Overshadowed by the recent revelations in the Epstein files, the 62nd anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination came and went with little notice. Yet new documents relating to that still-unsolved murder—released only recently by the Trump administration—deserve far more scrutiny than they have received from corporate media.
From the moment the latest batch of disclosures emerged this past March, the Democratic Party and their allies in corporate media assumed their familiar role as CIA stenographers, either overlooking—or outright refusing to look at—what more than 60,000 documents revealed. At an April 1 House hearing, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX)—illustrating the Democratic Party’s loyalty to the U.S. security state—confidently insisted that the JFK files “show no evidence of a CIA conspiracy,” and complained that even hearing testimony from Oliver Stone, Jefferson Morley, and Jim DiEugenio amounted to “platform[ing] conspiracy theories.”
The New York Times’ Julian Barnes echoed the Democratic congresswoman nearly word for word, announcing definitively that “the CIA did not kill JFK…Oswald acted alone,” despite the sheer volume of documents that no reporter could have seriously reviewed in such a short span of time. Speed-readers Lalee Ibssa and Diana Paulsen of ABC News likewise asserted that, by calling for Congress to reopen the investigation into Kennedy’s assassination, filmmaker Oliver Stone was “reviv[ing] unfounded conspiracy theories.”
But despite committed insistence from Democrats and their corporate media allies, the Trump administration’s JFK disclosures, along with troves of previously released files, do in fact suggest a CIA conspiracy. We have ample documentation from unsealed congressional records of who worked hard to cover it up—among them a consortium of CIA officials who systematically lied to the Warren Commission, misleading the public investigation about the prime suspect in the president’s murder, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Perhaps the main architect of that cover-up was the CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton, who, despite being the counterintelligence chief presiding over what was supposedly the worst intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor, wound up deeply involved in the CIA’s official investigation into the assassination.
Though Angleton insisted that the agency was inattentive to Oswald and unaware of the purpose of his activities leading up to Dallas, it has since been disclosed through unclassified JFK assassination records that Angleton personally maintained a classified 201 intelligence/surveillance file on Oswald for the four years preceding Kennedy’s assassination, strictly controlling which officials inside the CIA were permitted to see it through compartmentalization.
Angleton’s deceptions to investigators are so numerous that 60 years later they are still being uncovered; in one notable instance only revealed this year, Angleton committed perjury before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, claiming he knew almost nothing about Lee Harvey Oswald before the shooting. In another, Angleton concealed the fact that Oswald had visited the Cuban embassy in Mexico City—a visit the CIA publicly claimed it only discovered after the assassination. As Jefferson Morley, author of The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton, explained, the counter-intelligence chief “preferred to wait out the Warren Commission rather than explain the CIA’s knowledge of and interest in Oswald’s visit to the Cuban consulate” in Mexico.
Though Angleton left the CIA in disgrace, dismissed by many colleagues as a paranoid obsessive, his legacy has been consistently venerated by Israel’s intelligence services. In his memoir, the former director of the Mossad, Meir Amit, famously described James Angleton as “the biggest Zionist of the lot,” adding that “his total identification with Israel was an extraordinary asset for us.” As Morley writes, “Angleton’s loyalty to Israel betrayed US policy on an epic scale,” probably allowing the Israelis to build a nuclear bomb using stolen materials from the U.S.-based Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) facility at a time when it was the expressed policy of the U.S. government to prevent Israel from acquiring one.
Angleton had regular professional and personal contact with at least six men aware of Israel’s secret plan to build a bomb. From Asher Ben Natan to Amos de Shalit to Isser Harel to Meir Amit to Moshe Dayan to Yval Ne’eman, his friends were involved in the building of Israel’s nuclear arsenal. If he learned anything of the secret program at Dimona, he reported very little of it. If he didn’t ask questions about Israel’s actions, he wasn’t doing his job. Instead of supporting U.S. nuclear security policy, he ignored it.
Among the most sensitive questions revived by the Trump administration’s releases is whether Israel may have had a role in or foreknowledge of the plot against Kennedy, who spent his final months battling the Israeli government over its nuclear program, its lobby power in the U.S., and the resettlement of Palestinians from the land the Israelis had expelled them from.
The mere suggestion that Israel may have been involved in Kennedy’s assassination, much more so than allegations against the CIA, produces the swiftest denunciations from across the establishment. When podcaster Theo Von made the allegation against Israel on a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, for example, Israel loyalists like Amit Segal rapidly denounced the claim as a “blood libel” and “antisemitic.” CyberWell, an Israeli-helmed censorship outfit staffed by former Israeli intelligence officials that partners with every major social-media platform, has likewise labeled the allegation an antisemitic conspiracy theory and worked with those platforms to censor it from the internet.
The intensity with which critics denounce anyone who raises the question mirrors the vigor with which the government spent decades scrubbing any trace of the connection from its own files. For decades, dozens of references to “Israel,” “Tel Aviv,” and even the identities of Angleton’s Israeli operatives were blacked out of congressional testimony, including the Church Committee records.
In his 1975 Church Committee testimony, now available with many of the old redactions removed, Angleton confirms that during the CIA’s “Cuban business”—the covert campaign of sabotage and assassination plots against Castro run through Bill Harvey and Task Force W—he arranged for an Israeli intelligence officer in Havana to act as Harvey’s secret channel. According to Angleton, this “Israeli man” sent reports from Havana to Tel Aviv, from where they were passed directly to Angleton and then to Harvey. This setup kept some of the agency’s most sensitive operations outside the normal CIA chain of command. A now-missing page of that same testimony uncovered by Aaron Good shows Angleton downplaying any need to brief CIA Director John McCone about his Israeli liaison, even while admitting that “what they were doing was enormous.”
Good also highlights how Angleton’s Israeli channel intersected with Lee Harvey Oswald. The Counterintelligence Staff officer assigned to read Oswald’s mail and collect it for the 201 surveillance file that Angleton maintained before the assassination was Reuben Efron—a committed Zionist who had lived in Israel, published on espionage in a World Zionist Organization–affiliated journal, and, as Jefferson Morley notes, sat in on Marina Oswald’s Warren Commission interview with no official role listed.
At the very moment a U.S. president was seeking to restrict Israel’s nuclear ambitions and limit the political power of its lobby in Washington, the CIA official in control of the Oswald file was secretly sharing intelligence channels, assassination communications, and off-the-books operatives with Israel—and lying to both Congress and potentially some of his own CIA colleagues about it. The government spent 60 years redacting those facts and Americans have a right to know why.
Macro-data during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom (UK) are shown to have significant data anomalies and inconsistencies with existing explanations.
This paper shows that the UK spike in deaths, wrongly attributed to COVID-19 in April 2020,
was not due to SARS-CoV-2 virus, which was largely absent,
but was due to the widespread use of Midazolam injections,
which were statistically very highly correlated (coefficient over 90%) with excess deaths in all regions of England during 2020.
