Political ambiguity or a doomsday weapon: Why Abbas abandoned Oslo
By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | May 26, 2020
This time, we are told, it is different and that President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, is absolutely serious about his decision to absolve his leadership from all previous agreements signed with Israel and the United States.
But this time is not different, and Abbas is not serious.
“The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the state of Palestine are absolved … of all the agreements and understandings with the American and Israeli governments … including the security ones,” Abbas declared at an emergency meeting of his leadership held in Ramallah on May 19.
Unsurprisingly, there were no massive demonstrations reported throughout Occupied Palestine in support of Abbas’ latest decision. Aside from a few loyalists in PA-controlled media, it seemed as if the man did not utter a word, let alone cancel all agreements that justified the very existence of his Authority over the course of nearly 30 years.
The demonstrable truth is that Abbas ceased to matter to Palestinians a long time ago. However, for Israel, he mattered greatly, because his Authority has served as an additional security buffer between occupied Palestinians and the occupation army. Thanks to ‘security coordination’, Israel was allowed to fortify its occupation in peace.
Palestinians have long lost faith in Abbas as proved by one public opinion poll after another. This is not a sudden occurrence, but the accumulation of decades of failure and disappointments. Abbas’ commitment to the Oslo Accords led to absolutely nothing, except for the creation of a massive and utterly corrupt security apparatus that largely exists to ‘coordinate’ the subjugation of Palestinians with their Israeli oppressors.
Since his advent to power in 2005, Abbas and his faithful followers within the Fatah party became obsessed with their enmity, not with Israel and the United States, but with Abbas’ own Palestinian rivals, within Fatah itself – Mohammed Dahlan, etc. – and, to a larger extent, with Hamas in Gaza.
Israel mainly factored in Abbas’ many speeches in Ramallah and at the UN General Assembly in New York; despite all the rhetoric, little or no action ever followed. Concurrently, Israeli soldiers and illegal Jewish settlers carried on with their systematic abuse of Palestinians, unhindered.

Not once did Abbas’ ever-growing security forces (estimated at 80,000 strong) move to block the path of a single Israeli bulldozer demolishing a Palestinian home or uprooting an ancient olive grove in the West Bank. Nor did they prevent the arrest of an anti-Israeli occupation activist. Often, they carried out the arrests themselves.
Even as Israel was pounding Gaza with massive bombs and white phosphorus, Abbas continued barking insults at his Palestinian enemies. He berated Gaza’s armed resistance, yet offered no meaningful alternative to whatever version of ‘resistance’ he championed.
But if Abbas managed to co-exist under these humiliating conditions, why did he decide to cancel the agreements now? To answer this, first, let us look at the political context of Abbas’ decision.
In February 2015, Abbas threatened to sever security ties with Israel as a response to the Israeli decision to withhold millions of dollars of Palestinian tax revenues, which Tel Aviv obtains on behalf of the PA. Similar threats were made in July 2017, this time in response to Israel’s illegal measures around the Muslim holy sites in occupied Jerusalem. And again, in September 2018, when the US unilaterally recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. And, yet again, in July 2019, when Israel demolished Palestinian homes in occupied East Jerusalem.
The latest episode, Abbas’s threat to dissolve the PA, was in response to the American announcement of the so-called ‘Deal of the Century’.
These are only the notable threats that registered in media coverage. In reality, Abbas has waged his ‘war’ on Israel in the form of endless threats that were always met with disdain in Israel.
The difference, this time, is because Abbas has never experienced this degree of abandonment and political vulnerability. Discarded by the Americans and disowned by the Israelis, Abbas’ credibility is at an all-time low. More importantly, the Palestinian people have long abandoned any illusion that the path of liberation will go through Abbas’ office in Ramallah.
Overwhelmed by many odds, Abbas decided to conduct what is, most likely, to be his final political act. What happens next matters little, because at this stage the 84-year-old Palestinian leader is left with nothing to lose.
Canceling the Palestinian commitment to the agreements should translate into little on the ground, considering that Israel and the US have already reneged on these agreements.
The Oslo Accords were meant to be relevant up to a point, until 1999, when the final status negotiations were meant to be held as the last step before the establishment of an independent Palestinian State.
Jerusalem, like the rights of Palestinian refugees, was meant to be resolved then, not to be completely “taken off the table”, two decades later. No territorial swap, let alone annexation, was to be permitted without a bilateral agreement between both parties.
Only two components of these agreements survived Israel’s numerous violations: the ‘security coordination’ and the ‘donors’ money’, which kept the PA and its massive – but useless – army in operation.
Now that the US has withheld all funds to Abbas’ Authority, and Israel’s new national unity government has agreed, in principle, to annex much of the West Bank, Abbas is left with nothing.
By canceling all agreements, Abbas and his supporters are hoping that alarm bells sound in Washington and Tel Aviv, especially since the halting of ‘security coordination’ could prove costly to the safety of Israel’s Jewish settlers.
If Abbas was, indeed, serious in his announcement, he would have included in his speech a clear articulation of a new Palestinian political agenda that is predicated on unity – but a true Palestinian strategy was never the PA leader’s ultimate goal.
What Mahmoud Abbas is hoping to achieve, with his latest theatrics, is the establishment of a new political game, one that is based on political ambiguity, so that he is not entirely abandoned by his Western backers, or finally shunned as a collaborator by his own people.
May 26, 2020 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Israel, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment
Five Myths About the Venezuelan Opposition
Venezuelanalysis • May 24, 2020
The corporate media is almost unanimous in its support for US regime change plans in Venezuela. This support naturally extends to the US-backed Venezuelan anti-Chavista opposition, which in the past 20 years has constantly tried to overthrow the government. In order to maintain uncritical support for the opposition, the mainstream media has created a series of “myths” about it. The latest joint VA-Tatuy TV production explores five myths that sustain this favorable coverage.
May 26, 2020 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Video | Latin America, United States, Venezuela | Leave a comment
America Is Drowning in Problems
By Paul Craig Roberts | Institute for Political Economy | May 22, 2020
Washington is picking yet another fight with China. On top of the trade war we now have the coronavirus war. China is accused of being responsible for the virus by withholding information about it. Some in Washington want to make China pay for the cost of the virus by reneging on US debt held by China in the form of US Treasuries.
What information about coronavirus is China supposed to have withheld?
That China was doing coronavirus research? How could this information have been withheld when the US State Department knew about it, the N.I.H. was funding it, and US scientists were complaining about the danger?
