MassNotify app uses Google’s and Apple’s Bluetooth-based Exposure Notifications Express program.
The software framework was first released in April 2020,17 with the goal of allowing users who test positive for COVID-19 to report their results, which then sends out an alert to anyone whose phone crossed paths with the positive case and may have been exposed. The Exposure Notifications Express program acts as a blueprint from which states can implement their own tracking systems without having to develop their own individual apps.
While other states have required users to download an app to use the system, MassNotify was integrated directly into the operating system of Android phones.18 Such apps are based on technology developed by Apple and Google that was previously known as the “Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing Project”19 and is now referred to as the Exposure Notifications API (application programming interface).
In a May 2020 Forbes article by Simon Chandler, he pointed out that while contact tracing apps “may be cryptographically secure,” they still “threaten our privacy in broader and more insidious ways,”20 namely encouraging you to keep your cellphone with you at all times and tracking your whereabouts while you do, and further “normalizing” the constant use of technology to dictate your freedoms and behavior.
Using ‘Trickery for Profits’
The attorneys’ general lawsuits against Google are seeking fines and an end to Google’s use of “dark patterns” that influence users to give up more and more personal data in order for the company to increase its profits. The suits allege that Google’s products are designed to pressure users to allow location tracking “inadvertently or out of frustration,” in violation of state consumer protection laws.21
“Google uses tricks to continuously seek to track a user’s location,” Racine said. “This suit, by four attorneys general, on a bipartisan basis, is an overdue enforcement action against a flagrant violator of privacy and the laws of our states.” The more data that Google collects about individual users, the more advertising dollars it can generate. But, Racine noted, “The time of trickery for profits is over.”22
In a similar lawsuit filed in 2020, Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich also alleged that Google used deceptive practices to track its users’ locations. That suit stated:23
“This case concerns Google’s widespread and systematic use of deceptive and unfair business practices to obtain information about the location of its users, including its users in Arizona, which Google then exploits to power its lucrative advertising business. Google makes it impractical if not impossible for users to meaningfully opt-out of Google’s collection of location information, should the users seek to do so.”
Location data, meanwhile, can be used to reveal your gym memberships, health care visits, stores and restaurants you frequent or where you go to church. It may also be used to provide personalized ads on digital billboards as you pass by, and Google tracks and provides to its customers information about how well online ads work to drive people into brick-and-mortar stores.24
In addition to disabling as many location tracking apps as possible, and deleting your location history from your Google accounts, you can avoid additional Google products — and the privacy invasions they entail — using the following tips:
- Stop using Google search engines. Alternatives include DuckDuckGo and Startpage
- Uninstall Google Chrome and use Brave or Opera browser instead, available for all computers and mobile devices. From a security perspective, Opera is far superior to Chrome and offers a free VPN service (virtual private network) to further preserve your privacy
- If you have a Gmail account, try a non-Google email service instead such as ProtonMail, an encrypted email service based in Switzerland
- Stop using Google docs. Digital Trends has published an article suggesting a number of alternatives25
- If you’re a student, do not convert the Google accounts you created as a student into personal accounts
Sources and References
February 9, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | China, Covid-19, Google, Human rights, United States |
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Attention has increasingly begun to turn towards vaccine efficacy and vaccine damage now that we have collated some twelve months of data. HART has recently focused on the issue of the appropriateness and efficacy, as well as safety, of vaccinating children. One of the issues that has not been explored by anyone is liability for vaccine-induced damage; by this is meant liability to those not covered by the blanket government indemnity given to the vaccine manufacturers, but the potential liability of those pushing the vaccines, be that the personal liability of government officials, NHS employees, schools as well as public and private sector employers (or potentially the officials and employees of these organisations themselves). This is a real issue given that none of the individuals encouraging, administering or in other ways nudging or coercing the acceptance of these procedures has any idea of the content of the vaccines, nor of the medium or long term side effects that these might produce.
This article was prompted by an unconfirmed report (court papers have not been published so as far as we are concerned this remains anecdotal) from France that a life insurance company had refused a claim under its policy against the death of an insured individual who died of the vaccine. The refusal was justified on the basis that damage from experimental voluntary medical procedures are not covered (the vaccines are currently still of course only approved under an emergency protocol) and that such a death would therefore be classified as suicide. It went on to say that suicide from this cause was also not covered under its policy. The case was taken to the highest court in France and the claimants lost. It is not clear that an English court, for a similar situation in England and Wales under English law, would come to the same conclusion. The view from discussions in the insurance market is that it would not, but this is also anecdotal at this stage. Suicide would almost invariably be covered under an English law life insurance policy. However, the French case does begin to put this issue into sharper relief.