Importantly, excess deaths remained elevated following mass vaccination in 2021,
but were statistically uncorrelated to COVID injections, while remaining significantly correlated to Midazolam injections.
The widespread and persistent use of Midazolam in UK suggests a possible policy of systemic euthanasia.
Unlike Australia, where assessing the statistical impact of COVID injections on excess deaths is relatively straightforward,
UK excess deaths were closely associated with the use of Midazolam and other medical intervention.
The iatrogenic pandemic in the UK was caused by euthanasia deaths from Midazolam and also,
likely caused by COVID injections,
but their relative impacts are difficult to measure from the data, due to causal proximity of euthanasia.
Global investigations of COVID-19 epidemiology, based only on the relative impacts of COVID disease and vaccination, may be inaccurate, due to the neglect of significant confounding factors in some countries.
Graphs
April 2020, 98.8% increase 43,796
January 2021, 29.2% increase 16,546
Therefore covid is very dangerous,
This interpretation, which is disputable, justified politically the declaration of emergency and all public health measures, including masking, lockdowns, etc.
Excess deaths and erroneous conclusions
2020, 76,000
2021, 54,000
2022, 45,000
This evidence of “vaccine effectiveness” was illusory, due to incorrect attribution of the 2020 death spike.
PS
Despite advances in modern information technology, the accuracy of data collection has not advanced in the United Kingdom for over 150 years,
because the same problems of erroneous data entry found then are still found now in the COVID pandemic,
not only in the UK but all over the world.
We have independently discovered the same UK data problem and solution for assessing COVID-19 vaccination as Alfred Russel Wallace had 150 years ago in investigating the consequences of Vaccination Acts starting in 1840 on smallpox:
The Alfred Russel Wallace as used by Wilson Sy
“Having thus cleared away the mass of doubtful or erroneous statistics,
depending on comparisons of the vaccinated and unvaccinated in limited areas or selected groups of patients,
we turn to the only really important evidence, those ‘masses of national experience’…”
From October 20 – November 21, 1962, a little-remembered conflict raged between China and India. The skirmish damaged India’s Non-Aligned Movement affiliation, firmly placing the country in the West’s orbit, while fomenting decades of hostility between the neighbouring countries. Only now are Beijing and New Delhi forging constructive relations, based on shared economic and political interests. A detailed academic investigation, ignored by the mainstream media, exposes how the war was a deliberate product of clandestine CIA meddling, specifically intended to further Anglo-American interests regionally.
In the years preceding the Sino-Indian War, tensions steadily brewed between China and India, in large part due to CIA machinations supporting Tibetan separatist forces. For example, in 1957, Tibetan rebels secretly trained on US soil were parachuted into the territory and inflicted major losses on Beijing’s People’s Liberation Army forces. The next year, these cloak-and-dagger efforts ratcheted significantly, with the agency airdropping weapons and supplies in Tibet to foment violent insurrection. By some estimates, up to 80,000 PLA soldiers were killed.
Mao Zedong was convinced that Tibetan revolutionaries, while ultimately US-sponsored, enjoyed a significant degree of support from India and used the country’s territory as a base of operations. These suspicions were significantly heightened by Tibet’s March 1959 uprising, which saw a vast outflow of refugees from the region to India, and the granting of asylum to the Dalai Lama, their CIA-supported leader, by New Delhi. Weeks later, at a Chinese Communist Party politburo meeting, Mao declared a “counteroffensive against India’s anti-China activities.”
He called for official CPC communications to “sharply criticise” India’s premier Jawaharlal Nehru, stating Beijing “should not be afraid of making him feel agitated or of provoking a break with him,” and “we should carry the struggle through to the end.” For example, it was suggested that “Indian expansionists” be formally accused of acting “in collusion” with “British imperialists” to “intervene openly in China’s internal affairs, in the hope of taking over Tibet.” Mao implored, “we… should not avoid or circumvent this issue.”
Ironically, Nehru was then viewed with intense suspicion by the West due to his Non-Aligned commitment and broadly socialist economic policies. Thus, he could not be trusted to support covert Anglo-American initiatives targeting China. Meanwhile, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev considered Nehru an important prospective ally and was keen to maintain positive relations. Simultaneously, the Sino-Soviet Split, which commenced in February 1956 with Khrushchev’s notorious secret speech denouncing the rule of Joseph Stalin, was ever-deepening. Disagreements over India and Tibet only hastened the pair’s acrimonious divorce.
‘A weapon’
After months of official denunciations of Nehru’s policies toward Tibet, Beijing’s information war against India became physical in August 1959, with a series of violent clashes along the countries’ borders. Nehru immediately reached out to Moscow, pleading that they rein in their closest ally. This prompted a tense meeting in October 1959 between Khrushchev, his chief aides, and the CPC’s top leadership, at Mao’s official residence. Khrushchev belligerently asserted to his Chinese counterparts that their confrontations with New Delhi and unrest in Tibet were “your fault”.
The Soviet leader went on to caution about the importance of “preserving good relations” with Nehru and “[helping] him stay in power,” for if he was replaced, “who would be better than him?” Mao countered that India had “acted in Tibet as if it belonged to them,” and while Beijing also supported Nehru, “in the question of Tibet, we should crush him.” Assorted CPC officials then, one by one, forcefully asserted the recent border clashes were initiated by New Delhi. However, Khrushchev was highly dismissive.
“Yes, they began to shoot and they themselves fell dead,” he derisively retorted. A Soviet declaration of neutrality in the Sino-Indian dispute a month prior also provoked anger among the CPC contingent. Mao complained, “[the] announcement made all imperialists happy,” by publicly exposing rifts between Communist countries. Khrushchev et al were again unmoved by the suggestion. Yet, unbeknownst to attendees, they had all unwittingly stepped into a trap laid by the CIA, many years earlier.
In September 1951, a State Department memo declared, “The US should endeavor to use Tibet as a weapon for alerting” India “to the danger of attempting to appease any Communist government and, specially, for maneuvering [India] into a position where it will voluntarily adopt a policy of firmly resisting Chinese Communist pressure in south and east Asia.” In other words, it was believed that supporting Tibetan independence could force a Sino-Indian split. In turn, the Soviets might be compelled to take sides, deepening ruptures with Beijing.
This strategy informed CIA covert action in Tibet over the subsequent decade, which grew turbocharged when Allen Dulles became CIA chief in 1953. A dedicated, top-secret base was constructed for the separatists at Camp Hale, the US military’s World War II-era training facility in the Rocky Mountains. Local terrain – vertiginous, replete with dense forests – was reminiscent of Tibet, providing ample opportunity for insurgency practice. Untold numbers of militants were tutored there over many years.