That coronavirus was ravaging Wuhan? How was this information withheld when it was in the media every day?
The United States and its vassals knew about the virus outbreak in China two months prior to its outbreak in the West and did nothing. Through either inaction or intent, the US, Canada, and Europe imported the virus. The governments refused to stop flights in and out of China and to prevent cruise ships from welcoming passengers from infected areas. Governments did not want to interfere with profits, which came before public health. Absolutely nothing was done. No efforts were made to stockpile protective masks and gear, or to protect nursing homes, or to segregate hospital facilities, or to think outside the box about treatments. The Swedish government was so unprepared that it did not even try to do anything and just let the virus run its course with devastating effects on the elderly. [Note: There is much disinformation about Sweden from those who believe the virus is a plot to impose police state controls, such as claims that Sweden has kept the economy open without paying for it in a higher death rate and is gaining “herd immunity” against Covid-19. These claims are contradicted by news reports. For example: here and here.]
In an attempt, more or less successful, to reduce the infection rate so that health facilities were not over-burdened, every other country imposed social distancing rules, bans against crowd events, and workplace closures. As little was known about the disease and the Chinese mortality rate was believed to be vastly understated, there was no responsible alternative to the so-called “lockdowns.” It remains to be seen whether the concern for profits has produced a premature reopening that will result in a second wave of rapid infection rates. Many suspect that Big Pharma and Bill Gates want to keep the infection spreading in order to panic us into being vaccinated with an inadequately tested vaccine.
The blame China game is really an effort to cover-up the failure of Western governments to deal with a crisis.
The failure of governments to deal with crisis is ubiquitous. Just think Katrina, the hurricane that devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. If you don’t remember or are too young to have experienced the 2005 hurricane via TV, read Douglas Brinkley’s The Great Deluge.
Everyone knew that the levies protecting New Orleans and surrounding areas were unable to withstand a storm of Katrina’s intensity. The city was a bowl waiting to fill up with the water that wiped out 80% of New Orleans and 150 miles of Gulf Coast communities. Evacuation orders came too late. There were no steps taken to evacuate those without cars and resources. The sick and elderly were left in place. The few steps that were taken to assemble buses, boats, and first responders located the scanty resources in areas that flooded. The New Orleans Police Department went AWOL. Some joined in the looting. FEMA was a total failure. President George W. Bush and Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff were not focused on the unfolding tragedy but on their creation of a terrortist hoax that was used to justify 20 years of US bombing and invasions of Middle Eastern and North African countries. As Bush had deployed Louisiana’s National Guard to Iraq, the Louisiana governor had to borrow guardsmen from other states.
The US Coast Guard, Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries personnel, and private individuals formed the force of first responders. People from Louisiana and from other states showed up on their own time, their own money, and with their own boats and began organizing rescues. There were many heroic and generous people involved in the rescue. As most of the rescuers were white southerners and most of the rescued were black, it put the lie to the propagandistic picture of the white southern racist. For example, Sara Roberts and her husband Buisson, a descendant of Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard, organized the Cajun Navy. Sara enlisted clients of her accounting firm who came up with 35 boats and crews to man them. One of her clients, Ronny Lovett, paid his construction crews triple wages for their rescue time and spent $200,000 of his money equipping the boats with food, water, medical supplies, chain saws, life jackets, spotlights, ropes and whatever else could contribute to successful rescues. It was individual citizens, not the governments in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Washington that rescued many thousands of people who otherwise would have perished.
From its founding day, New Orleans was a man-made disaster waiting to happen. Dredging, canals, watercourse alterations, pipelines and a variety of other environmental damaging mistakes had over the years destroyed the wetlands that protected the city and Gulf Coast. In order to serve private profit, failure was built into the system. The Great Deluge is an external cost of a political and economic system that puts private profits first.
We are undergoing it again at this moment as areas of Michigan are inundated from floods caused by dam failures. One of the dams, the Edenville Dam was a long known public safety hazard . Boyce Hydro, the owner of the dam, repeatedly failed despite the intervention of regulators to address the known risk. Not only was Boyce Hydro negligent, but also were the government authorities that permitted the known risk to persist unaddressed. The loss of life and property from the flooding is an external cost imposed on third parties by Boyce Hydro whose agenda was limited to its profits.
It is as difficult to understand the liberal and progressive belief in government as it is to understand the libertarian belief in the efficacy of the invisible hand that allegedly causes private greed to serve the public’s interest. Humans are a built-in failure machine. Their time perspective is short term. They are always surprised by the unintended consequences of their own thoughtless actions and inaction.
Throughout America, state, local, and federal government epitomize failure. Trillions of dollars have been poured into weapons systems that cannot be used without destroying the United States along with the rest of the world, while dams fail, bridges collapse, communities deteriorate, and homelessness grows. The government in Washington spends time, effort, and money manufacturing enemies to justify the budget of the military/security complex, while jobs and the US economy are offshored, the environment is degraded, and health care needs go unaddressed. The US rivals third world countries in terms of the percentage of its population that has no savings, no access to health care, and no prospects for advancement in life.
But we can blow up the world several times over and make mindless interventions in the natural environment that multiply the destructive power of storms, heavy rains, and other natural phenomena.
Another election approaches and yet again there is no acknowledgement of the real problems our country faces or any interest in discussing what to do about them. America and the Western World in general are simply going to drown in their unaddressed problems just as New Orleans drowned in Hurricane Katrina.
May 25, 2020 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Timeless or most popular | United States | Leave a comment
Meet Bill Gates
Corbett • 05/24/2020
There can be no doubt that Bill Gates has worn many hats on his remarkable journey from his early life as the privileged son of a Seattle-area power couple to his current status as one of the richest and most influential people on the planet. But, as we have seen in our exploration of Gates’ rise as unelected global health czar and population control advocate, the question of who Bill Gates really is is no mere philosophical pursuit. Today we will attempt to answer that question as we examine the motives, the ideology, and the connections of this man who has been so instrumental in shaping the post-coronavirus world.
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TRANSCRIPT
Computer whiz kid. Talented software developer. Shrewd businessman. Benevolent philanthropist. Global health expert.
There can be no doubt that Bill Gates has worn many hats on his remarkable journey from his early life as the privileged son of a Seattle-area power couple to his current status as one of the richest and most influential people on the planet. But, as we have seen in our exploration of Gates’ rise as unelected global health czar and population control advocate, the question of who Bill Gates really is is no mere philosophical pursuit.
