Did Jeremy Scahill’s Analysis Fumble the Ball in Its Indictment of Joe Biden as an “Empire Politician”?
The Intercept series on Biden is marred by omissions and even State Department disinformation
By Jeremy Kuzmarov | CovertAction Magazine | April 30, 2021
Known for his exposés of Blackwater and the U.S. dirty wars in the Middle East, The Intercept reporter Jeremy Scahill’s latest blockbuster is a series on Joe Biden’s history as an “empire politician.”
The series is impressive and informative, however, it ignores certain unflattering historical facts and perpetuates a few popular misperceptions.
CovertAction Magazine commends The Intercept’s investigation into Biden’s influence on U.S. foreign policy over the last half-century, and hopes it will amend and improve it by examining some of the problems with what it reported—and the even greater problems with what it failed to report.
In his introduction, Scahill writes that after poring over congressional reports and speeches among other documents, he came to the conclusion that Biden is a man “dedicated to the U.S. as an empire, who believes that preserving U.S. national interests and ‘prestige’ on the global stage outweighs considerations of morality or even at times the deaths of innocent people.”
The series goes on to provide strong evidence to corroborate this assessment.
Scahill details, for example, Biden’s chairing of congressional hearings that helped build support for the 2003 War in Iraq, his staunch support for the bombing of Serbia and Kosovo, and for the kind of military occupation that the U.S. had conducted in Germany and Japan after WW II there.
Biden further supported U.S. aggression in Grenada, Libya and Panama in the 1980s, which resulted in the deaths of many civilians, and in 1981 voted to provide expansive aid to Pakistan in order to arm Islamic fundamentalists fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
One year later, Biden tried to justify Israel’s killing of civilians in Lebanon, which even the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin couldn’t do.
In the 1990s, Biden backed President Bill Clinton as he bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, and supported President George W. Bush’s sending suspected terrorist suspects to Guantanamo Bay.
Biden supported the bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan under false pretexts in 1998. [Source: csmonitor.com ]
When he first ran for the Senate, Biden positioned himself as an opponent of the Vietnam War, albeit on tactical grounds, considering the war to have been “lousy policy” rather than a crime.
Before that Biden had obtained a draft deferment because he had asthma as a teenager. However, he never took part in antiwar protests and referred to antiwar protesters who had occupied the chancellor’s office at Syracuse University where he was a law student as “assholes.”
Senator-elect Joe Biden, D-Del., takes his oath of office in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 13, 1972. [Source: theintercept.com ]
During his early years in the Senate, Biden co-sponsored the 1973 War Powers Act, which mandated that presidents obtain congressional authorization before going to war.
Eighteen years later, Senator Biden denounced President George H.W. Bush’s “monarchist” disdain for congressional authority and opposed the Gulf War in Iraq.
Soon after Bush declared victory in the Gulf, Biden, however, determined that his opposition was a political mistake and began a transformation into a top hawk on Iraq and supporter of many subsequent wars.
While early in his career voting to rein in the CIA, he evolved also into a foe of whistleblowers and helped block the nomination of Theodore Sorensen as CIA Director when it was discovered that Sorensen had given an affidavit in the case of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg that sympathized with Ellsberg.
Ted Sorensen, center, arrives with Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., right, at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Sorensen’s nomination for CIA director on Jan. 17, 1977. [Source: theintercept.com ]
Distortions and Omissions
As the above summary indicates, there is much to learn from The Intercept’s series and admire.
However, there are certain topics that are only superficially covered, or inexplicably left out altogether.
Scahill, for example, says nothing about how Biden was mentored when he first came into the Senate “as a young kid” by Averell Harriman, the “father of the Cold War.”
A son of one of the original robber barons who founded the legendary Wall Street firm Brown Brothers & Co., Harriman served as U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union 1943-1946, Secretary of Commerce 1946-1948, Governor of New York 1955-1958 and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Harriman’s support for an aggressive anticommunist foreign policy was both ideological and personal; he lost a fortune when zinc mines that he had invested in were nationalized by communist regimes in Eastern Europe.
In the late 1970s, Biden accompanied Harriman and his wife Pamela on a trip to Yugoslavia to attend the funeral of Eduard Kardelj, Tito’s intellectual mentor [Tito was the socialist leader of Yugoslavia from 1953-1980].
W. Averell Harriman, Biden’s political mentor. [Source: wikipedia.org]
Two decades later, as a prominent member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden helped see to it that Harriman’s ambition was fulfilled.
He supported secessionist factions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia that caused the breakup of Yugoslavia and aggressively promoted the bombing of Bosnia, Kosovo and Montenegro, whose end result was the establishment of a giant U.S. military base, Camp Bondsteel.
Aerial photo of Camp Bondsteel. [Source: wikipedia.org]
Scahill’s discussion of the Bosnia war omits any consideration of the geopolitical imperative underlying U.S. policy and presents a misleading narrative about the war.
He writes that “as Yugoslavia’ disintegrated in the early 1990s, Serbia and Croatia began a bloody battle for control of large swaths [of it].” The Serbs, however, had attempted to keep the Yugoslav federation together when Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina seceded with U.S. encouragement.
The IMF and World Bank had contributed to Yugoslavia’s dissolution through its promotion of fiscal austerity and neoliberal economic programs, which Scahill omits.
After his pithy assessment of the war’s origins, Scahill writes that in Bosnia, “Serb forces committed widespread atrocities, particularly against Muslims.” While this statement is true, it reinforces the dominant view of the Muslims as victims of Serb aggression and war crimes.