At any given time, the CIA maintained a secret army of up to 14,000 Tibetan separatists in China. While the guerrillas believed Washington sincerely supported their secessionist crusade, in reality, the agency was solely concerned with creating security problems for Beijing, and resultantly inflicting economic and military costs on their adversary. As the Dalai Lama later lamented, the agency’s assistance was purely “a reflection of their anti-Communist policies rather than genuine support for the restoration of Tibetan independence.”
‘More susceptible’
Come October 1962, the CIA’s Tibetan operations had become such an irritant to China that PLA forces invaded India. Washington was well aware in advance that military action was imminent. A telegram dispatched to Secretary of State Dean Rusk five days prior to the war’s eruption forecast a “serious conflict” and laid out a detailed “line” to take for when the time came. First and foremost, the US would publicly make clear its “sympathy for the Indians and the problems posed by the Chinese intervention.”
However, it was considered vital to “be restrained in our expressions in the matter so as to give the Chinese no pretext for alleging any American involvement.” While New Delhi was already secretly receiving “certain limited purchases” of US military equipment, Washington would not actively “offer assistance” when war broke out. “It is the business of the Indians to ask,” the telegram noted. If such requests were forthcoming, “we will listen sympathetically to requests… [and] move with all promptness and efficiency to supply the items”:
“The US is giving assistance… designed to ease Indian military transport and communications problems. Additionally, the Departments of State and Defense are studying the availability on short notice and on terms acceptable to India of transport, communications and other military equipment in order to be prepared should the government of India request such US equipment.”
As predicted, the Sino-Indian conflict prompted Nehru to urgently reach out to Washington for military aid, a significant policy shift. Much of New Delhi’s political class duly adopted a pro-Western line, with calls for a review of the country’s Non-Aligned stance reverberating widely throughout parliament. Even Communist and Socialist parties that hitherto rejected any alliance with the US eagerly accepted the assistance. The CIA’s Tibetan operations had triumphed.
As a May 1960 Agency National Intelligence Estimate noted, “Chinese aggressiveness” toward New Delhi over Tibet had fostered “a more sympathetic view of US opposition to Communist China” among India’s leaders. This included “greater appreciation of the value of a strong Western – particularly US – position in Asia to counterbalance” Beijing’s influence regionally. However, the CIA noted how, as of writing, “Nehru has no intention of altering India’s basic policy of nonalignment, and the bulk of Indian opinion apparently still shares his attachment to this policy.”
The Sino-Indian War changed all that. A December 1962 Agency analysis of the conflict’s “outlook and implications” hailed New Delhi’s “metamorphosis”, which the CIA forecast would “almost certainly continue to open up new opportunities for the West.” The country was judged “more susceptible than ever before to influence by the US and the UK, particularly in the military field.” Conversely, the War had “seriously complicated the Soviet Union’s relations with India and aggravated its difficulties with China”:
“The USSR will place a high value on a continued close relationship with India. While its opportunity to build up lasting influence in the Indian military has virtually disappeared, it will probably continue to supply some military equipment and to maintain its economic ties with India.”
Subsequently, New Delhi began assisting Anglo-American intelligence gathering on China and became actively involved in CIA wrecking activities in Tibet. The Sino-Indian War’s spectre hung over relations between the two nations for many years thereafter, and border clashes occurred intermittently throughout. Now, though, as Donald Trump bemoaned in September, India appears enduringly “lost” to Beijing and its close partner Russia. Decades of determined US efforts to foment antagonism between the vast neighbours have come spectacularly undone, due to the sheer weight of geopolitical reality.
In the shadowy world of U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America, few names inspire as much controversy as Otto Reich, a Jewish-Cuban exile whose career reads like a manual for regime change, complete with illegal propaganda operations, coup connections, and an unwavering commitment to toppling governments that defy Washington.
The story begins in Havana, where Otto Juan Reich was born on October 16, 1945, to an Austrian Jewish father who had fled National Socialist Germany in 1938 and a Cuban Catholic mother. His father’s escape from Germany became the foundational narrative of Reich’s worldview, a tale of authoritarian evil that he would later project onto Latin America’s leftist movements. Raised as a Catholic despite his Jewish heritage, young Otto attended the elite, American-run Ruston Academy, where he absorbed both Cuban culture and American influence in equal measure.
During Reich’s youth, Cuba was under the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, whose political repression was so severe that even Reich’s own family, as he told The New Yorker, was “pro-revolution, anti-Batista.” The lone exception was his father, whose experience fleeing one authoritarian regime had made him suspicious of revolutionary movements. When Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, that suspicion proved prophetic—or so Reich would claim for the rest of his life. Castro’s consolidation of power prompted Reich’s father to flee once more, this time taking his family to North Carolina in 1960, when Otto was just 15 years old, as the New York Times reported.
His father’s double exile—first from Germany, then from revolutionary Cuba—became the crucible that forged the younger Reich’s political identity. Where some might see tragedy, Reich saw opportunity. Where others might advocate reconciliation, Reich would pursue confrontation. The teenage refugee would grow into one of Washington’s most zealous operators against Latin American leftism, a man for whom the line between communism and democracy admitted no gray areas, no nuance, no possibility of coexistence.
From the Military to the Foreign Policy Blob
Reich’s trajectory toward influence was methodical. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in International Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1966, then immediately joined the U.S. Army, serving three years as an officer in the 3rd Civil Affairs Detachment stationed in the Panama Canal Zone. This posting provided Reich with more than military experience; it offered a frontline view of U.S. power projection in Latin America, where American military presence wasn’t just about defense but about maintaining influence over an entire hemisphere.
After his military service, Reich completed a Master’s degree in Latin American Studies from Georgetown University in 1973, assembling the credentials that would make him indispensable to conservative policymakers seeking expertise on the region.
When Ronald Reagan swept into the White House in 1981, Reich found his moment. The Reagan administration needed operatives willing to prosecute an aggressive anti-communist agenda in Latin America, and Reich eagerly volunteered. From 1981 to 1983, he served as Assistant Administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development, managing American economic assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean during a period of revolutionary upheaval. But this posting was merely preparation for Reich’s true calling.
The Architect of the Contra Propaganda Machine
In 1983, Reich established and began directing the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean, an anodyne name for what would become one of the most controversial operations in modern American foreign policy. The OPD’s official mission was to promote the Contra guerrillas fighting Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Its actual function, as would later be revealed, was to conduct what the Comptroller General characterized in 1987 as “prohibited, covert propaganda” to bolster the Contra’s image among the American public.
Under Reich’s management, the OPD became a factory for disinformation. The office planted false stories in U.S. media outlets, including unsubstantiated claims about the Nicaraguan government’s involvement in drug trafficking. It published opinion pieces in mainstream newspapers attributed to fictitious Nicaraguan rebel leaders. It coordinated with paid consultants who wrote pro-Contra articles while concealing their government connections—a practice congressional investigators would later identify as “white propaganda.”