Given that we are currently living through a crisis that has been “predicted” by Bill Gates, which is triggering a response from the global health organizations that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has bankrolled, and driving us toward a vaccination and biometric ID “solution” which Bill Gates has been working on for years, the answer to the question “Who Is Bill Gates?” is quickly becoming one of the most important questions of our lives. That answer will not only tell us about the world that we are living in, but about the one that we are being thrust into . . . and how we can avoid it.
Today we will attempt to answer that question as we examine the motives, the ideology, and the connections of this man who has been so instrumental in shaping the post-coronavirus world.
Meet Bill Gates.
You’re tuned into The Corbett Report.
So who is Bill Gates?
Some argue that he’s a genius who leveraged his natural computer savvy into a billion-dollar fortune.
INTERVIEWER: You’re called a genius and I will—well, no, I don’t think that embarrassed you at all. They call you a genius. Part of your genius is that you are a computer whiz, and the other is that you did have the business acumen to turn it into a working company. Are you a business genius, too?
GATES: Well, I wouldn’t say “genius.”
SOURCE: Watch 28-year-old Bill Gates explain why he didn’t see himself as a genius
Others insist that he is a visionary who changed our lives with his foresight and bold imagination.
ALAN GARBER: Bill had a vision—and I understand it went back even then—that computing would be ubiquitous. It would be part of all of our lives. And, indeed, as you all know, he executed on that vision. And the world today has changed so dramatically in large part due to the work that Bill has done throughout the years.
SOURCE: A Conversation with Bill Gates’ Q&A at Harvard University
He has been hailed as a shrewd executive who built the Microsoft empire with his remarkable talent for business.
JAMES WALLACE: When the biographers and historians write the history of the 20th century, Bill Gates is going to go down as the best businessman of our century, and Microsoft as one of the greatest companies of the 20th century.
SOURCE: Biography: Bill Gates
And he has been praised as a philanthropist who is selflessly devoting his wealth to improving the lives of people around the world.
JESSE KORNBLUTH: Bill, even your harshest critic would have to admit that your philanthropy work is, you know, planet-shaking incredible and could be, if you make it, a second act so amazing that it would dwarf what you’ve actually done at Microsoft. [APPLAUSE]
But, like anyone of his status, he has his detractors. In the 1990s he was often portrayed as the greedy head of the evil Microsoft monopoly.
BENJAMIN WOOLEY: Bill Gates isn’t content with his Windows system running just a few PCs. He wants it to run the world, spreading like a computer virus into our faxes, our phones, our TV sets, and, yes, even our toasters.
But in the age of the coronavirus crisis, he is most often treated like some sort of epidemiologist or leading health researcher.
ANDERSON COOPER: Back here with us once again to talk about this, as well as testing, treatments and more: Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill, thanks so much for being back with us. It’s been a little over a month since you were here and at that time you said the US had not hit its peak. So at this point do you think we have peaked and where do you think we are right now in kind of the arc of the pandemic?
SOURCE: Bill Gates says US system produces ‘bogus’ testing numbers
But in truth, none of these perspectives are accurate.
Microsoft’s big break famously came from a deal to provide software for IBM as they moved into the personal computer market. But the deal was not the result of Gates’ technical genius or amazing business acumen. As has been quietly admitted by IBM executives in the years since, Microsoft was given their shot at the chance to work with “Big Blue” as a result of Gates’ mother’s relationship with IBM CEO John Opel.
GORAN MILIC: You remember your partnership of IBM and Bill Gates? How did it break up?
EDWARD ANDRUS: I do remember very well, actually. Bill Gates at the time at the beginning of our relationship with them was living on pizza and Pepsi Cola in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And his mother happened to be on the United Way board with our chairman and asked our chairman to help him. And you know, when the chairman comes in and tells you to go help this kid, nine hundred people get on the plane Monday morning and they all go down to try to help Bill Gates.
[. . .]
So I don’t see Bill Gates as this great, creative person. I see him as an opportunist. And, in fact, in those days there was a lot of sharing of software code. People gave it away in Silicon Valley; they would share everything. He came in and he tried to control everything and put a price on it.
SOURCE: Idemo u Ameriku 2
Computer historians have long known how the basis for what became MS-DOS was not Bill Gates’ brilliant imagination, but QDOS, a “Quick and Dirty Operating System” that had been thrown together by Tim Patterson, a worker at Seattle Computer Products, as a placeholder until he could sell a proper operating system to his customers. And as even Gates himself admitted, the breakthrough Graphical User Interface that became the basis for Windows was ripped off from the researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
As Bill would say after Apple unsuccessfully sued Microsoft for copyright infringement over Windows’ GUI: “Hey, Steve, just because you broke into Xerox’s house before I did and took the TV doesn’t mean I can’t go in later and take the stereo.”
SOURCE: Paul Allen, Idea Man (p. 156)
And, as Gates also admits, it is not a spirit of selfless generosity that motivates his interest in vaccines and other lucrative health interventions.
BECKY QUICK: I’d like to talk to you about your approach to vaccinations. You wrote something recently, and, like you always do, you kind of looked at the problem from a scientific and business perspective on things. You’ve invested 10 billion dollars in vaccinations over the last two decades, and you figured out the return on investment for that. It kind of stunned me. Can you walk us through the math?
[. . .]
BILL GATES: You know, we see a phenomenal track record. It’s been a hundred billion overall that the world’s put in—our foundation is a bit more than 10 billion—but we feel there’s been over a 20-to-one return. So if you just look at the economic benefits, that’s a pretty strong number compared to anything else.
SOURCE: Bill Gates: My ‘best investment’ turned $10 billion into $200 billion worth of economic benefit
As we have seen, Gates’ “philanthropic” investment scheme has paid off well, with his $50 billion net worth having ballooned to over $100 billion after his decade of “altruism” in the vaccine market. As critics of his foundation have repeatedly pointed out, the 9,000,000 people who die every year of hunger would be best served by securing food supplies, running water and other basic necessities, not costly medical interventions for rare diseases. But there is no return on investment to be made from that kind of charity.
No, this is not about charity. It is about control. The population control grid that Gates has been quietly funding into existence for the past decade—a biometric identification system tied to a digital payments infrastructure that will be used to track, catalogue and control every movement, every transaction and every interaction of every citizen—is just now coming into view.