The Muslims not only committed their own gruesome atrocities, but were led by an Islamic fundamentalist, Alija Izetbegović, who had been arrested in World War II after recruiting Muslims for a military unit organized by the SS Gestapo.
Then Senator Biden speaks with Alija Izetbegović in Sarajevo on April 9, 1993. [Source: aljazeera.com]
The Muslim fighting regiments were also bolstered by 4,000 Arab jihadist fighters from Afghanistan, Algeria, and other Islamic countries and included two future 9/11 hijackers—a fact Scahill ought to have mentioned.
Srebrenica Distortions
The quality of Scahill’s analysis descends further when he promotes misinformation about the July 1995 killings by Bosnian Serb forces of Muslims in Srebrenica.
Scahill writes that “the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)… determined that more than 8,000 people were killed during the massacre and ruled that the Bosnian Serb operations constituted genocide.”
But the 2001 ICTY judgment of Serb commander Radislav Krstic gave a low estimate of seven thousand men that were captured by the Serbian forces at Srebrenica and concluded that only a “few mortal remains” were found near the purported killing site.[1]
The Sarajevo-based International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP), an adjunct of the ICTY, which matched the DNA from bone samples with family members of persons reported as missing, in 2007 identified a total of 6,930 Srebrenica victims.[2]
However, some on this list had gone missing prior to July 1995 and the study could not determine the cause of death.[3] Autopsy reports referred to bodies where only shell or mortar fragments were found, militating strongly against the thesis that they were executed.[4]
Satellite image of alleged mass graves were presented by U.S. ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright at the UN several weeks after the alleged Srebrenica massacre. The problem is that proof of the mass graves has never been firmly established and Albright never made the photos available for public examination. [Source: nsarchive2.gwu.edu]
Another thing Scahil omits is that Muslim regiments under Naser Orić, commander of the Bosnian Army’s 29th Division, killed over 3,000 Serb soldiers and civilians from the Srebrenica area, including the town Mayor, before the Serb massacre took place.[5]
Naser Orić a U.S.-supported warlord who bragged about massacres of Serbs committed near Srebrenica. [Source: serbiamonitor.com ]
Scahill makes a point of contrasting Biden’s agitation for war in the Balkans with his opposition to the use of force in Haiti to restore populist Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power after he had been ousted in a right-wing coup, insinuating that Biden was less concerned about Haitians because they were black.
This is fine, but Scahill could have written more about the politicization of human rights and geostrategic imperatives driving U.S. military intervention in the 1990s.
Biden and DuPont
A principle flaw of “Empire Politician” is that it does not discuss political-economy and the corporate interests that drove Biden’s support for the U.S. empire.
Readers are not made aware of the structural forces that need to be overcome for the forever wars to end. Scahill leaves the impression that Biden’s shifting and mostly odious record is the result of his own misjudgments, rather an oligarchic political system, and that a better man in his position might have done better.
We know that Biden enjoyed a particularly close relationship with the MBNA credit card company and big banks in Delaware along with the DuPont Corporation, the infamous war profiteer and polluter which for decades ruled Delaware like a personal fiefdom.
Biden’s first Senate campaign in 1972 was staffed by DuPont employees, had its office on a road named after DuPont and celebrated its victory in the Gold Ballroom of the Hotel DuPont.
Subsequently, Biden employed a DuPont lawyer as a top adviser and DuPont engineer as Senate chief of Staff and later head of his presidential transition team.
From 1974-1996, Biden lived in the DuPont mansion in Wilmington.
Aerial view of the DuPont mansion in Wilmington which Biden lived in from 1974 until 1996. [Source: housebeautiful.com ]
During the 2020 election cycle, DuPont provided the Biden campaign with $95,729.
Biden further received donations from DuPont lobbyists and executives working for companies owned by the Du Pont family.[6]
In the early 1980s, Biden launched an investigation into Summit Aviation Corp., a Middletown, Delaware company owned by Richard “Kip” DuPont that ferried bombs and guns to the Nicaraguan Contras, a right-wing paramilitary group fighting the left-wing Sandinistas, but never released the findings.[7]
Biden’s job clearly was to help to cover up for criminal activities by a prominent DuPont family member in return for DuPont supporting Biden’s political career.
DuPont later benefited from Biden’s policies in the Middle East, a fast-growing market for DuPont which supplies products to the oil and gas industry, and in Ukraine where the company opened a seed plant to support “increased demand for Pioneer brand corn hybrids.”
Imperial Vice President
Like with Biden’s ties to large corporations, Scahill is weak in analyzing Biden’s record as Vice President.
While acknowledging Biden’s role in supporting drone strikes and covert military interventions in the Middle East, he fails to discuss his advancement of U.S. corporate interests in Central America and record as the Obama administration’s key point man on Iraq.
In that latter capacity, Biden forged close relations with Nouri al-Maliki, the “Shia Saddam,” who helped trigger the growth of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) by oppressing Iraq’s Sunni population.
Biden laughs with Nouri al-Maliki, the “Shia Saddam,” at a press conference in Baghdad in 2009. [Source: sandiegouniontribune.com]
Biden later helped install Haidar al-Abadi as Iraq’s president in an attempt to fulfill the long-standing U.S. ambition of privatizing Iraq’s oil industry, and oversaw the Third Iraq War, which was among the least transparent in modern U.S. history.
Journalists Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal determined that one in five of the 27,500 coalition air strikes over Iraq resulted in at least one civilian death, more than 31 times that acknowledged by the U.S. government.[8]
Scene from Mosul after its sacking by U.S.-coalition forces in 2016. [Source: time.com ]
Ukraine
The biggest elephant in the room is Ukraine.