Reich had effectively turned his office into a domestic propaganda operation aimed at manipulating American public opinion to support a covert war. A House Foreign Affairs Committee report didn’t mince words, characterizing the OPD as “a domestic political and propaganda operation.” For three years, Reich oversaw this machinery of deception, becoming what journalist Ann Bardach would later call the “chief spinner” of the Iran-Contra effort.
The scandal that eventually engulfed the Reagan administration would shut down Reich’s operation in 1987. Yet remarkably, Reich himself was not personally accused of illegal activity. He had operated in that gray zone where government officials claim plausible deniability—close enough to the crime to be indispensable, distant enough to avoid prosecution. It was a skill he would refine over decades.
The Lobbyist Years
When Reich left government service in 1989, following a stint as U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela from 1986 to 1989, he didn’t abandon his mission. He simply changed his methodology. For 12 years, Reich worked as a corporate lobbyist, first as a partner in the Brock Group and later as president of his own firm, RMA International. But these weren’t ordinary lobbying gigs; Reich selected clients whose interests aligned perfectly with his ideological agenda.
He represented Bacardi rum company in a campaign to nullify Cuba’s trademark protection for “Havana Club,” an effort that succeeded with the enactment of the Helms-Burton Act in 1996, which further fortified the Cuban embargo. He worked on behalf of Lockheed Martin to sell F-16 fighter jets to Chile. Where others saw business opportunities, Reich saw another front in his endless campaign to maintain American primacy in Latin America.
Return to Power
When George W. Bush captured the White House in 2001, Reich saw an opportunity to return to government service. Bush nominated him for Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, but the appointment immediately sparked controversy. The Senate, wary of Reich’s Iran-Contra record and his advocacy for Orlando Bosch—a Cuban exile militant suspected of organizing the bombing of Cubana de Aviación Flight 455, which killed 73 people—refused to hold confirmation hearings.
Bush’s solution revealed the depths of Reich’s value to Republican hardliners: He simply bypassed the Senate through a recess appointment, allowing Reich to serve for one year without confirmation before being appointed as Special Envoy to Latin America. Democracy be damned; Reich’s expertise in destabilization was too valuable to sacrifice to Senate oversight.
The 2002 Venezuelan Coup
Reich’s tenure coincided with one of the most controversial episodes in recent Latin American history: the brief coup d’état in Venezuela on April 11, 2002, that temporarily removed President Hugo Chávez from power. During the coup, Reich communicated with coup leader Pedro Carmona Estanga and contacted ambassadors from other Latin American countries. Cuban sources would characterize Reich as the “mastermind of the April 2002 coup plot against Hugo Chávez,” though Reich has denied direct involvement in the coup planning.
The pattern was familiar: A left-leaning, democratically elected leader who defied Washington’s preferences; a sudden coup involving military and business elites; and Otto Reich in communication with the coup leaders. Whether Reich masterminded the operation or simply provided encouragement and diplomatic cover, his presence at the center of events spoke volumes about his role in Bush administration policy.
The Ideological Entrepreneur
After leaving government service in 2004, Reich established Otto Reich Associates, a Washington consulting firm providing international government relations advice. But he remained far more than a mere consultant. Reich positioned himself as an ideological entrepreneur, shaping policy from outside government through media appearances, congressional testimony, and advisory roles to Republican presidential candidates, including John McCain in 2008 and Jeb Bush in 2016.
During Donald Trump’s first term, Reich played a significant behind-the-scenes role in shaping Latin American policy. In August 2018, he was credited with recommending Mauricio Claver-Carone to National Security Advisor John Bolton for the position of top official for Latin America policy at the National Security Council. Bolton later acknowledged: “I wouldn’t have known [Claver-Carone’s] name if Otto hadn’t recommended him. I trusted Otto’s judgment.”
Reich praised the appointment of Cuban-American hawks to key Trump administration positions, stating: “We have people who understand the cause, and not just the symptoms, of the problems in Latin America—not all the problems—and that is Cuba.” He argued that “the United States has been a fire brigade in Latin America for the last 60 years and we have ignored, to a large degree, the arsonist,” referring to Cuba’s role in supporting leftist movements throughout the region.
The Unending Campaign to Preserve U.S. Hegemony
Reich’s crusade against Latin American leftism never wavered, never softened. He characterized Venezuela as a “branch” and “subsidiary” of Cuba, accusing President Chávez of “having put a lot of his country’s money at the service of Fidel Castro” and “giving away” petroleum to the Caribbean island. This close alliance, Reich claimed, fueled what he called the “disgusting and gloomy process of Cubanization” unfolding in the petroleum-rich nation.
Then-Vice President José Vicente Rangel defended Venezuela’s sovereignty in July 2005, claiming that Reich “permanently attacks the Venezuelan government, because all of the petroleum business that [the US] has with Venezuela frustrates him.” Rangel rhetorically asked Reich to clarify “exactly which process of Cubanization is he talking about,” arguing that “the true Cubanization of Venezuela occurred years ago with the infiltration of anti-Castro Cubans into Venezuela’s police bodies.”
In a February 2015 panel discussion at the University of Miami titled “Venezuela: A Deepening Political and Economic Quagmire?”, Reich compared the Venezuelan government to National Socialist Germany, stating that officials there could claim they were “simply obeying the laws of the land” just as German officials did, warning “we have to be careful what the laws of the land are.” The comparison was as hyperbolic as it was revealing—for Reich, every leftist government in Latin America was potentially the next Third Reich.
By January 2024, Reich’s criticism had intensified following the Biden administration’s temporary sanctions relief on Venezuela. In an interview with PanAm Post, Reich declared that Biden’s policy toward Venezuela “has been a failure since the beginning of his administration” and characterized it as “not just a failure but a humiliation.” He warned that “not only the ideological pressure groups of the left but now also the commercial groups, the American oil companies that are doing business with Maduro, are going to put pressure on the Biden government not to restore the sanctions.”
Expanding the Enemy List
For Reich, the list of adversaries extended far beyond Cuba and Venezuela. He grouped Nicaragua and Bolivia together with Venezuela and Cuba as what he called “21st Century Socialist States,” arguing they represented a coordinated Cuban-Venezuelan effort to undermine democracy throughout Latin America. In March 2014 testimony before Congress titled “U.S. Disengagement from Latin America,” Reich warned that these governments constituted “organized crime states” where “top politicians and high-ranking military officers have been implicated in drug trafficking, support of terrorism and other illicit activities.”