But the real question is: Why is he doing this? What drives a man like Bill Gates, a man rich beyond the wildest dreams of avarice, to spend his time and invest his fortune in schemes to control the population? To find the answer to that question, we have to examine Gates’ family background.
Bill Gates, it should not be surprising to learn, was born into money. His great-grandfather, J. W. Maxwell, was the president of National City Bank in Seattle. His grandfather, Willard, was also a banker, and his grandmother, Adele, a prominent Seattle civic leader.
Bill Gates’ mother, Mary Maxwell Gates, was a scion of the Maxwell banking family and, by all accounts, as hard-driving as her forebears. She served as a director of several companies, including First Interstate Bancorp and KIRO-TV of Seattle. She served as a regent at the University of Washington. And she was appointed to the board of the United Way of America, where, as we have seen, she persuaded IBM CEO John Opel to help her son in his fledgling software development career.
Bill’s father, William H. Gates, Sr., was a prominent Seattle-area lawyer. He co-founded a powerful law and lobbying firm, helped Howard Schultz in his bid to buy Starbucks, served on the boards of numerous companies and organizations, and, along the way, had a profound influence on his son’s life and career.
GATES: My dad was a large presence, both physically and in terms of his wisdom. He worked very hard, so he’d leave in the mornings, often before we had breakfast, and get home in time for dinner. I always looked up to my dad in terms of how hard he worked.
At the dinner table my dad would go through various lawsuits and expect us to follow along. He had high expectations.
The young Bill Gates—technically “William H. Gates, III,” although his card-playing family dubbed him “Trey”—learned much from his parents. From his mother’s banking family he inherited a “nose for the dollar,” as one childhood friend’s father called it. From his hard-driving legal-minded father, he learned the value of legalizing business arrangements. As a child, he even had a legal contract drawn up to grant him the use of his older sisters’ baseball mitt.
These traits would not earn him many friends, but they served him well as he began to bring order to the anarchic software development community of the 1970s. At that time, software for the brand new personal computer market was the realm of computer hobbyists—people whose excitement about the microcomputer revolution and love of engineering and problem-solving led them to develop and share code freely with each other.
But this was no good for the young Bill Gates, who, even before Microsoft was off the ground, was already dreaming of commoditizing this hobby and turning it into the basis of a business empire. In 1976, with the ink still wet on Microsoft’s first contract with Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems of Albuquerque, New Mexico, the then-21-year-old Gates wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists excoriating the early computer enthusiasts, who represented his main market. for sharing Microsoft’s code for Altair BASIC.
As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? [. . .] The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man [sic] years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
SOURCE: Open Letter to Hobbyists
The letter was awkward and tone-deaf, as many people have described the young Bill Gates in his social interactions. It heaped vitriol on the very people who would be the customers of any future business and tried to change an established culture of sharing software code merely by decree. Even Apple Computers, which would go on to be one of the prime purveyors of “walled garden” systems that restrict users’ ability to control their own computers, scored an easy marketing victory by responding to Gates’ angry letter with a reminder that “Yes, Folks, Apple BASIC is Free!”
But the gauntlet was thrown down, and Gates would have his way. Although freeware and other forms of open source software development still exist, the establishment of software code as legally protected intellectual property has led to the rise of billionaires like Gates.
A “nose for the dollar” and a knowledge of how to use the legal system to get what you want were not the only things to emerge from Bill Gates’ childhood, however. His parents also encouraged discussion about the family’s charity work and the causes they held close to their heart.
As Gates revealed to Bill Moyers in 2003, those causes included “the population issue” which sparked a lifelong interest in “reproductive health.”
GATES: One issue that really grabbed me as urgent were issues related to population . . . reproductive health.
MOYERS: But did you come to reproductive issues as an intellectual?
GATES: When I was growing up, my parents were always involved in various volunteer things. My dad was head of Planned Parenthood. And it was very controversial to be involved with that.
SOURCE: A Conversation with Bill Gates: Making a Healthier World for Children and Future Generations
Gates tips his hand when he equates “issues related to population” with “reproductive health.” The topic is particularly controversial, because “population control” and “reproductive health” have been used for half a century as a euphemism for eugenics, the discredited pseudoscience that holds that certain families are fit to be leaders of society by virtue of their superior genes.
As we saw in “Why Big Oil Conquered the World,” eugenics was a field named and codified by Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin. Ostensibly concerned with heredity and what would later be known as genetics, the eugenicists believed that the rich and powerful were rich and powerful not because of luck or chance or happenstance, and certainly not from the deployment of cutthroat business tactics and underhanded dealings; no, the rich and powerful had attained their status because they came from “better stock.” Conversely, the poor were poor because of their “defective germ plasm.”
As transparent as it seems to us today that this ideology was a self-serving self-justification for the ruling class, it was quickly taken up as the great social crusade of the early 20th century. From Teddy Roosevelt to H. G. Wells to Julian Huxley to Winston Churchill, there was widespread support for the eugenicist notion that society must strive to make sure that the rich and “well-born” breed as much as possible, and the poor, infirm, and “feeble-minded” be prevented from having children.
A common eugenicist argument was that the scarce resources of society should not be used to support the lower classes, as that only encouraged more of their kind. Instead, life-saving medical care and intervention should be rationed so that those resources can be best put to use elsewhere. So-called negative eugenicists even took things further, with some, like famed playwright George Bernard Shaw, calling for people to be called before a state-appointed board to justify their existence or be put to death.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: [. . .] But there are an extraordinary number of people whom I want to kill. Not in any unkind or personal spirit, but it must be evident to all of you — you must all know half a dozen people, at least—who are no use in this world. Who are more trouble than they are worth. And I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly appointed board, just as he might come before the income tax commissioner, and, say, every five years, or every seven years, just put him there, and say: “Sir, or madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence?”
SOURCE: George Bernard Shaw talking about capital punishment
But, in the post-WWII era, as the name of eugenics became tarred by association with the Nazi atrocities, the talk of death panels and other harsh eugenicist notions was dropped from public conversation. Now, the quest to reduce the size of the poor population was spoken of as “population control” and “reproductive health.” Still, occasionally, these old negative eugenics ideas are revisited in moments of candor.