Biden’s actions there during his Vice-Presidency were arguably the most unethical of his career and showed the maturation of a corrupt political figure.
Biden played a key role in supporting a coup in Ukraine in 2014 that brought to power a regime infiltrated by Neo-Nazis, and was a close confidante of post-coup president Petro Poroshenko, who presided over one of the most corrupt regimes in the world.
Biden enjoys a laugh with Petro Poroshenko, the most corrupt leader in Europe. [Source: covertactionmagazine.com ]
Biden further promoted expanded arms sales to the Ukrainian military while it carried out large-scale human rights atrocities in a dirty war in the East provoked by the coup.
Later Biden bragged about blackmailing Ukraine’s president to secure the firing of an honest Attorney General in order to protect a corrupt energy company, Burisma, which appointed his son Hunter to its board of directors—even though Hunter had no experience in the energy field.
New York Post feature story Biden and his son Hunter’s misdeeds in Ukraine, which Scahill ignores. [Source: nypost.com ]
Evidence has emerged that would indicate that Burisma was a CIA front, controlled by a warlord, Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who used it to finance private militias that were relied upon to wage the war in the East.
None of this is mentioned in “Empire’s Politician.”
Besides Ukraine, Scahill fails to address Biden’s support for color revolutions in Eastern Europe that resulted in the overthrow of pro-Russian leaders, and his support for oppressive rulers like Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia (2004-2007; 2008-2013), who provoked a deadly war with Russia that Biden supported.
Saakashvili pins a medal on Biden in July 2009. [Source: facebook.com]
Pierre Omidyar and The Intercept’s Black Hole on Ukraine
Given the shortcomings in Scahill’s study, the question needs to be asked: is Scahill limited in his skills as a researcher and historian—merely a B or B+ level performer, or is he compromised by his work for The Intercept?
The Intercept was launched in 2014 with $50 million in seed money from Pierre Omidyar, the founder of e-bay and owner of PayPal, whom Forbes ranked as the 24th richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $21.8 billion.
Pierre Omidyar [Source: usatoday.com ]
Journalists Max Blumenthal and Alec Rubinstein found that Omidyar has partnered closely with many of the U.S.-funded outfits that fulfill the role the CIA used to play during the Cold War in backing opposition media and civil society in countries targeted for regime change.
One of these countries is Ukraine. In 2011, Omidyar’s foundation, the Omidyar Network, gave $335,000 to “New Citizen,” an NGO that was mobilizing political support against Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, who was overthrown in the 2014 Maidan coup.
The head of New Citizen, Oleh Rybachuk, was a favorite of the State Department, DC neocons, the EU, and NATO—and the right-hand man to Viktor Yushchenko, who had led Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution against Yanukovych, which Biden supported.
Scene from Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution. [Source: pinterest.com]
Before the Maidan Square protests, Rybachuk boasted that he was planning another “Orange revolution.”
Oleh Rybachuk [Source: kyivpost.com ]
In December 2013, The Financial Times reported that Rybachuk’s “New Citizen” NGO campaign “played a big role in getting the [Maidan Square] protest up and running.”
New Citizen, along with the rest of Rybachuk’s network of NGOs and campaigns—“Center UA,” which Omidyar’s network provided over $100,000 to in 2012, “Chesno,” and “Stop Censorship”—targeted pro-Yanukovych politicians in an anti-corruption campaign that built its strength in Ukraine’s regions, before massing in Kyiv.
Omidyar’s Network further funded a virulently anti-Russian Ukrainian internet TV station, Hromadske TV, which promoted anti-Yanukovych propaganda during the Maidan protests, and Rappler, another internet TV station that allied with U.S. interests.
Omidyar’s background and support for the Maidan coup could very well explain why The Intercept’s exposé of Joe Biden leaves out Ukraine, and why Scahill watered down his analysis by omitting any discussion of political-economy.
Repression, Censorship, and Ideological Homogeneity on the Left
The Intercept’s black hole with regards to the Ukraine was apparent in the saga of Glenn Greenwald, who resigned after senior editors refused to publish an article of his about Biden and Ukraine before the November 2020 election.
Greenwald was The Intercept’s other star reporter who had published the Snowden leaks and reported on the machinations in Brazil that led to the impeachment of leftist leader Dilma Rousseff and jailing of Lula.
In his resignation letter, Greenwald wrote that “the same trends of repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I co-founded [The Intercept], culminating in censorship of my own articles.”
In a very subtle way, did Scahill succumb to the censorship and enforcement of ideological homogeneity by limiting the scope of his investigation into Biden?
After writing a puff piece about U.S. bombardiers in World War II entitled Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team, famed author John Steinbeck wrote: “We were all part of the war effort… correspondents were not liars but it is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies.”[9]
Scahill is a viable critic of the military, but it is in the things not mentioned—Ukraine, Burisma, Averell Harriman, Naser Orić, Mosul, the Shia Saddam, Camp Bondsteel, Petro Poroshenko, Alija Izetbegović, and Dupont—that the untruth lies.