Reich’s recent writings reveal an expansion of his ideological enemies to include Middle Eastern actors. In a November 2023 article for the Jewish Policy Center, Reich argued that “for more than one year, Iran secretly provided the weapons and training that Hamas needed for planning the October 7th attack against Israel.” He specifically accused Cuba of being “a key Iran-Hamas ally” in diplomatic efforts supporting the Palestinian militant organization.
Reich documented three high-level meetings that he claimed demonstrated Cuba’s complicity in the attack: a February 5, 2023 visit by Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian to meet with Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel; a February 25, 2023 Hamas delegation visit to Jorge León Cruz, the Cuban Ambassador in Lebanon, where Cruz recognized “the legitimate right of the Palestinians to defend their land,” stating that Palestinians “are fighting for a just cause”; and a June 15, 2023 meeting between Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Díaz-Canel in Havana.
Reich asserted that these meetings, coupled with Cuba’s “long history of both antisemitism and support of extremist terrorist organizations in the Middle East,” proved that Cuba operated “terrorist training camps in secret locations” and allowed Hezbollah to establish “an operational base in Cuba, designed to support terrorist attacks throughout Latin America.”
Regime Change Villain
Throughout his career, Reich’s targets have consistently accused him of the very interference he claims to oppose. The Cuban government has consistently accused Reich of supporting terrorism and interfering in Cuban affairs. In 2002, Cuba’s Foreign Relations Ministry categorically denied Reich’s claims that four Cuban airplanes landed at Venezuela’s airport during the 2002 coup attempt, calling Reich’s assertion “an absolute lie.” The ministry stated that “if it had been necessary to land a Cuban civilian airplane to collect Cuban diplomatic personnel who were besieged by Mr. Reich’s friends, or for any other humanitarian and peaceful objective, we would have done it and we would have no reason to hide it.”
During a diplomatic visit to South America in July 2002, Reich drew criticism for instructing the Argentine government to commit to an austerity program demanded by the International Monetary Fund–one of the most notable vehicles of Judeo-American power. His aggressive approach to diplomacy was so abrasive that Senator Lincoln Chafee, a Republican member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, reported getting first-hand experience of Latin American hostility toward Reich during travels in the region. The term “hemispheric security mechanism” that Reich promoted stirred “unpleasant interventionist memories” throughout Latin America, according to a report by Toby Eglund.
Venezuelan officials have been particularly vocal about Reich’s skullduggery, even in the Obama era. In March 2013, Venezuela’s then-interim president Nicolás Maduro accused “factors in the Pentagon and the CIA” of conspiring against Venezuela, specifically naming Reich and Roger Noriega, who directly succeeded Reich as Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Maduro stated: “We want to say to President Barack Obama, stop this madness,” claiming to have “testimonies and direct, first-hand information” about U.S. plots. Both Reich and Noriega rejected the claims of orchestrating a plot to assassinate Maduro’s rival Henrique Capriles as “untrue, outrageous and defamatory.”
In September 2013, Maduro cancelled his planned trip to speak at the United Nations, citing “serious provocations that could threaten his life.” He specifically accused “the clan, the mafia of Roger Noriega and Otto Reich” of conspiring against him, stating that “the US government knows exactly that these people were behind a dangerous activity being plotted in New York.”
A Legacy of Fire-Starting
In January 2018 testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Reich called President Obama’s rapprochement with Cuba “a foreign policy failure.” He argued that it “consisted of a series of unrequited unilateral concessions to the Castro regime that had negative consequences for US national security, foreign policy interests and traditional values, and which brought increased repression to the Cuban people while filling the coffers of the Cuban military, the Communist Party, and the Castro family.”
Reich emphasized that “unlike previous, successful American initiatives, Obama’s rapprochement with the Castro dictatorship identified the US with a nation’s oppressor instead of the oppressed.” This framing revealed his consistent position: U.S. policy should align with opposition movements rather than incumbent leftist governments—in other words, perpetual regime change over diplomatic engagement.
In March 2023, following the International Criminal Court’s issuance of arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes in Ukraine, Reich called for scrutiny of Cuba’s support for Russia’s “criminal and illegal war.” He stated that “the Cuban government has been actively using its diplomatic and propaganda services to support the illegal and criminal invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s Russia,” while “Cuban strongman Raúl Castro, his hand-picked president Miguel Diaz-Canel, and the rest of the ruling class, are profiting from Putin’s criminal war of aggression by receiving deliveries of Russian contraband oil, and wheat stolen from Ukraine.”
As of 2025, Reich continues his work through Otto Reich Associates and serves on the Advisory Board of United Against Nuclear Iran, an organization dedicated to preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
As Washington’s confrontation with Venezuela intensifies, observers should recognize that this escalation did not materialize out of nowhere. They are the predictable outcome of decades of work by regime change specialists such as Otto Reich, figures who helped design a long-term interventionist blueprint for Latin America. Today, that blueprint is being dutifully executed by hawks like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a close ally of Reich and a committed interventionist in his own right.
Just as Reich’s kinfolk in Israel labor tirelessly to secure regional supremacy for the Jewish state, Reich has devoted his career to making the Western Hemisphere safe for world Jewry by safeguarding Washington’s full-spectrum dominance in Latin America.
In this transnational criminal enterprise, the roles are clearly defined. And Reich’s role is to ensure that Empire Judaica’s strategic footholds in Latin America remain firmly intact.
You see, the Hasbara herd seems to have one gift, in Israel and stateside. They live in a self-reverential and self-referential world: They talk from under wet cement about … themselves. And, they are training you to do the same: talk about them.
As hard as it is for this lot to compute; the genocide, however, is about their victims, Israel’s victims, the Palestinians.
About the Sde Teima leaked rape tape, suffice it to say the following: Like the Hostage Square demonstrators in Tel Aviv, whose concern was exclusively for only their hostages; the same Israeli society is not unhappy about crimes against Palestinians; but that one such crime had been made public to the detriment of their criminally complicit countrymen.
More so than mere publicity—after all, Israel is conducting genocide to a packed house, the world—Israel’s military advocate general worries that the leaked Sde Teiman footage will undermine Israel’s international legal impunity.
The case of the rectal-rape-with-objects of a Palestinian hostage, one among thousands held in the legal limbo of detention-without-trial, was leaked by the Military Advocate General’s office (MAG), whose apparatchiks had heretofore never expressed—nor acted to convey—regret, remorse, contrition, or penitence over the genocide ongoing. (So you know, Israel has merely shifted to “genocide lite” and to the “ghettoization” of the Strip.)
There are no nettles of conscience in the genocidal society. The on-camera rape has just become a PR (public relations) problem. Unless the world’s yelling can be quelled, Israel’s legal representatives fear for the country’s legal impunity, which is meant to last in perpetuity.