GATES: You’re raising tuitions at the University of California as rapidly as they [sic] can and so the access that used to be available to the middle class or whatever is just rapidly going away. That’s a trade-off society’s making because of very, very high medical costs and a lack of willingness to say, you know, “Is spending a million dollars on that last three months of life for that patient—would it be better not to lay off those 10 teachers and to make that trade off in medical cost?” But that’s called the “death panel” and you’re not supposed to have that discussion.
SOURCE: Bill Gates: End-of-Life Care vs. Saving Teachers’ Jobs
It is worth questioning why this man, who openly muses about death panels and the trade-offs of providing health care to the elderly is to be taken completely at face value in his attempts to slow population growth in the third world or to handle a coronavirus health crisis that primarily affects the elderly.
That the Gates agenda is being driven by a eugenicist ideology is suggested by multiple lines of evidence, both historical and current.
As we have also seen in “Why Big Oil Conquered the World,” the Rockefeller family was instrumental in funding and promoting eugenics, both in America and overseas.
The Rockefellers helped fund the Eugenics Record Office.
The founding director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, William Welch, sat on the ERO’s board and helped direct its activities.
The Rockefellers sponsored the studies of the eugenics researchers at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in Germany, including Ernst Rüdin, who would go on to draft Nazi Germany’s forced sterilization law.
And, when the American Eugenics Society became embarrassed of its own name, its long-time director, Frederick Osborne, merely took over as president of the Rockefeller-founded Population Council.
This dedication to the cause of “public health” did not escape the approving gaze of Bill Gates, Sr. In a chapter of his 2009 book, Showing Up for Life, called “Walking With Giants,” he writes admiringly of the Rockefellers and their influence in the field:
Every corner we’ve turned in the field of global health, we’ve found that the Rockefellers were already there and had been there for years.
When we committed to childhood immunization we found ourselves building on efforts the Rockefeller Foundation had helped launch and fund in the 1980s.
When we became interested in fighting malaria and tuberculosis, we learned that the Rockefellers had been studying the prevention and treatment of such diseases around the globe for, in some cases, as long as a hundred years.
A similar dynamic held true in the case of HIV/AIDS.
A lesson we learned from studying and working with the Rockefellers is that to succeed in pursuing audacious goals you need like-minded partners with whom to collaborate.
And we learned that such goals are not prizes claimed by the short-winded. The Rockefellers stay with tough problems for generations.
SOURCE: William H. Gates. Showing Up for Life (pp. 158-159)
As Gates, Sr., suggests, it is by working with “like-minded partners” that such “great” achievements in the field of global health can be made. For the Gates, these like-minded partners include the Rockefellers themselves. Bill Gates, Sr. got to discuss global health, agriculture and environment with the likes of David Rockefeller, Sr., and David Rockefeller, Jr., at a meeting on “Philanthropy in a Global Century” at Rockefeller University campus in 2000. And Bill Gates, as we have seen, co-hosted a meeting on reducing the population with David Rockefeller in 2009.
But the most salacious hints of a deeper agenda are not to be found in the Gates’ public associations, but in the associations that they have tried to hide from the public.
STEPHANIE RUHLE: Jeffrey Epstein may be dead, but this story isn’t. A shocking new report from The New York Times sheds light on the connection between Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the late Jeffrey Epstein. After Gates’ name came up in connection with Epstein and MIT Media Lab, Gates gave a statement to The Wall Street Journal where he insisted he did not have any business relationship or friendship with Epstein. But a new report outlines conversations with Gates and Epstein and a conversation with Bill and Melinda Gates’ Foundation. A connection between their foundation and JPMorgan Chase to set up a charitable fund to benefit Epstein. You know what I want to know: Why?
SOURCE: NYT: Bill Gates Repeatedly Met With Jeffrey Epstein | Velshi & Ruhle | MSNBC
Beginning in August of last year, a string of information connecting Bill Gates to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein began to emerge.
Flight logs revealed that Gates had flown on Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet.
An email surfaced showing disgraced MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito—who resigned from his position after it was discovered that he had helped cover up Jeffrey Epstein’s identity as an “anonymous” donor to the lab—informing his staff that a $2 million donation to the lab in 2014 was a “gift from Bill Gates directed by Jeffrey Epstein.”
As the story gained momentum, Gates tried to downplay the relationship, with a Gates spokesperson protesting that Gates “didn’t know it was Epstein’s plane,” and Gates himself insisting that “I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with [Epstein].”
This was immediately contradicted by The New York Times, who reported in October of 2012 that Gates had in fact met with Epstein on multiple occasions, even going so far as to discuss the creation of a multibillion dollar charitable fund with seed money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and JPMorgan Chase.
According to the Times, Gates emailed his colleagues about Epstein in 2011: “His lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me.”
Epstein’s will even named Boris Nikolic—a Harvard-trained immunologist who served as the chief scientific advisor to both Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and who appears in the sole publicly known photo of Epstein and Gates’ 2011 meeting at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion—as the backup executor of Epstein’s estate.
It is not difficult to see why Gates would try to distance himself from his relationship with a child sex trafficker. Epstein, after all, is suspected of ensnaring high-ranking politicians, businessmen and even royalty in an intelligence-directed “honeypot” operation, recording them in the act of sexually abusing underage girls and using that evidence as blackmail.
But, as it turns out, the attempt to suppress the Gates-Epstein story may have been an attempt to suppress the revelation of an altogether different shared interest.
KRISTEN DAHLGREN: Sources say several accusers have come forward in New Mexico, where Epstein owns a sprawling ranch. According to a new report published in The New York Times—not verified by NBC News—Epstein wanted to use the ranch for controlled breeding, using his DNA to improve humanity. Citing two award-winning scientists and an advisor to large companies and wealthy individuals, the article reports Epstein surrounded himself with leading scientists and would tell them he wanted to have 20 women impregnated at a time on the ranch.
SOURCE: Jeffrey Epstein Had Plan To Father Dozens Of Children, Report Says | TODAY
The already scarcely believable Jeffrey Epstein story took another bizarre turn in August of 2019, when it was reported that Epstein “Hoped to Seed the Human Race With His DNA.” As The New York Times explained, Epstein’s plan to impregnate 20 women at a time at his New Mexico ranch in order to “seed the human race with his DNA”—a plan he told to a number of the “scientific luminaries” he kept in his orbit—put a modern gloss on a very old idea:
Mr. Epstein’s vision reflected his longstanding fascination with what has become known as transhumanism: the science of improving the human population through technologies like genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. Critics have likened transhumanism to a modern-day version of eugenics, the discredited field of improving the human race through controlled breeding.