- “Radislav Krstić becomes the first person to be convicted of genocide at the ICTY and is sentenced to 46 years imprisonment.” UN, ICTY Press Release, August 4, 2001, https://www.icty.org/x/cases/krstic/tjug/en/010802_Krstic_summary_en.pdf ↑
- https://www.icmp.int/press-releases/over-7000-srebrenica-victims-recovered/; David Rohde, “Denying Genocide in the Face of Science,” The Atlantic, July 17, 2015. ↑
- Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, “The ‘Srebrenica Massacre’ Turns Twenty Years Old,” Dissident Voice, August 5, 2015, https://dissidentvoice.org/2015/08/the-srebrenica-massacre-turns-20-years-old/ Military service records showed that 140 of the total had been killed in combat months or years before the fall of Srebrenica. Stefan Karganovic, Deconstruction of a Virtual Genocide (Srebrenica Project, 2011), 186. Some on the Red Cross’ missing list also turned up on voter rolls later on and could have been captured or killed in other battles. ↑
- See The Srebrenica Massacre: Evidence, Context, Politics, ed. Edward S. Herman (Evergreen Park, Illinois: Alphabet Soup, 2011); Karganovic, Deconstruction of a Virtual Genocide. ↑
- “The Fall of Srebrenica, July 1995, Bosnia’s Darkest Hour: Srebrenica: Background and Battle,” Clinton Presidential Library, Yugoslavia Genocide, Srebrenica, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/53013. Orić even bragged about killing 114 Serbs in one single incident. Scahill’s discussion of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) is flawed because it omits its involvement in heroin trafficking and ties to Islamic extremism and fact that President Clinton’s special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, referred to them as a “terrorist organization” mere months before the bombing commenced. Scahill misinterprets the reasons why KLA leader Hashim Thaçi was indicted for war crimes; he was accused of criminal involvement in over 100 murders during the war. ↑
- For a critical history of DuPont, see Gerard Colby, Du Pont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain (Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1984). ↑
- Colby, Du Pont Dynasty, 14, 786, 787. According to an international arms dealer who knew a Summit executive, Summit planes were used by high-ranking members of the Thai military in northern Thailand to protect illegal drug operations along the Cambodian border and for counterinsurgency operations in the Vietnam War and to protect the illegal Southeast Asian heroin connection by which the CIA funded mercenaries. Some of its warplanes–including ones outfitted for spraying crop defoliants–were sold illegally to dictatorships in Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala and Anastasio Somoza’s Nicaragua in operations supported by Theodore Roosevelt III. DuPont may have further set up military training camps at his Maryland farm where there were reports of automatic weapons being fired. ↑
- See Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting for the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press Inc., 2019), 178-181. ↑
- John Steinbeck, Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team (New York: Penguin Classics, 2009); Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Airpower (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 137. ↑
Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: jkuzmarov2@gmail.com.
Ten years on, Syria is almost destroyed. Who’s to blame?
Syria in ruins after ten years of conflict (File photo)
BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | MARCH 20, 2021
In George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm, the ruling pigs led by Napoleon constantly rewrote history in order to justify and reinforce their own continuing power. The rewriting by the western powers of the history of the ongoing conflict in Syria leaps out of Orwell.
The joint statement issued by the foreign ministers of the US, UK, France, Germany and Italy last week to mark the tenth anniversary of the Syrian conflict begins with an outright falsehood by holding President Bashar al-Assad and “his backers” responsible for the horrific events in that country. It asserts that the five western powers “will not abandon” the Syrian people — till death do us part.
The historical reality is that Syria has been a theatre of the CIA’s activities ever since the inception of that agency in 1947. There is a whole history of CIA-sponsored “regime change” projects in Syria ranging from coup attempts and assassination plots to paramilitary strikes and funding and military training of anti-government forces.
It all began with the bloodless military coup in 1949 against then Syrian president Shukri al-Quwatli which was engineered by the CIA. As per the memoirs of Miles Copeland Jr, the CIA station chief in Damascus at that time — who later actually went on to write a fine book of high literary quality on the subject — the coup aimed at safeguarding Syria from the communist party and other radicals!
However, the CIA-installed colonel in power, Adib Shaishakli, was a bad choice. As Copeland put it, he was a “likeable rogue” alright who had not “to my certain knowledge, ever bowed down to a graven image. He had, however, committed sacrilege, blasphemy, murder, adultery and theft” to earn American support. He lasted for four years before overthrown by the Ba’ath Party and military officers. By 1955, CIA estimated that Syria was ripe for another military coup. By April 1956, a joint CIA-SIS (British Secret Intelligence Service) plot was implemented to mobilise right-wing Syrian military officers. But then, the Suez fiasco interrupted the project.
The CIA revived the project and plotted a second coup in 1957 under the codename Operation Wappen — again, to save Syria from communism — and even spent $3 million to bribe Syrian military officers. Tim Weiner, in his masterly 2008 book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, writes:
“The president (Dwight Eisenhower) said he wanted to promote the idea of an Islamic jihad against godless communism. “We should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect,” he said at a 1957 White House meeting… (Secretary of state) Foster Dulles proposed a “secret task force,” under whose auspices the CIA would deliver American guns, money, and intelligence to King Saud of Saudi Arabia, King Hussein of Jordan, President Camille Chamoun of Lebanon, and President Nuri Said of Iraq.”
“These four mongrels were supposed to be our defence against communism and the extremes of Arab nationalism in the Middle East… If arms could not buy loyalty in the Middle East, the almighty dollar was still the CIA’s secret weapon. Cash for political warfare and power plays was always welcome. It could help an American imperium in Arab and Asian lands.”
But, as it happened, some of those “right-wing” officers instead turned in the bribe money and revealed the CIA plot to the Syrian intelligence. Whereupon, 3 CIA officers were kicked out of the American embassy in Damascus, forcing Washington to withdraw its ambassador in Damascus. With egg on its face, Washington promptly branded Syria as a “Soviet satellite”, deployed a fleet to the Mediterranean and incited Turkey to amass troops on the Syrian border. Dulles even contemplated a military strike under the so-called “Eisenhower Doctrine” as retaliation against Syria’s “provocations”. By the way, Britain’s MI6 was also working with the CIA in the failed coup attempt; the details came to light accidentally in 2003 among the papers of British Defence Minister Duncan Sandys many years after his death.