Like all shouting scraps in Israel, this one is entirely without an ethical or moral dimension. The leak of the filmed rape is but a procedural, administrative annoyance, the “Minister of Defense and many others in the political sphere and public discourse,” even claiming that any criminal proceedings constitute a “blood libel.”
At about this time, Israeli think-tank residents are fretting. As the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) put it (in all sincerity), it is imperative to preserve “Israel’s legal and diplomatic ‘resilience’ internationally, and thus … our ability to protect IDF (Israel Defense Forces) service members from legal risks around the world.”
If the IDF justice system, headed by the [aforementioned] MAG [Military Advocate General], is not perceived as professionally independent, Israel will struggle to argue that there is no place to advance overseas legal proceedings against soldiers and commanders alleged to have violated the law of armed conflict, and that the Israeli justice system should be given primacy in handling suspects. (IDI)
Cloaking themselves in the raiment of decency, the code-word for “impunity” in Israeli think tanks is “resilience.” The country must remain “resilient” internationally. Bathed in blood though it is; Israel and its military advocate general still want continued carte-blanche from the international community for their crimes. Hence the Brownian motion over the public rape of a Palestinian hostage.
Again, the leaked Sde Teiman tape threatens Israel’s legal impunity which is meant to last in perpetuity.
Let us, then, end forthwith conversation about Israel’s two-bit Kabuki players. We who inhabit the Global Genocidal Western Woke matrix have a responsibility to help pilot Palestinians through these dangerous shoals. Or, support those who are doing that work. Let’s, then, return to the resilient victims of the genocidal entity, the Palestinians.
Early in the genocide, in essays that provide a comprehensive chronology of the signal events, the people violated and the first principles flouted, I had picked up on—and postulated about—the seemingly systematic nature of the sexual sadism evinced by Israel’s army and security forces.
Palestinians are “living alongside serial-killing sexual sadists,” I remarked in a subsection of the essay, “Why The Israel-Occupied Levant Must be Liberated, S.O.S.,” further noting that “the pairing of sexual arousal and violence toward Palestinians, in the practices of the IDF and Israeli Security Forces, makes for a particularly irremediable pathology, the stuff of serial killers.”
As though Israel was not already outside all moral gravitational pull—the evidence for my deductions is now in. What we’ve known to be deductively true has been empirically confirmed. The social science is in: Palestinians are sexually brutalized by Israeli occupation forces!
If you had lingering doubts that sexual perversion and predation by the Israeli military and security forces is systemic and statistically significant—new social science nixes that naïve notion.
Incidents of sexual torture are not outlier cases. The Israel Occupation Forces are indeed a festering cauldron of serial-killing sadists and sexual deviants. Helpless Palestinians are the repository of this rot.
Having investigated the phenomenon and tabulated the results; the UN International Commission of Inquiry has revealed that rape, genital mutilation—of men, women, boys and girls—exhibitionism (public flashing); all the sexual perversions and paraphilias I had picked up on—are systemic, pervasive, carried out happily, seemingly ordained from above. No crime is a “one-off.”
The frequency, prevalence and severity of sexual and gender-based crimes perpetrated across the Occupied Palestinian Territory leads the Commission to conclude that sexual and gender-based violence is increasingly used as a method of war by Israel to destabilize, dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people. The Commission documented a pattern of sexual violence, including cases of rape and other forms of sexual violence, torture and other inhumane acts that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Section number 222 of the report’s summary states that, “Israeli detention is characterized by widespread and systematic abuse and sexual and gender-based violence. These practices have increased significantly in severity and frequency since 7 October 2023, following orders and statements of the Minister for National Security Ben Gvir who is in charge of prisons. The mistreatment of Palestinian detainees by Israeli authorities is a result of an intentional policy that utilizes sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence to humiliate and degrade Palestinians in detention. This was observed across several facilities, temporary holding locations, during interrogation and while in transit.”
These Israelis are men and women of cold violence. Their hearts are as black as boot polish. The brutalized bodies of Palestinian men, women, and children; their pets and livestock bear this out. But broad-brush statements aggregating their practices are not enough.
Daily, the Palestinians’ closest neighbors, the settlers, make manifest their red-hot hatred toward them, stealing private Palestinian property, vandalizing installations on this land, regularly slaughtering helpless livestock with biblical cruelty (watch settlers gouge the eyes out of helpless lambs), and generally menacing Palestinian property owners. Most disturbing is the overt, perverted threat of sexual violence from settlers and their soldier helpers.
Indeed, the poisonous cabal of Israeli settlers and soldiers works cheek by jowl.
In “Holy Redemption: Stealing Palestinian Land,” a TRT World exclusive documentary, there is no editorializing. The videographers plainly followed and recorded these settlers in character. Twenty-nine minutes and 20 seconds into this TRT settler odyssey, Turkish TV captures a uniformed IDF, in cahoots with settlers, publicly manhandling himself on camera, in a manner not fit to print.
Said IDF soldier hisses:
“I spit on Palestine. F-ck your mother. I’m the Israeli Army.” He is not done. Just as I imagined this breed of Cain could not expose itself as more indecent, the same soldier comes close to indecent exposure. At the said timestamp, the atavistic, low-brow individual shows himself to be lacking the inhibitions to keep his perversion private. Reflexively. Quite obviously, this IDF had been aroused by threatening a helpless group of Palestinian homesteaders. He had likely imbibed a pornographic sensibility and had not been taught propriety and shame in public.
Right there on film is that pathological pairing of violence and sexual arousal, the stuff of serial killers!
In another unremarkable vignette, filmed by B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, an armed settler threatens a Palestinian farmer in the South Hebron Hills with rape. “Rape in the name of God,” a la SdeTeiman, promises settler Shem Tov Luski, to a mortified, modest Palestinian man. “No officers were dispatched, and the residents were advised to file a complaint at the Kiryat Arba police station,” reports Wikipedia.
His flesh softer than sin, the delightful Rabbi Col. Eyal Karim, the head of the military rabbinate of the Israel Defense Forces, had instructed, in 2016, that, essentially, any carnal demands of the flesh be allowed: “As part of maintaining fitness for the army and the soldiers’ morale during fighting, it is permitted to … satisfy the evil inclination by lying with attractive Gentile women against their will… .’ News of the rabbinical rape-injunction came courtesy of Israel’s own YnetNews.com.