Epstein’s interest in genetics led him to sponsor a number of scientists working in the field, including George Church, a Harvard geneticist whose lab received funding from Epstein’s foundation from 2005 to 2007 for “cutting edge science.” Church publicly apologized for his connection to Epstein, which included several meetings a year from 2014 onward. This was neither the first nor the last time that this unassuming Harvard biologist, whose “cutting edge science” often strays into controversial areas, caused a public scandal. In 2019, Church proposed a “genetics dating app” which was immediately denounced as applied eugenics.
Church also acted as scientific advisor to Editas Medicine, a startup seeking to use the genome-editing tool, CRISPR-Cas9, to eliminate diseases by deleting the parts of a genetic code responsible for the illness. In 2015, the company announced it had raised $120 million from a group led by Epstein’s appointed backup executor, Dr. Boris Nikolic. Naturally, that group of investors included Bill Gates.
Yes, Bill Gates is certainly following his father’s advice to collaborate with “like-minded partners.”
So, the question remains: Is Bill Gates motivated by eugenics? Given that eugenics went underground over half a century ago, we are unlikely ever to unearth a frank admission along those lines from Gates himself. After all, there are no longer any card-carrying members of the American Eugenics Society; the society was rebranded in the 1970s when, as the society’s founder noted, “it became evident that changes of a eugenic nature would be made for reasons other than eugenics, and that tying a eugenic label on them would more often hinder than help their adoption.”
But there was an American Eugenics Society in the 1920s, and it just so happened to boast a “William H. Gates” on its member roster. But perhaps that is just a coincidence.
And there was an American Eugenics Society in the 1960s, when William H. Gates II was preceded as head of Planned Parenthood by Alan Guttmacher, who simultaneously served as the Director of the American Eugenics Society.
And perhaps it was coincidence that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation organized their London Summit on Family Planning, at which the Gates recommitted themselves to funding population control in the third world, in July 2012, on the anniversary of the First International Eugenics Congress, held in London exactly 100 years prior.
And perhaps it is reaching to compare the young Bill Gates’ dating preferences to the genetic-based dating favored by modern-day eugenicists.
JAMES WALLACE: I interviewed several women who had dated Bill just briefly and one told me the very first question Bill asked her was: “What did you score on your SAT test?” You know, this is not exactly what a young woman wants to hear. For Bill Gates, though . . . He had scored a perfect 800 on his math portion of the SAT and this was a matter of pride with him. And he wanted to make sure whoever he was dating, you know, had scored a pretty high grade.
SOURCE: Biography: Bill Gates
No, we cannot expect an answer about Bill Gates true motives to come from Gates himself. By this point the question of Bill Gates’ intentions has been buried under the combined weight of hundreds of millions of dollars of paid PR spin. Like the Rockefellers before them, the Gates have long since learned the secret of enlarging their family fortune—not to mention their control over the human population—by donning the mask of philanthropy.
There are many perspectives on Bill Gates; depending on who you ask, he is a computer savant, a genius businessman, or a saintly philanthropist. But all of these perspectives have been brought to you through PR outlets founded or funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill Gates is no longer a subject for historians but hagiographers.
Now we must confront the question of why this man is motivated to build such a web of control—control over our public health agencies—
GATES: And for all 193 member states, you must make vaccines a high priority in your health systems, to ensure that all your children have access to existing vaccines now—and to new vaccines as they become available.
SOURCE: BILL GATES TO WORLD HEALTH ASSEMBLY: IMMUNIZE EVERY CHILD
Control over our identities—
GATES: And the lack of an ID system is a problem, not just for the payment system, but also for voting and health and education and taxation. And so it’s a wonderful thing to go in and create a broad identification system
SOURCE: Bill Gates at the Financial Inclusion Forum, December 1, 2015
Control over our transactions—
GATES: Once financial flows go underground—where you have lots of legitimate transactions mixed in with the ones you want to track—and once they’re going over a digital system that the US has no connection to, it’s far more difficult to find the transactions that you want to be aware of or that you want to block.
SOURCE: Bill Gates at the Financial Inclusion Forum, December 1, 2015
And even control over our bodies—
GATES: We’re gonna have this intermediate period of opening up, and it won’t be normal until we get an amazing vaccine to the entire world.
We must confront the possibility that this quest for control comes not from a selfless spirit of generosity that never seemed to exist before he became a multi-billionaire, but from the same drive for money, the same desire for domination and the same sense of superiority that motivated him on his way up the corporate ladder.
But if the answer to the question “Who is Bill Gates” is “Bill Gates is a eugenicist,” that tells us some important things about the world that we are living in.
It tells us that Gates is deceiving the public into supporting his takeover of the world with a false front of philanthropy.
It tells us that the goal of the Gates, like the goal of the Rockefellers before them, is not to improve the world for humankind, but to improve the world for their kind.
And most importantly, it tells us that Bill Gates is no comic-book supervillain, single-handedly directing all of the chaos that is unfolding in the world or single-handedly bringing his own order to that chaos.
No, if Bill Gates is a eugenicist, driven by a belief in the superiority of himself and his fellow wealthy elitists, then what we are facing is not one man, or even one family, but an ideology.
This is not a trivial point. One man, whatever his wealth, can be stopped easily enough. But even if Bill Gates were to be thrown in jail tomorrow, the agenda that has already been set in motion would continue without missing a beat. An entire infrastructure of researchers, labs, corporations, governmental agencies and public health bodies exists, funded more often than not by Gates, but driven by the belief of all those millions of people working for these various entities that they are truly working in the best interest of the people.
No, an ideology cannot be stopped by stopping one man. It can only be stopped when enough people learn the truth about this agenda and the world of total, pervasive control that is coming into view.
If you have watched all four parts of this exploration on Bill Gates, then you are now one of the most informed people on the planet about the true nature of this agenda. You have seen how the takeover of public health has been used to railroad the world into a headlong rush toward mandatory vaccinations, biometric identification and digital payments. You have seen how the pieces of this puzzle fit together, and how they represent a far greater threat to the future of humanity than any virus.
Here is the good news: Armed with this information, you have the antidote to the scourge of this eugenicist ideology. The truth is that ideologies are viruses of the mind; they spread from person to person, infecting them with ideas that can lead to a disease of the body politic.
But here is the even greater truth: Inoculations do work. Inoculations of truth against the lies of those spreading their poisonous ideology.