There have also been reports from an insurer in the United States (OneAmerica) that deaths of 16-64 year olds have increased by 40%, based on its numbers in comparable quarters year on year. Similar increases have been reported by the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India. This is a catastrophic increase, given that a 1-in-200-year event would correspond to a 10% increase and would in itself be categorised as a catastrophe event by insurers if it were widely experienced. While one or two swallows does not make a summer, this is an unfolding event that insurers and regulators will be watching closely. The time to watch is this month as insurers begin to report on their Q4/21 numbers, but the picture is not likely to improve throughout the year. Swiss Re and Munich Re, the world’s most prolific reinsurers, will be worth keeping an eye on, as a key market bellwether. If the numbers are half or even a quarter as bad as OneAmerica’s data, there will have been some actuarial deep dives and the focus will soon turn to begin investigation of the vaccine as one of the only materially different exogenous factors that could have influenced the data.
Furthermore, one of the states of the USA is in the early stages of introducing primary legislation to make employers liable for just this sort of event. The US is notoriously litigious, though Canada and Australia are very close behind. The principle of requiring the manufacturer and in some cases distributor as well as in this instance the administrator of a product to be liable if it causes harm is a perfectly sound one. This ultimately would be for the courts to decide, but in a liability policy, all parties involved with the drug that does harm would be in the chain of people to sue. However, in the case of vaccinations, a key part of that principle has long been abandoned, in that for decades now, since the first Reagan administration and Thatcher’s era in the UK, governments have given full indemnities to the pharmaceutical industry for vaccine-related liabilities. Yet governments themselves offer only paltry and complex compensation schemes that can take years to pay out at huge actual, as well as emotional cost to the victims, for sums that come nowhere close to being real compensation. This is and always has been unjust, legally unwise and morally wrong. It effectively encourages the wrong priorities for pharma, giving profit an easy priority over safety. And worst of all, it leaves victims powerless, jobless, and of course injured. It puts them and their wider families into crippling financial difficulties and does nothing to curb the behaviour of pharma. The family speaking here describe the huge financial impact in addition to the impact of the injury itself on an 18-year-old girl and her parents. Add to that, cooperative governments that then mandate vaccines and encourage or coerce employers to do so. This is disproportionate given the risk from the virus in most younger people and we witness a healthcare system that seems to have become prone to forget — or even relegate — what should be a sacrosanct principle of First Do No Harm. The result is a toxic mix in which the only beneficiaries are the balance sheets of pharma and their shareholders.
One sure-fire way of stopping vaccine mandates in their tracks is for primary legislation to ensure that employers are liable if they go along with government mandates or nudges. Insurers are likely to react by reviewing coverage for such scenarios, where under legislation they can. Employers will not wish to assume such liabilities without adequate insurance. And should they fall foul of this obvious pitfall, shareholders may resort to Director’s and Officer’s liability insurance lawsuits before which Workers’ Compensation (and their European and other-world equivalents) actions are likely to play out.
Let us hope that such legislation passes and spreads swiftly around the world.
February 9, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, France, UK, United States |
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In Part 5 I look at the scientific literature on face mask use. I look at a lot of studies, but I am not undertaking an exhaustive review of all mask studies, which is an impossible task. However, I do review all the randomized controlled trials, which are the most credible trials. After that I look at a selection of the better trials and meta-analyses. I do focus more on those papers that conclude that there is little or no benefit to mask wearing. I have done this because academia, governments, health institutions and the media are currently giving such an appallingly one-sided view that a corrective is needed.
Also, many of the studies that pro-maskers refer to are not credible, or are not relevant to the real world, and a better evidence base is required.
Bear in mind, as statistician William Briggs says,
The burden of proof is entirely on those who make masklessness a crime: they are imposing, we are not. I have no obligation, none whatsoever, to show masks do not work. But, we have more than enough evidence they do not.
I also refer the reader to City Journal’s ‘Do Masks Work? A Review of the Evidence’, which demolishes some poor studies, including ones that the CDC has pushed. For example, the CDC has especially promoted an incredibly weak observational study which
focused on two Covid-positive hairstylists at a beauty salon in Missouri. The two stylists, who were masked, provided services for 139 people, who were mostly masked, for several days after developing Covid-19 symptoms. The 67 customers who subsequently chose to get tested for the coronavirus tested negative, and none of the 72 others reported symptoms.