214. “Israel has targeted civilian women and girls directly, acts that constitute the crime against humanity of murder and the war crime of willful killing. Women and girls have also died from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth due to the conditions imposed by the Israeli authorities impacting access to reproductive health care, acts that amount to the crime against humanity of extermination. …”
221. “Palestinian men and boys have been subjected to specific persecutory acts intended to punish them collectively. The way in which these often-sexual acts are committed, including their filming, photographing and dissemination online, in conjunction with similar cases being documented in several locations, shows that forced public stripping and nudity, as well as sexualized torture and ill-treatment, are part of the persecutory attack against men and boys committed to punish, humiliate and intimidate Palestinian men and boys into subjugation. …”
224. “Specific forms of sexual and gender-based violence such as forced public stripping and nudity, sexual harassment including threats of rape, as well as sexual assault, de facto form part of the Israel Security Forces (ISF) standard operating procedures towards Palestinians. The Commission concludes that these and other forms of sexualized torture, including rape and violence targeting the genitals, are committed with either explicit orders or an implicit encouragement by the top civilian and military leadership. The Commission found that all its documented incidents of sexual and gender-based violence committed by members of the ISF were met with impunity. Under these circumstances, the civilian and military leaders are as responsible for these crimes, as are the direct perpetrators. …”
In the “widespread use of sexualized violence against men and boys,” the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security has [too] identified several specific patterns of sexualized violence that are indicative of a genocidal process, not all overlapping the findings of the International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory:
Life-force atrocities (including ritualized humiliations); separation of families and other reproductive violence; and possible elitocide through the use of sexualized violence.
By “elitocide,” the Lemkin Institute is probably referring to sexual violence to whittle at the finest and noblest; the people we most rely on: altruistic aid and rescue workers, healers in their clinics ministering to their patients, peace activists, writers, reporters and intellectuals recording the crimes for posterity.
Dr. Adnan Al Bursh, for example. The 50-year-old renowned orthopedic surgeon headed the orthopedic department at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. “A doctor. a stellar surgeon. The embodiment of Palestinian ethics, Dr. Al Bursh was likely raped to death.”
To genocide, snuff films, the torture and torching of animals, and the rape and robbery of their Palestinian owners; to bombings, boobytrapping and extra-judicial assassinations the world over—add “elitocide.”
Another new term to add to Israel’s lexicon of crime. All this, remember, is customary, informal law in the Genocidal Society.
Ilana Mercer, paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide (because that is our obligation). A war against civilians is a war on civilization.
This is the dark history of vaccination the powers that be are hiding from you. They won’t tell you that sick animals are used in the process of developing these shots. You won’t hear that our own government agencies kept projects involving cancer-producing ingredients in immunizations under wraps. And why isn’t anyone talking about how all this ties into future pandemics and bioweapons research? Fortunately, we have the records to prove that these things are real and more common than not. Suzanne Humphries, M.D. does not mince words on this topic, which is why she is the perfect person to talk about it. Join Dr. Humphries and Polly Tommey on CHD.TV as they discuss!
The concern that British leaders have about United States’ Donald Trump turning his back on Ukraine is just a cover for their true motives, considering that of all the countries with which Russia has clashed over the past two centuries, Britain is by far the most Russophobic, and the clamor for aid to the Kiev regime is actually frustration because Russia will inevitably win the war.
London’s centuries-old Russophobia is today stronger even than a sense of self-preservation, which is why British leaders continue to prioritize supporting the Kiev regime instead of solving domestic problems. Citing experts, The Telegraph warns that Trump consistently makes decisions that are directed against the interests of Ukraine and complicate the position of Kiev, as if they have no other concerns.
Although it can be argued that the article does not necessarily reflect official circles, especially given that the Daily Telegraph is traditionally close to the Conservative Party, and Labour is in power, it is not as if their frustration obscures any major difference in London’s strategic assessments.
This is not only in the United Kingdom, but also elsewhere in Western Europe due to Trump’s seemingly unexpected and abrupt policy change last month, when he suddenly said that Ukraine could regain all its territories and that Russia was a “paper tiger.” However, Trump’s statement has not led to any major US actions in favor of Ukraine and, as we saw in his recent meeting with Chinese Premier Xi Jinping, his administration’s strategic focus is undoubtedly on the Indo-Pacific region.
And while London is concerned about Ukraine, the British are taking to the streets in mass protests against the intolerable double standards, according to which foreign criminals are released from prisons overfilled by the very strict police prosecution of citizens accused of racist statements or hate speech against illegal immigrants.
Britain is on the verge of collapse due to uncontrolled immigration and the absolutely proven unwillingness and reluctance of the majority of migrants, especially from the Islamic world, to accept the customs, behavior, and value system of the receiving country. This is actually a form of collective madness because, for members of the liberal establishment of the modern West, including the British, Russia is an object of hatred, among other things, because it remains one of the few bastions in Europe of preserving traditionalism, the family, and the Christian faith, which the Western elite has long rejected.
Beyond the geopolitical aspects of the desire to surround Russia with hostile military alliances and powers, the Western elite perceives Russia as a disruptive factor in their intention to spread the spirit of postmodernism, where a mixture of races and nations will be much easier to manage than self-aware and indigenous peoples.
Within Britain, there is absolute acceptance of the influx of migrants from third-world countries and of the transformation of urban centers such as London, Bradford, Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, and Manchester into predominantly non-British cities. This process is seemingly paradoxical because, on the one hand, there is still tremendous animosity and aversion towards Russia, which poses absolutely no danger to Britain. On the other hand, there is tolerance for a process that leads to the loss of any authentically recognizable British identity.
Britain has been proven time and again throughout history to be the most Russophobic country.
During Bismarck’s time, first as Prussian and later as Chancellor of a united Germany, relations between Germany and Russia were at their best. Even then, the Three Emperors’ Alliance was formed — Russian, Austrian, and German — which contributed to stability in Europe.
Between 1853 and 1856, the British led a coalition that included France and the Ottoman Empire, which waged the Crimean War against Russia. From the time of the Crimean War, a number of negative stereotypes about Russians were published in the then very popular humorous magazine Punch. There, the Russian bear was portrayed as a wild, greedy, and savage creature who needed to be civilized and could only be brought to order by force.
It can even be said that Russia and Britain being on the same side in both world wars was an anomaly. In both cases, many voices in the British establishment argued that Britain was on the wrong side. On the eve of World War II, during the Russo-Finnish War, there were even voices in the British Parliament calling for the Finns to be helped.
After World War II, during the Cold War, British intelligence played a leading role in recruiting local agents in Eastern European countries, even though it was itself infiltrated with Soviet agents, as seen in the cases of Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess.
This instinctive Russophobia of the British establishment is not even tied to one party or another — it is historically present in both the Conservatives and Labour. As seen, Britain’s Russophobia is centuries old, continuing today with its policy towards the Russia-Ukraine War, and has no sign of abating.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
The remains of deceased Palestinians returned by Israel show signs of organ harvesting performed with surgical precision and intended for transplantation, a surgeon has warned.
Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, a British-Palestinian surgeon, said on Sunday that he had seen “photographs of the bodies that were received by the Palestinian Ministry of Health from the Israeli army,” which clearly revealed “surgically removed lungs, heart, kidneys and liver; done in a professional, surgical way, using sharp bone saws, causing zero damage to surrounding tissues.”