Now, coming down to current history, suffice to say that according to the WikiLeaks, since 2006, the US had been funding London-based Syrian dissidents, and the CIA unit responsible for covert operations was deployed to Syria to mobilise rebel groups and ascertain potential supply routes. The US is known to have trained at least 10,000 rebel fighters at a cost of $1 billion annually since 2012. President Barack Obama reportedly admitted to a group of senators the operation to insert these CIA-trained rebel fighters into Syria.
The well-known American investigative journalist and political writer Seymour Hersh has written, based on inputs from intelligence officers, that the CIA was already transferring arms from its Benghazi station (Libya) to Syria around that time. Make no mistake, Obama was the first world leader to openly call for the removal of Assad. That was in August 2011. Then CIA chief David Petraeus paid two unannounced visits to Turkey (in March and September 2012) to persuade Erdogan to step in as the flag carrier of the US’ regime change project in Syria (under the rubric of “anti-terror fight”.)
In fact, the US’ key allies in the Persian Gulf — Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE — took the cue from Obama to loosen their purse strings to recruit, finance and equip thousands of jihadi fighters to be deployed to Syria. Equally, from the early stages of the conflict in Syria, major western intelligence agencies provided political, military and logistic support to the Syrian opposition and its associated rebel groups in Syria.
Curiously, the Russian intervention in Syria in September 2015 was in response to an emergent imminent defeat of the Syrian government forces at the hands of the jihadi fighters backed by the US’ regional allies. Saudi Arabia withdrew from the arena only in 2017 after the tide of the war turned, thanks to the Russian intervention.
The joint statement issued last week by the US and its NATO allies belongs to the world of fiction. In reality, there is Syrian blood in the hands of these NATO countries (including Turkey) and the US’ Gulf allies. Look at the colossal destruction that the US has caused: in the World Bank’s estimation, a cumulative total of $226 billion in gross domestic product was lost to Syria due to the war from 2011 to 2016 alone.
The Syrian conflict has been among the most tragic and destructive conflicts of our time. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have died, half a nation has been displaced, and millions have been forced into desperate poverty and hunger. In the UNHRC estimation, after ten years of conflict, half of the Syrian population has been forced to flee home, 70% are living in poverty, 6.7 million Syrians have been internally displaced, over 13 million people need humanitarian assistance and protection, 12.4 million people suffer from lack of food (or 60% of the entire population), 5.9 million people are experiencing a housing emergency and nearly nine in 10 Syrians are living below the poverty threshold.
And, come to think of it, Syria used to have one of the highest levels of social formation in the entire Muslim Middle East. It used to be a middle income country until the US decided to destabilise Syria. Ever since the late 1940s, the US’ successive regime change projects were driven by geopolitical considerations. The agenda is unmistakeable: the US has systematically destroyed the heart, soul and mind of “Arabism” — Iraq, Syria and Egypt — with a view to perpetuate the western [Zionist] domination of the Middle East.
Former President Donald Trump intended to withdraw the US troops from Syria and end the war. He tried twice, but Pentagon commanders sabotaged his plans. What Joe Biden proposes to do is anybody’s guess. Biden doesn’t seem to be in any rush to withdraw the US troops.
The most disturbing aspect is that the US is methodically facilitating a Balkanisation of Syria by helping the Kurdish groups aligned with it to carve out a semiautonomous enclave in the country’s northeast. In fact, the the Arab population in northeastern Syria resents being under the Kurds’ governance, and this may eventually turn into a new source of recruits for Islamic State. Meanwhile, Turkey seized the US-Kurdish axis as alibi to occupy vast territories in northern Syria.
The sad part of the joint statement by the US and its European allies is not only that it is rewriting history and spreading falsehood but conveys a sense of despair that there is no hope for light at the end of the tunnel in the Syrian conflict in a conceivable future.
The US policy in Syria is opaque. It has oscillated between aiming to prevent a resurgence of IS, confronting Iran, pushing back against Russia, providing humanitarian aid, and even protecting Israel, while the crux of the matter is that successive US administrations have failed to articulate a clear strategy and rationale for the US military presence in Syria.
New ‘dangerous chemical’ leak detected at NUCLEAR WASTE site in Washington state
RT | April 30, 2021
A nuclear waste storage tank at a defunct plutonium reactor in Washington state has sprung a leak, the Department of Energy said, as local officials warn the aging vessel will emit 1,300 gallons of chemicals over the next year.
The leaking tank, located at the Hanford site in southeast Washington, just 8 miles west of the Columbia River, was announced on Thursday by the Energy Department. A breach in the 75-year-old storage reservoir was suspected more than a year ago but only confirmed recently, one of several decrepit tanks at the facility.
“It’s a serious matter whenever a Hanford tank leaks its radioactive and dangerous chemical waste,” the state’s ecology director, Laura Watson, said in a statement, adding that that officials do not believe the breach poses “increased risk to workers or the public,” though it does contribute to “the ongoing environmental threat at Hanford.”
“This leak is adding to the estimated one million gallons of tank waste already in the soil across the Hanford site. This highlights the critical need for resources to address Hanford’s aging tanks, which will continue to fail and leak over time.”
While the problematic tank, designated B-109, is only the second officially confirmed leak at Hanford, (the first was detected in 2013), many of the site’s 149 storage tanks are suspected to have issues, with the Washington Ecology Department estimating that more than 200,000 gallons of waste have escaped from the “B Farm” alone, where B-109 is located. Across the whole Hanford facility, they believe 1 million gallons have poured from compromised tanks.