The CDC’s spin was reported uncritically in media such as the New York Times.
‘This study’, the City Journal article went on,
has major limitations. For starters, any number of the 72 untested customers could have had Covid-19 but been asymptomatic, or else had symptoms that they chose not to report to the Greene County Health Department, the entity doing the asking. The apparent lack of spread of Covid-19 could have been a result of good ventilation, good hand hygiene, minimal coughing by the stylists, or the fact that stylists generally, as the researchers note, “cut hair while clients are facing away from them.” The researchers also observe that “viral shedding” of the coronavirus “is at its highest during the 2 to 3 days before symptom onset.” Yet no customers who saw the stylists when they were at their most contagious were tested for Covid-19 or asked about symptoms. Most importantly, this study does not have a control group. Nobody has any idea how many people, if any, would have been infected had no masks been worn in the salon. Late last year, at a gym in Virginia in which people apparently did not wear masks most of the time, a trainer tested positive for the coronavirus. As CNN reported, the gym contacted everyone whom the trainer had coached before getting sick—50 members in all—“but not one member developed symptoms.” Clearly, this doesn’t prove that not wearing masks prevents transmission.
5.1: The effectiveness of face masks: Randomized-controlled trials
5.2: The effectiveness of face masks: Other trials and studies
5.3: The effectiveness of face masks: reviews and meta-analyses
5.4: The effectiveness of face masks: preprints, commentaries, editorials and academic letters
5.5: The effectiveness of respirators in healthcare settings
5.6: The effectiveness of surgical face masks in surgical settings
5.7: Face mask harms
5.8. Relevant media reports (a small selection)
The main Face Mask FAQs page.
February 9, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, Covid-19, Human rights, New York Times |
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Yesterday, a number of important Democratic governors lifted mask mandates in their states. Almost to a one, they cited the changes wrought by the fast moving and relatively mild omicron variant of the SARS-CV2 virus as the prime reason for the change.
What none of them did was admit what “the Science” has shown for at least two decades, and has been clear through the last two years to anyone doing a modicum of independent research on the subject: masks have never been shown to fundamentally alter the spread of respiratory viruses within the general population.
What they did say almost to a one, like their counterparts in Great Britain, Denmark and other countries now dismantling previous Covid restrictions, was that the return to normality was greatly facilitated by the uptake of vaccines in the populations they currently govern.
Nearly a half century ago, a man named Ron Ziegler held the position now occupied by Jen Psaki. Like all presidential spokespeople before and since he was a serial dissembler.
But back then there were still a few journalists at the presidential court and beyond willing to do their jobs. And when one day in the midst of the Watergate scandal he used the passive voice construction “mistakes were made” in an attempt to explain away obvious breaches of honesty and ethics committed quite actively by the Nixon Administration, he was roundly mocked by the press corps.
Sadly, however, as I have argued elsewhere, this type of non-apology apology, which caused a scandal then, has become ubiquitous across our social landscape. And that’s a shame.
Why?
Because real apologies and expressions of accountability are important. Without them, neither the apologizer nor the aggrieved party ever experiences what the ancient Greeks considered a cardinal element in human development and human relations: catharsis.
This is especially so in the case of government entities. Without admissions of guilt, the assumptions and premises undergirding failed policies remain intact, lying fallow until such time as the government entity in question feels it opportune to deploy them again in the service of another misguided crusade.
This is what is currently occurring with the Covid hawks who have violated our fundamental rights time and again over the last two years.
These enemies of human dignity and freedom now realize that many of their former supporters among the citizenry feel exhausted, and in many cases, flat out deceived.
At the same time, however, they do not want to permanently relinquish the powerful repressive tools they have acquired during the two-year state of exception.
The answer?
One part of it, already mentioned, is the moderated limited hangout operation now being conducted regarding the use of masks in public. By relaxing these strictures while in no way addressing the fundamental fallacies upon which the masking policies were based, they ensure that mask mandates can be brought back when and if they deem it necessary to do so.
The second part, which is far more pernicious and consequential, is the effort to push a proposition that is at best quite tenuous in light of what actual scientific studies are currently revealing about vaccine efficacy: that without widespread injection uptake the virus would have never receded, and we would have thus never have gotten into a position to recover our freedoms.
Note the underlying logic here. We are not getting our freedoms back because they intrinsically belong to us and were unjustly stolen. We are getting them back because an important plurality of us have done what the “experts” and the “authorities” coerced us into doing.