“These bodies also had liquid nitrogen burns on their skin, but no other injuries. It is unlikely the organs were retrieved post-mortem. All of these bodies belonged to Palestinians whose families said they had been imprisoned alive. So all of this is highly indicative of organ harvesting … Every organ was removed as if ready for transplant,” he added.
Abu Sittah noted that the photographs were taken on October 17, shortly after Israel handed over 120 bodies.
His observations align with reports by the Gaza Government Media Office director, Ismail al-Thawabta, who said Israeli forces had stolen organs from deceased Palestinians. He demanded an immediate international investigation.
Al-Thawabta described dozens of mutilated bodies missing vital parts, including eyes, limbs, and internal organs.
“When we examined the bodies, we found that large parts were missing; there were half bodies, bodies without heads, without limbs, without eyes, and without internal organs,” he said.
Since the Gaza ceasefire agreement took effect on October 10, Israel has released 300 Palestinian bodies, which show unmistakable signs of torture and abuse.
According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, the remains provide “conclusive evidence of field executions and brutal torture,” including hanging and rope marks on necks, gunshot wounds at close range “confirming deliberate field executions,” hands and feet bound with plastic restraints, eyes blindfolded, being crushed under Israeli tank tracks, and fractures, burns, and deep wounds indicating “severe physical torture.”
“We call for the urgent establishment of an independent international commission of inquiry to investigate these heinous crimes and to hold Israeli leaders accountable for the war crimes committed against our people in the Gaza Strip,” the Office said.
Since the Israeli regime launched its genocidal assault on Gaza on October 7, 2023, nearly 69,000 Palestinians have been killed and about 171,000 wounded, most of them women and children.
On the streets of Jerusalem, Abby Martin interviews Jewish Israeli citizens from all walks of life. In several candid interviews, disturbing comments reveal commonly-held views about Palestinians and their future in the region.
Israeli-born human rights activist and anti-Zionist, Ronnie Barkan, explains why these attitudes dominate Israeli society.
A recent article in The Hill, “Climate change is not a ‘con job’,” claims that catastrophic, human-caused climate change is killing reefs via ocean heatwaves. This claim is false. In reality, corals have existed for millions of years, through warmer and colder periods, and in the recent past, coral reefs have recovered from bleaching events and even die-offs, proving to species to be adaptive and resilient in the face of climate change.
The Hill article, from Rebecca Vega Thurber, the director of the UC Santa Barbara Marine Science Institute, is framed by Thurber’s annoyance that President Donald Trump says climate change is a “con job.” She claims her personal research experience refutes his comment.
Thurber explains that pollution from fertilizer runoff can kill corals, which is true, but goes on to assert that “every result we have collected, in every one of these well intentioned and carefully designed experiments, was waylaid by the increasingly frequent and severe heat waves that have arisen in the last decades.” She says their efforts to mitigate pollution were “overwhelmed by high water temperatures driven by climate change or worse, climate change killed our whole experiment.”
Thurber claims marine heatwaves in the French South Pacific hampered her work by “transform[ing] these normally bountiful reefs from habitats where there was once 60 percent of the seafloor covered with healthy corals to barren plains with less than 1 percent live coral.”
In point of fact, one long-term study from 2019 showed that rather than a “barren plain” French Polynesian reefs have an “outstanding rate of coral recovery, with a systematic return to pre-disturbance state within only 5 to 10 years.”
A second study from 2024, published in Nature, sought to understand why reefs bounced back so readily after major heat waves, concluding that:
Over the past three decades, there have been five main warming events that have caused mass bleaching around Moorea and Tahiti, in 1994, 2002, 2007, 2016, and 2019. Despite bleaching levels up to 100% for some coral species, reefs experienced as high as ~76% recovery following each event. […]
It is currently unknown what controls the ability of coral coverage to recover quickly at these locations. It has been suggested that reefs may develop an increased tolerance to higher SSTs following each bleaching event, and that the increased resilience would allow for a shorter recovery period with less die-off under subsequent SST extremes.
In short, the scientific literature does not support Thurber’s contention in The Hill that coral reefs are dying off in vast numbers. Interestingly, just a few years ago The Hillpublished an article with a different tone, discussing the fact that coral reefs were thriving “despite warming seas,” but the outlet seems to have forgotten this.
What Thurber and The Hill also neglected to mention was that recent mass die offs did not just coincide with heatwaves alone. Rather a spate of tropical cyclones and crown of thorns starfish outbreaks occurred over the same period resulting in multiple coral colony declines. Multiple stressors are harder on a species than any of those dangers would be alone.
Thurber mentions that Australian reefs are another part of her area of research, but she does not mention that 2024 was the third year in a row where the Great Barrier Reef had record breaking coral coverage.
Unfortunately, close study of reef die backs barely existed in the early parts of the 20th century and before, so short term records like single-event tied die-offs do not stretch into the pre-industrial period for comparison. As a result it is all too easy for alarmists to assert, for example, that marine heatwaves are unprecedented when there are only a few decades of satellite data to work from. Longer term studies, and a knowledge of how coral reefs around the world are built over time, show, in fact, that coral death is part of the reef construction process.
Coral reefs have survived much hotter periods than today, like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum which was 5-8°C hotter, as well as much colder glacial periods. One reason for this is that coral organisms are not immobile. Even if particular regions became too hot, which is highly unlikely in our lifetimes, corals could just migrate poleward, as research suggests they did in the past. Change like that might be uncomfortable for narrowly-focused researchers, but it is part of the Earth’s history.
The Hill did a disservice to its readers by publishing this article which served no other purpose than to frighten readers into ignoring Trump’s important point, that bad actors (particularly at the United Nations, where he made the comments) are using climate alarm to promote harmful leftist-favoring policies and enrich themselves. I am sure that Thurber is a “true believer” in the catastrophic warming narrative, but it does not help her case when essential facts are left out of the argument and when the multiple sources of data that do exist contradict her claims.
For the first time over the last 30 years, Panamanian authorities agreed to declare “National Day of Mourning” on December 20, which is the date on which the United States invaded Panama in 1989.
“The government acknowledges declaring December 20 as a day of national mourning to honor Panamanians and all the innocents who lost their lives and defended our territory’s integrity,” President Laurentino Cortizo tweeted on Wednesday.
On Dec. 20, 1989, President George H.W. Bush ordered “Operation Just Cause” and deployed some 26,000 soldiers to overthrow General Manuel Antonio Noriega.
Until then, he had been one of the most faithful collaborators of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
Noriega fueled the Bush administration’s hostility when he requested the closure of “The School of the Americas,” where the U.S. had trained thousands of Latin American military since 1946. Upon losing Washington’s support, however, the U.S. Department of Justice accused him of drug trafficking. … continue
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