With B-109 leaking an estimated 3.5 gallons each day, or 1,300 gallons per year, the concerns are compounded by the tank’s close proximity to the water table, sitting just over 200 feet above, as well as the Columbia River.
A formal leak assessment was launched last year after the tank’s levels were found to be dropping, and though a breach was discovered, local officials’ hands remain tied under an agreement governing clean-up operations at Hanford. Environmental agencies can only take “immediate action” in response to a leak if it is deemed “necessary to abate an imminent and substantial endangerment to public health or welfare or the environment.” For now, the state, as well as federal agencies, have assessed no immediate danger from B-109, despite the confirmed leak.
“Contamination in this area is not new and mitigation actions have been in place for decades to protect workers, the public and the environment,” Energy Department spokesman Geoff Tyree told the Associated Press, adding “There is no increased health or safety risk to the Hanford workforce or the public.”
Hanford has seen a years-long, multi-billion-dollar clean-up effort due to its ailing equipment, which itself has become controversial. In 2019, the federal government sued arms dealer Lockheed Martin, which was awarded a $3.2 billion contract in the clean-up project alongside another private company, alleging it defrauded American taxpayers with illegal kickback payments.
The site’s management has also come under fire in recent years, with workers accused of deliberately dumping toxic waste into the environment in 2017.
The Hanford facility has a rich history stretching back to the days of the Manhattan Project, becoming the site for the world’s first large-scale plutonium production reactor. Plutonium manufactured there was used in the first nuclear bomb test at the Trinity site, as well as in Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan in the waning days of World War II.
The B-109 tank came online in 1946, running for 30 years before it was shut down, while the entire facility was shuttered in 1987, leaving behind 53 million gallons of waste. Since then, local authorities have worked to stabilize the remaining storage vessels, but problems keep piling up, as thousands of gallons of hazardous materials continue to flow into the soil unabated.
An exclusive interview with Dr Mike Yeadon
By Oliver May | The Daily Expose | April 25, 2021
Dr Yeadon, a former vice-president and chief scientific officer of the Allergy and Respiratory department at Pfizer, who has also provided a simple explanation of why lockdowns could never have worked, went on to explain that there is “zero” chance of incessantly reported new variants escaping immunity.
The 60-year-old, convinced the UK reached herd immunity last May, is now looking to move to Florida, where he hopes to work alongside Governor Ron DeSantis. He has expressed his severe concern over vaccine passports, saying that not only do healthy people under 60 not need a Covid 19 vaccine, but that the introduction of certification could lead to a society whereby, without such a pass, you may not even be permitted to leave your house.
In a passionate exclusive interview with The Daily Expose, he also criticised former Conservative MP Edwina Currie for her “uninformed” scattergun comments on Good Morning Britain in which she said she would not want anyone unvaccinated anywhere near her.
Dr Yeadon said:
“I know enough about biotechnology to know that you can easily create, shall we say, pathogens, which don’t look like they’re related to what you’ve done. And what’s even more horrifying is you can separate them in time, so an injection which will later make you ill or kill you can be separated by design in time from that event. So you might die a year later of liver cancer or something and you wouldn’t connect that. And if you can imagine making a smorgasbord of different pathogens so not everybody is going to die of the same thing, you literally could do away with big slices of the population if you want. And we could all be running around like headless chickens. This is an attempt on global depopulation.
“I think vaccine passports are a gateway to numerous things and it is my belief that it will be a gateway to mass killing, in the billions. And the reason I say that is many of the key players, including Bill Gates and his father and Boris Johnson and his father, have all been maniacal – and possibly correct – about earth being overpopulated. Even if we said to people can you stop having children, the population would only start to fall in about 100 years. If you got birth rates down below replacement, it would still take a century given each new birth will probably live out 100 years.
“I accept the argument that, if we are on the verge of destroying the planet, the ecosystem and its non-renewables and biodiversity, if these things are true then, I’m not saying I endorse it, I can see the argument of ‘do you know what, the only possible way to save the earth is to get rid of 90 per cent of the people and then it will be a nice place to live’.
“I think a group of people over decades have said to each other, ‘this is an awful task that has fallen to us, which is to rescue the human species and its planet and there is no other way of doing it except for mass extermination. And it’s not something that anybody would want to do but we have to do it and it’s got to happen in this generation and these are the technological advances required’.
“There are some clever people who have taken it upon themselves to basically do God’s work and to do a violent readjustment of the population of the world to put it into a position where, once it sorts itself out from this utter bloody disaster, will be a place where 500million people maybe will be living on the planet and they can have comfortable sustainable lives with plenty of space, plenty of room for the animals. I will not support what they’re doing but that would provide a justification for those who are doing it.”
Dr Yeadon believes the proof lies in the correlation between deaths and the rollout of vaccines which have been rushed through via an Emergency Use Authorisation. He said:
“If you look at every regional health authority, they tick up on the same day, they peak at the same day and drop back in the same way and that’s because they’re sycned to vaccination. If it was the spreading of an epidemic, it could not possibly occur in Auchtermuchty on the same day as Aldershot. It can’t, it has to move.
“But the thing that moved was the vaccination squads. They started on December 8 everywhere in the NHS and then in the care homes, so that was the strong clue for me that what was correlating with the time and cause of deaths was not a geographical history and neither were the differences in timing, it was just the date of vaccination.
“Can it be stopped? I am not optimistic about the UK because as time has gone on there are fewer of me and most people have just put their heads down. I am fortunate in a number of ways, I have the breadth of a full career behind me and I love science and biology. There is nothing I can be fired from and I’m not doing it for money, so I can only be stopped if they arrest me or kill me.