With this approach there is no catharsis or healing, and certainly no acquisition of new wisdom and knowledge. What there is, is a sly reification of the infantilizing and anti-democratic ways of thinking that have predominated in our policy-making class throughout the pandemic.
Though many people, laboring under the mortal fear of being branded with the weaponized term of “conspiracy theorist,” are reluctant to admit it, the central concern of policy-makers throughout the pandemic has not been the health of our communities, but rather gaining enhanced control over where we go and what we put into our bodies.
There is nothing more central to the idea and practice of freedom than bodily autonomy. It is the basal freedom from which all others are derived. Without it—as the history of slavery starkly reminds us—all other liberties are comparatively ornamental.
For this reason, we must vigorously oppose this organized attempt to present the vaccines, which have been delivered to millions under rather severe coercion, as a great, if not the greatest, hero of the pandemic film.
Thomas Harrington, Senior Scholar at the Brownstone Institute, is an essayist and Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College in Hartford (USA) where he taught for 24 years. He specializes in Iberian movements of national identity Contemporary Catalan culture. His writings are at Thomassharrington.com.
February 9, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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Not one to miss – the latest Israeli Vitamin D status vs Covid Severity study is not only stunning, but agrees with the similar studies I featured in April 2020!
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February 9, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Vitamin D |
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A succession of events in recent weeks all point to the inescapable fact that nearly 75 years of Israel’s painstaking efforts to hide the truth about its origins and its racist apartheid regime are failing miserably. The world is finally waking up, and Israel is losing ground quicker than it is able to gain new supporters or whitewash its past and ongoing crimes.
First, there were the revelations about Tantura, a peaceful Palestinian village whose inhabitants were mostly exterminated by Israel’s Alexandroni Brigade on 23 May, 1948. Like many other massacres committed against unarmed Palestinians over the years, the Tantura massacre was mostly remembered by the village’s few survivors, ordinary Palestinians and Palestinian historians. The mere attempt in 1998 by Israeli graduate student Theodore Katz to shed light on that bloody event ignited a legal, media and academic war, forcing him to retract his findings.
In a recent social media post, Professor Ilan Pappé revealed why, in 2007, he had to resign his position at Haifa University. “One of my ‘crimes’,” wrote Pappé, “was insisting that there was a massacre in the village of Tantura in 1948 as was exposed by MA student, Teddy Katz.”
Now, some Alexandroni Brigade veterans have finally confessed to the crimes in Tantura.
“They silenced it. It mustn’t be told, it could cause a whole scandal. I don’t want to talk about it, but it happened.” These were the words of Moshe Diamant, a former member of the Alexandroni Brigade who, with other veterans, revealed in the documentary “Tantura” by Alon Schwarz, the gory details of the horrific crimes that were committed in the Palestinian village.
An officer “killed one Arab after another” with his pistol, said former soldier Micha Vitkon. “They put them into a barrel and shot them in the barrel. I remember the blood in the barrel,” explained another. “I was a murderer. I didn’t take prisoners,” admitted Amitzur Cohen.
Hundreds of Palestinians were killed in Tantura in cold blood. They were buried in mass graves, the largest of which is believed to be under a car park at the Dor Beach, to which Israeli families flock daily.
The Tantura massacre is arguably the most glaring representation of “hidden” Israeli criminality on the occupation state’s roll call of shame. However, this is not the story of Tantura alone. The massacre in the village is representative of something much bigger, of ethnic cleansing on a huge scale, forceful evictions and mass killings. Thankfully, the truth is now being unearthed and exposed.
In another example, the Israeli army launched a full-scale military operation in 1951 to ethnically cleanse Palestinian Bedouins from the Naqab Desert. The tragic scenes of entire communities being uprooted from their ancestral homes were justified by Israel with the usual cliché that the terrible deed was carried out for “security reasons”.
In 1953, Israel passed the so-called Land Acquisition Law, which allowed the occupation state to seize the land of the Palestinians who had been forced out of their homes. By then, Israel had unlawfully expropriated 247,000 dunams of land in the Naqab, with 66,000 remaining “unutilised”. The remaining land is currently the epicentre of an ongoing saga involving Palestinian Bedouin communities in Israel and the Israeli government, which makes ludicrous claims that the land is “essential” for Israel’s “development needs”.
Extensive research conducted by Professor Gadi Algazi points to Israel’s narrative in the Naqab being a complete fabrication. According to numerous newly-revealed documents, Moshe Dayan, then the head of the Israeli army’s Southern Command, was central to an Israeli government and military ploy to evict the Bedouin population and to “revoke their rights as landowners”, under the conveniently created Israeli law, which allowed the government to “lease” the land as if it was its own.