If you have made it this far, it is incumbent on you to help inoculate those around you against the corrupt ideology of Bill Gates and all those who seek to control the population of the world. You must help to spread this information so that others have a chance to see the bigger picture and decide for themselves whether they are willing to roll up their sleeves and accept what is coming, or not.
But time is not on our side. Even as we speak, mass vaccination campaigns are being prepared:
ALLISON ARWADY: You know we are already building our plans to vaccinate the whole city of Chicago and working with others across the region on a major plan for this. We’ve bought syringes, we’ve bought cold boxes, we’ve planned out locations.
SOURCE: COVID COACH
Biometric identification schemes and “immunity passports” are already being rolled out:
CARYN SEIDMAN BECKER:
And so while we started with travel, at our core we’re a biometric-secure identity platform, where it’s always been about attaching your identity to your boarding pass at the airport or your ticket to get into a sports stadium or your credit card to buy a beer. And so now with the launch of Clear Health Pass, it’s about attaching your identity to your COVID-related health insights for employers, for employees, for customers.SOURCE: CLEAR’s new Health Pass service to help screen for coronavirus: CEO
Programs for tracking, tracing, and surveilling the entire population are already being beta-tested:
DEENA HINSHAW: Today we are launching another useful tool that can supplement the critical detective work we are conducting in public health. Alberta Trace Together is a voluntary secure mobile contact tracing application to help prevent the spread of COVID-19.
And the digital payment infrastructure, the system of financial exclusion that will allow governments to turn off our access to the economy at will, is being put into place:
UHURU KENYATTA: In order to avoid the risk of transmission through physical handling of money, we encourage the use of cashless transactions such as mobile money M-Pesa and otherwise and credit cards.
SOURCE: Uhuru: Government encourages cashless transactions to reduce risk of coronavirus transmission
NICHOLAS THOMPSON: People are using touchless payment systems much more than they’re using cash, both because we’re not interacting with people directly as much anymore and also because cash is kind of skeezy.
SOURCE: A Post-Pandemic Cashless Society? Was Remote NFL Draft a Tech Success? | Tech In :60 | GZERO Media
We must spread the word about the dark nature of this population control agenda to as many people as we can before our ability to speak out against this agenda is taken away for good.
Thanks to the likes of Bill Gates, the virus of this population control agenda is already here. It is threatening to crash the system as we’ve known it.
But if Bill Gates has taught us anything, it’s how to deal with a virus.
It’s time for a hard reset.
May 24, 2020 Posted by aletho | Deception, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment
China, Russia can initiate probe of US bio-labs
Washington urged to be transparent with bio-weapons program

By Yang Sheng – Global Times – 2020/5/14
In order to hide the fact that the US is researching on biological weapons, the US will not respond to an international query on its bio-labs, Chinese military experts said, adding that China and Russia could initiate an investigation of bio-labs worldwide at the UN to pressure the US.
The US can’t just claim all reasonable inquiries to its bio-labs as “conspiracy theories,” and when US politicians keep accusing China’s lab in Wuhan as the origin of COVID-19 without providing any evidence, they should respond to the questions on US bio-labs, including the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, analysts said.
China and Russia can initiate an international investigation of all P3 and P4 labs worldwide, including the ones run by the US, at the UN Security Council, and US antiwar groups and media can also pressure Washington to be transparent on the question of its bio-labs, Chinese analysts suggested.
Washington’s unwillingness to support the idea of a protocol to the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons in order to create a verification mechanism makes one wonder what goals the US seeks to achieve through its overseas bio-labs, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters on Wednesday, TASS reported.
Lavrov said at a news conference following an online meeting of foreign ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) on Wednesday that “These [US] laboratories are densely formed along the perimeter of the borders of the Russian Federation, and, accordingly, next to the borders of the People’s Republic of China,” the Xinhua News Agency reported.
Reasonable concerns
Song Zhongping, a military expert and TV commentator, told the Global Times on Thursday that “Russia has repeatedly voiced its concerns to the US about the labs in its neighbors like Ukraine and Georgia, but the US has ignored these concerns. The reason is simple – the US is hiding its bio-weapons program.”
The US has had a very advanced capability to develop chemical and biological weapons since the Cold War, and it had used them in Vietnam, like Agent Orange, which caused serious casualties and harm to Vietnamese civilians and even US soldiers, so it is reasonable for other countries to worry what the US is doing in those overseas bio-labs, said a military expert at a Beijing-based military academy who requested anonymity.
Jin Canrong, associate dean of School of International Studies, Renmin University in Beijing, said the questions that China and Russia raised about US labs are reasonable queries, which are totally different from the groundless accusations and conspiracy theories about the origin of COVID-19 made by some US congressmen and politicians. The US accusations were dismissed by US scientists, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, and intelligence agencies.
“The US must be transparent and respond to international concerns over its bio-labs,” Jin noted.
US self-isolation
In response to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s previous groundless accusation of the Wuhan lab, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said at a press conference on May 8 that “According to open records we have access to, China has only two P4 labs, the highest bio-safety level lab, while the US has 13 that are either in operation, under expansion or in planning, according to a February report by the Federation of American Scientists.”
“The US also has 1,495 P3 labs, not including many other labs it built in territories of the former Soviet Union, like in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, and in many other places around the world… the US has been the only country that has blocked the resumption of negotiations on a verification protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention,” she remarked.
Song said “biological weapons research needs to be carried out in the environment and the people that the weapons might be used for. So, Russia and China, as the major strategic competitors of the US, are the targets, and that’s why the US built these labs in countries neighboring its two major rivals.”
“Additionally, building bio-labs overseas can avoid (impact on US territory) in a potential leak accident, and to avoid the legal problems and pressure from US media and antiwar groups,” Song noted.
Song said “if the US wants to launch an international investigation into Wuhan P4 lab, China and Russia can also initiate an investigation at the UN Security Council on all labs capable of researching bio-weapons. Not surprisingly, the US will refuse as it knows it is the one who is really developing bio-weapons.”
If China and Russia, the two influential UN Security Council permanent members, propose the investigation at the UN of all P4 and P3 labs worldwide, most member states will vote for it except the US, and this will embarrass Washington, Chinese observers said.
The Russian foreign minister said at the conference that “For almost 20 years, Russia and most other countries, including China, have been calling for a protocol on the convention that would establish a mechanism to verify and check states’ commitment not to create biological weapons.”