“But I don’t fear for my life. It’s over anyway. This is not going to return to normal. It would be pointless. There is no way, with the amount of damage that has been done deliberately, would it then just be left. It would just be dumb. It would make no sense at all to have marched people up to the top of the hill and then say, ‘you can go back now’. And remember the drum beats for vaccine passports are very strong. And once that’s in then if they can transition an absolute majority that they already have who will be so delighted with their privileges, beeping their phones when they go in and out of shops, they are not going to pay any attention to someone like me who says, ‘excuse me what about the unvaccinated’?
“They will say, ‘well don’t you know, you’re the unclean people, you’re the ones brewing the variants, you’re going to kill us. Can you just go away or I might feel that I have to kill you’. I expect vaccine passport will come in and those who have already been vaccinated will whoop for joy, a large number of people yet to be vaccinated will rush to get vaccinated because they will see their horizons will be shrunk and they simply won’t realise they are being herded like cattle into a pen.
“I would fear next winter being an unvaccinated person in this country, there will be additional orchestrated events. They will need that in order to drive people to top-up vaccines. I’ve decided I’m not going to stop the fight, I’m going to leave the country. I’ll go wherever I have to because it’s not going to be safe for unvaccinated people indefinitely.”
Top-up vaccines is another thing that frightens Dr Yeadon, who highlighted the fact that these too will forego any further safety checks. He added that the driver for these will come in the form of new variants, which he says are barely any different from the original sequence.
“As soon as they started talking about it [new variants] I went to look at the source material and found that the variants most different from the Wuhan sequence are still 99.7 per cent identical. “And I can assure you that there is zero – not just implausible, but zero – chance something that would escape the immunity of someone who was immune from natural infection or vaccinated. It’s absolutely impossible, no matter what they tell you.
“We know for example that Sars 2003 is 20 per cent different – not 0.3, 180 times different – and the immune system has absolutely no trouble in recognising the two as brothers. I have empirical evidence, theoretical evidence and yet, countering that, we are being told by Sage, politicians, people around the world that you need these variant vaccines. We’ve closed our borders, we’re smashing our economy and depriving people of their liberty over the theoretical concern about variants, which is a lie. And now we are making variant vaccines. I became terrified when I knew they were actually making them and not just talking about it – and when all the large medicine regulators of the world put out a joint statement saying that, because vaccine variants are so similar to the parents from which they’re derived, we will not require the manufacturers to conduct any clinical safety studies.
“I have spoken to eight professors in the UK whose discipline includes immunology and they all agree with my analysis in terms of the technical side of it. Three months ago my fear levels went into the red and I begged them, ‘people like you have go to start writing letters to editors and getting pieces into the papers that this b******t about variants is fake because people are going to believe it’. Carl Heneghan [director of evidence based medicine at Oxford University] said that the world is in such a sort of panic at the moment, anything he could say would not have any breakthrough power at all.
“We’ve been trained to think that if anyone raises any question at all about vaccines, you automatically think ‘anti-vaxxer’. I’ve spent my entire professional career in the industry that produces these things. I would say I’m extremely pro innovative medicines. I don’t have an anti bloody anything in my body except I’m anti unsafe medicines. Why have we got vaccines that clearly are much more dangerous than other public health prophylactic vaccines, because they are if you just compare the number of people that have died within a month with the number of reported deaths after all other vaccines – it’s like 10 times worse.
“There have been 10 times more deaths from within a couple of months of any covid vaccination than in the entire year for all other vaccines combined. Most vaccines are very safe but there are rare idiosyncratic responses including fatal ones and I’m afraid that does happen. You might just drop dead tomorrow going out to your car. But as long as the numbers are very, very small it’s tolerable, because there is a benefit to it. But what we have here is that, even if the people being given the vaccines were at risk – and a lot of them are not – anyone 60 or younger who is in good physcial shape and does not have serious prior chronic conditions is not going to be killed by this virus, they’re just not. It’s unethical even to bloody offer it to them. There is no logic to the statement that we need to vaccinate everybody in order to stop this, it’s just nonsense.
“Now if Edwina Currie is vaccinated then she is fine. She might sincerely believe what she’s saying in which case she’s just uninformed and nuts. I’m sure lots of MPs have just been given the brief and they’re not very clever. I’ve personally spoken to about 60. Several get it reasonably well but some of them are just embarrassing.”
Reports have surfaced in the past week that trials mean venues might be able to open to capacity audiences on June 21, in keeping with the Government’s roadmap – but only if people agree to Covid passports. Dr Yeadon believes that introducing such a system will create a two-tier society and one which can be tweaked at a moment’s notice depending on the Government’s wishes.
Dr Yeadon said:
“There is absolutely no chance whatsoever that Westminster will save the people. They are the tools of our destruction. They will vote vaccine passports through, even those who know these are horrible things. They’ll be told it’s temporary and get their pat on the shoulder. But of course they won’t be temporary.
“For example, you might even be told as from next month it will be illegal to leave your house without a valid vaccine passport. That’s how easy it would be. We are following “the science”, capital T, capital S. I’m not saying they will do that but they can exclude non-vaccinated people from civil society wholly and that is what is happening in Israel. Once this system comes in I cannot see a way in which it can be undone. They might say initially you can’t enter a sports ground or a large shopping complex, but then in a couple of weeks they might say, ‘as of Tuesday all large supermarkets will use vaccine passports on the door’, so that’s them out. And eventually they can say, ‘as from Wednesday week, all cashless transactions must be preceded by demonstration of a vaccine pass’ – so you can’t even fill your car with petrol. It could happen.