“There was an organised transfer of Bedouin citizens from the north-western Negev eastward to barren areas, with the goal of taking over their lands,” Algazi told Haaretz. “They carried out this operation using a mix of threats, violence, bribery and fraud.”
The entire scheme was organised in such a way as to facilitate the claim that the Palestinians had moved “voluntarily”, despite their legendary resistance and “the stubbornness with which they tried to hold onto their land, even at the cost of hunger and thirst, not to mention the army’s threats and violence.”
Furthermore, a newly-released volume by French historian Vincent Lemire has entirely dismissed the official Israeli version of how the Moroccan Quarter in Jerusalem was demolished in June 1967. Although Palestinian and Arab historians have long argued that the destruction of the neighbourhood — 135 homes, two mosques and more — was done as per the order of the Israeli government through the then Jewish Mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, Israel has just as long denied that version. According to the official Israeli account, the demolition of the neighbourhood was carried out by “15 private Jewish contractors [who] destroyed the neighbourhood to make space for the Western Wall plaza.”
In an interview with Agence France-Presse (AFP), Lemire said that his book offers “definitive, written proof on the pre-meditation, planning and coordination of this operation,” and that includes official meetings between Kollek, the commander of the Israeli army and other top government officials.
The story continues with more heartbreaking revelations as a well-integrated version of the truth exposing long-hidden or denied facts. The days of Israel getting away with these crimes seem to be behind us. For the third time in a little over twelve months, a major human rights organisation, on this occasion Amnesty International, has condemned Israeli apartheid.
Amnesty’s report, “Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: A Look into Decades of Oppression and Domination”, is 280 pages of damning evidence of Israel’s racism and apartheid. It does not shy away from connecting Israel’s violent present with its equally bloody past, nor does it borrow from Israel’s deceptive language and self-serving division of Palestinians into disconnected communities, each with a different claim and a different status. For Amnesty, as was the case with Human Rights Watch’s report in April last year, Israeli injustices against the Palestinians must be recognised and duly condemned in their entirety.
“Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has pursued an explicit policy of establishing and maintaining a Jewish demographic hegemony,” wrote Amnesty, “while minimising the number of Palestinians and restricting their rights.” This could only happen through mass killing, ethnic cleansing and genocide, from Tantura to the Naqab, to the Moroccan Quarter, the Gaza Strip and Sheikh Jarrah. The Israeli roll call of shame is long.
February 8, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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The UK government is planning to re-work its human rights law to put an increased emphasis on “personal responsibility” and “duties to the wider society”, as well as preventing people “abusing” their rights.
Sounds pretty awful, doesn’t it? But let’s go back to the beginning.
In December 2020 the UK government announced they would be looking into Human Rights reform in the near future.
These announcements became more concrete a year later on December 14th 2021, when the government began a “consultation” on restructuring the Human Rights Act.
The plan is to replace current rights legislation with a so-called “UK Bill of Rights”, a policy dating from the Cameron administration. The new “bill of rights” would update and replace the Human Rights Act.
As a brief summary of UK human rights law:
Some rights are enshrined in common law from the days of Magna Carta, but the vast majority of the time when we talk about “human rights” in the UK we’re referring to the Human Rights Act 1998.
This act was written into law as essentially a verbatim copy of the European Convention on Human Rights passed by the Council of Europe in the 1950s.
The purpose of writing the international treaty into domestic law was so British citizens could take human rights cases to domestic courts, instead of having to go to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
As with most human rights laws, from the UN Declaration of Human Rights to the US Constitution, a lot of the time the Human Rights Act is flat-out ignored, or at best worked around. But it does exist, and it does offer some protection of the individual from the power of the state.
Will that continue to be the case after these “reforms”?
The UK’s current “consultation” on Human Rights “reform” is set to end next month (March 2022), & whatever its final recommendations are will likely not be published for several months after that. But, while we can’t yet be certain exactly what they will say…we can get some rough ideas from what they have released so far.
Dominic Raab, the Justice Secretary who commissioned the consultation, recently said in an interview on LBC:
Our plans for a Bill of Rights will strengthen typically British rights like freedom of speech and trial by jury, while preventing abuses of the system and adding a healthy dose of common sense.”
If you’re anything like me, the phrases “abuses of the system” and “common sense” just made your inner cynic twitch, but there’s no real detail there.
Perhaps you’re thinking, at this point, that if you read the whole briefing document there will be nothing there to justify any paranoia.
… except I have, and there is.
If you drill down through the filler, and can read through the bureaucratic language, there are some pretty concerning red flags waving around, especially in their stated aims [emphasis added]:
Our reforms will be a check on the expansion and inflation of rights without democratic oversight and consent, and will provide greater legal certainty.
[The Bill of Rights will] provide greater clarity regarding the interpretation of certain rights, such as the right to respect for private and family life, by guiding the UK courts in interpreting the rights and balancing them with the interests of our society as a whole
[The Bill of Rights will] provide more certainty for public authorities to discharge the functions Parliament has given them, without the fear that this will expose them to costly human rights litigation
The government is committed to ensuring that the biggest social media companies protect users from abuse and harm, and in doing so ensuring that everyone can enjoy their right to freedom of expression free from the fear of abuse.
Protecting authorities from legal consequences, stamping out “abuse” online, subordinating privacy to national security… these are pretty routine aims of new legislation these days. They are expected, almost cliche.
The biggest and freshest warning sign is the sheer number of mentions of “duty” or “responsibility” or “the wider society”.
For example, this sentence from the forward written by Raab himself:
our system must strike the proper balance of rights and responsibilities, individual liberty and the public interest,
And in point 6 of the Executive Summary…
The Bill of Rights will make sure a proper balance is struck between individuals’ rights, personal responsibility, and the wider public interest.
… and then point 9 too:
[The Bill of rights will] recognise that responsibilities exist alongside rights, and that these should be reflected in the approach to balancing qualified rights and the remedies available for human rights claims
The header at the top of Chapter 3, “The Case for Reforming UK Human Rights Law”, bemoans:
the growth of a ‘rights culture’ that has displaced due focus on personal responsibility and the public interest […] public protection [is] put at risk by the exponential expansion of rights
Going into greater detail further down:
The international human rights framework recognises that not all rights are absolute and that an individual’s rights may need to be balanced, either against the rights of others or against the wider public interest. Many of the rights in the Convention are ‘qualified’, recognising explicitly the need to respect the rights of others and the broader needs of society […] The idea that rights come alongside duties and responsibilities is steeped in the UK tradition of liberty
And then again, in the first paragraph from section IV “Emphasising the role of responsibilities within the human rights framework” [emphasis added]:
We all have responsibilities in our society: to society (such as to obey the law and pay taxes), to our families, and to people around us. Everyone holds human rights whether or not they undertake their responsibilities, particularly the absolute rights in the Convention such as the prohibition on torture. Nonetheless, the government believes that our new human rights framework should reflect the importance of responsibilities.
It carries on in equally concerning fashion…
when a court is considering the proportionality of an interference with a person’s qualified rights, it will consider the extent to which the person has fulfilled their own relevant responsibilities.
The overall message is clear: Human rights can be tempered with “responsibilities” & anyone who does not fulfil their “responsibilities” is less deserving of the legal protection of their rights.
This is neither new thinking nor new language. Throughout “Covid times” we have seen talk of liberty parried with talk of duty, but it predates Covid too.
For years free speech has been tempered with talk of “being offensive” or “spreading misinformation”. The right to privacy has long been secondary to “national security” and “keeping people safe”.
Human Rights law is regularly trumped by The Patriot Act or Investigatory Powers Act or a dozen equally appalling pieces of legislation from both sides of the Atlantic.
But now, rather than bypassing human rights laws, this government is going to – to quote Raab – “rebuild them”. Meaning shred the existing ones and write all new ones. Ones that use “common sense” to make sure people are “responsible” and don’t “abuse” their rights.
Within the scope of this so-called “reform” is the desire to add conditions to basic human liberties. Exchanging “self-evident” truths, “endowed upon men at their creation”, for a quid-pro-quo agreement with the state.
This is a seismic shift in the very definition of “rights”.
The entire point of human rights is that they are innate and inalienable, they exist for everyone everywhere, and are not in the gift of any authority.
But now, rather, the UK government is arguing your rights are given to you at their behest, and that they come at the cost of expected duty.
And given all the talk during the “pandemic” regarding “protecting others” and being “responsible” – with masks, lockdowns and most especially vaccines – it’s not hard to see how these new “duties” could be applied in the future.
There’s no direct talk of compulsory vaccination, yet, but if these new “human rights” laws are made a reality, the next pandemic could be much harder to navigate.
You can read the complete consultation on human rights reform here.
February 8, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, UK |
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