“The idea would be for me to be in America, educating and essentially immunising populations and politicians against what is happening, so that when they’re told next time that you need to lock down your businesses and your state, they won’t. That’s the goal. My preferred one would be to go and work for either Governor DeSantis or his scientific advisory team.”
Dr Yeadon has criticised his peers for failing to speak out against the problems he sees with following only one line of enquiry. He explains that the UK’s official figures of 4,395,703 positive cases and 127,000 simply cannot be believed due to the countless levels of contamination in testing and the unprecedented change in how deaths are certified.
He said:
“I am disappointed that almost no one in the scientific community has said anything. What about recently retired professors, people who are not being paid by universities, why aren’t you saying something? Is it cowardice? Death certification has been radically changed in a way that has never been done anywhere for any disease. And we have never used PCR on an industrial scale and it is my opinion – confirmed by people who do this professionally – that it could never be done reliably. So whatever they tell you it’s a lie. You cannot run three quarters of a million PCR tests and not have cross contamination all over the place.
“Why were the doctors not complaining about the death certification? If you have a positive in this ropey test at any time 28 days up to your death then that is on your death certificate. It’s just not even logical. It’s like saying if you had biro on your finger at any point 28 days prior to your death, we’ll say you died of biro ink poisoning. It’s absurd. But they went along with it.”
And he has a message for those who no doubt once would have agreed that you cannot trust a politician but who know hang on their every word.
“If you spot an inconsistency, something you think, ‘that doesn’t sound right’, pursue it, because if you pursue it to a point where you think, ‘I’m not being told the truth’ – which you’re not – once you spot that, then the question would be, ‘if your Government has lied to you about one thing, don’t you think it’s quite likely it has lied to you about other things?’ I believe they are lying to you about everything.
“Let’s look at pubs; you can only take a drink outside and you can only pay for it outside. Hold on, have the supermarkets not been open continuously through this process? Sometimes it’s really busy and you might be in the shop an hour. Isn’t that an inconsistency? And why are we OK with that? I don’t believe that any outbreaks have ever been linked to a supermarket. And that is another odd one. That’s about the only place you meet. Surely all the outbreaks that aren’t linked to hospitals and care homes must be linked to common places of commerce and they are supermarkets and essential shops – there aren’t any others, none.”
And he uses supermarkets in his insight as to why lockdowns are pointless; in a nutshell, if you are full of virus, you feel very ill, so you would be at home, curled up on the sofa, in bed or in hospital. If not, you do not have enough virus in your body to be a threat of transmission. Indeed, a global study, cited by Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, to a court in Manitoba, found that asymptomatic transmission is close to zero in an outside setting, given it is about 0.7 per cent inside.
Dr Yeadon says:
“We will lock down again. They will want to do it as early as possible, so October.
“But the reason why lockdowns could never have worked is combined with one of the other lies, asymptomatic transmission. The reason it’s a lie is that, in order to be a good source of infection, you need to have lots of virus in your body. If you’ve only got a little bit, the chances that you would infect another person is very low, even if you were close to them – maybe even if you kissed them – you just don’t have that much virus in and around your body.
“But if you had a thousand times more virus, maybe you could put a droplet on a person and they might inhale it or whatever. But if you have lots of virus you must have symptoms. You cannot have a situation where your body is growing huge amounts of virus in the airwaves and producing no symptoms and this is because the virus will attack you, it’s damaging your tissues, every cell it multiplies in and then escapes from is destroyed. It’s not just a theory, it’s inevitable you will have symptoms. And furthermore you need symptoms like coughing in order to propel infected droplets out of your body. They don’t come out when you’re just passively breathing. If you have lots of virus and it’s attacking you and making you ill and your immune system is fighting it back, which is also making you feel ill, those symptoms are called ‘I don’t feel well’.
“So if you’re a good source of infection, you’re symptomatic, you don’t feel well, you probably feel very ill, possibly bad enough to be in your bed and we’re giving you chicken soup and cups of tea every few hours. And if you’re a bit older you might be in hospital. But what you’re not going to be doing is dashing up and down the aisles in Sainsbury’s. Or sitting in the pub. You’re ill. So that’s the whole point. In the general community, almost no one who met the conditions to be pretty sure of infection was out there. It’s just simply not possible. You need to be full of virus, you need to get the symptoms to get the stuff out of your body but you need to be completely unwell despite those two things.
“And those things do not overlap, you can’t have ‘feeling fine out and about, looking normal but full of virus’. And we are trained to notice if someone has a cold or they look ill. We have known this stuff for tens of thousands of years. You can spot someone who is a respiratory threat to you. It’s very uncommon for people with good sources of infection to be walking about in the community and, even if they were there, you would usually avoid them. And as a result hardly any transmission occurred in the general population. And as a result shutting down the general population made f**k all difference to transmission. And that is why lockdowns don’t work and they never did. They never worked anywhere because lockdown isn’t really lockdown, it just smashes the economy.”
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Is America behind the massive surge in Kiev regime’s child trafficking?
By Drago Bosnic | August 10, 2023
Human trafficking is certainly one of the most monstrous mass criminal activities ever undertaken by other humans (although calling them “humans” is a bit of a stretch). And yet, there’s a special kind of this deeply repulsive crime that pushes it to diabolical proportions – child trafficking. Underage kids, particularly those who were abandoned, sold or have very poor/abusive family backgrounds, are by far the most vulnerable group. The depraved criminals who engage in such illicit activities specifically target unfortunate children and given there are millions of them all around the globe, particularly in war-torn areas, the “recruitment pool” is effectively endless. Unfortunately, the demand on the black market also seems to be constant and growing, making it a very lucrative and appealing prospect for criminals. … continue
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