“The US stands almost alone against this initiative. Tensions around the issue have escalated and Washington’s unwillingness to ensure transparency of its military biological activities in various parts of the world raises questions about what is really going on there and what the actual goals are,” The Russian Foreign Minister pointed out.
Lavrov said that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is preparing an action plan to ensure sanitary and epidemiological safety – specifically bio-safety – with a summit to be held this year in St. Petersburg.
Song noted that “apart from putting pressure on the US, US civilian antiwar organizations and media can also contribute to pressuring Washington to be transparent on its bio-labs.”
May 24, 2020 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | China, Covid-19, Russia, United States | Leave a comment
The Strange Tale of the USS Pueblo
Tales of the American Empire
On January 23,1968 a US Navy ship, the USS Pueblo, was captured by North Korea while conducting environmental research offshore. North Korea killed one sailor during the seizure and held its 82 crewmen for 11 months and kept the ship as a museum. This incident has been cited for decades as proof that North Korea can never be trusted. However, evidence suggests that the secret mission of the USS Pueblo was to get captured!
May 23, 2020 Posted by aletho | Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | Korea, United States | Leave a comment
Drone Pilots have Bank Accounts and Credit Cards Frozen by Feds for Exposing US Murder
By William N. Grigg | The Free Thought Project | November 25, 2015
The U.S. Government failed to deter them through threats of criminal prosecution, and clumsy attempts to intimidate their families. Now four former Air Force drone operators-turned-whistleblowers have had their credit cards and bank accounts frozen, according to human rights attorney Jesselyn Radack.
“My drone operators went public this week and now their credit cards and bank accounts are frozen,” Radack lamented on her Twitter feed (the spelling of her post has been conventionalized). This was done despite the fact that none of them has been charged with a criminal offense – but this is a trivial formality in the increasingly Sovietesque American National Security State.
Michael Haas, Brandon Bryant, Cian Westmoreland and Stephen Lewis, who served as drone operators in the US Air Force, have gone public with detailed accounts of the widespread corruption and institutionalized indifference to civilian casualties that characterize the program. Some of those disclosures were made in the recent documentary Drone; additional details have been provided in an open letter from the whistleblowers to President Obama, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, and CIA Director John Brennan.
“We are former Air Force service members,” the letter begins. We joined the Air Force to protect American lives and to protect our Constitution. We came to the realization that the innocent civilians we were killing only fueled the feelings of hatred that ignited terrorism and groups like ISIS, while also serving as a fundamental recruiting tool similar to Guantanamo Bay. This administration and its predecessors have built a drone program that is one of the most devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the world.”
Elsewhere the former drone operators have described how their colleagues dismissed children as “fun-sized terrorists” and compared killing them to “cutting the grass before it grows too long.” Children who live in countries targeted by the drone program are in a state of constant terror, according to Westmoreland: “There are 15-year-olds growing up who have not lived a day without drones overhead, but you also have expats who are watching what’s going on in their home countries and seeing regularly the violations that are happening there, and that is something that could radicalize them.”
By reliable estimates, ninety percent of those killed in drone strikes are entirely harmless people, making the program a singularly effective method of producing anti-American terrorism. “We kill four and create ten,” Bryant said during a November 19 press conference, referring to potential terrorists. “If you kill someone’s father, uncle or brother who had nothing to do with anything, their families are going to want revenge.”
Haas explained that the institutional culture of the drone program emphasized and encouraged the dehumanization of the targeted populations. “There was a much more detached outlook about who these people were we were monitoring,” he recalled. “Shooting was something to be lauded and something we should strive for.”
Unable to repress his conscience or choke down his moral disgust, Haas took refuge in alcohol and drug abuse, which he says is predictably commonplace among drone operators. At least a half-dozen members of his unit were using bath salts and could be found “impaired” while on duty, Haas testifies.
Among the burdens Bryant now bears is the knowledge that he participated in the mission that killed a fellow U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki. Identified as a radical cleric and accused of offering material support for al-Qaeda, al-Awlaki was executed by a drone strike in Yemen. His 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, was killed in a separate drone strike a few weeks later while sitting down to dinner at the home of a family friend. Asked about the killing of a native-born U.S. citizen – who, at age 16, was legally still a child – former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs appeared to justify that act by blaming it on the irresponsibility of the innocent child’s father.
As Bryant points out, as a matter of law the elder al-Awlaki was innocent, as well.
“We were told that al-Awlaki deserved to die, he deserved to be killed as a traitor, but article 3 of section 2 of the U.S. Constitution states that even a traitor deserves a fair trial in front of a jury of his peers,” Bryant notes, lamenting that his role in the “targeted killing” of a U.S. citizen without a trial was a violation of his constitutional oath.
Investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill has produced evidence suggesting that the White House-approved killing of Anwar al-Awlaki’s son may have been carried out as retaliation against the family for refusing to cooperate in the search for the cleric. There are indications that the government has tried to intimidate the whistleblowers by intimidating their families.
In October, while Brandon Bryant was preparing to testify about the drone program before a German parliamentary committee, his mother LanAnn received a visit in her Missoula, Montana home from two representatives of the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations. The men claimed that her personal information was in the hands of the Islamic State, which had placed her name on a “hit list.” She was also told not to share that disclosure with anyone – a directive she promptly ignored by informing Ms. Radack, who represents Brandon and the other whistleblowers.
According to Radack, a very similar episode occurred last March in which the stepparent of another whistleblower received a nearly identical visit from agents of the Air Force OSI. “This is the US government wasting taxpayer dollars trying to silence, intimidate and shut up people. It’s a very amateurish way to shut up a whistleblower … by intimidating and scaring their parents. This would be laughable if it weren’t so frightening.”
Given the role played by the U.S. government in fomenting, equipping, and abetting the growth of ISIS, such warnings have to be perceived as credible, albeit, indirect death threats.
May 23, 2020 Posted by aletho | Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CIA, United States | Leave a comment
Dutch emergency services battle fire at abandoned NUCLEAR PLANT, urge residents to lock windows and doors
RT | May 21, 2020
Dozens of firefighters have been deployed to tackle a blaze at a disused nuclear facility in Dodewaard in the Netherlands. Police have asked the public to stay away and lock all doors and windows to avoid exposure to the fumes.
The fire broke out shortly before noon local time on Thursday in Dodewaard, which is roughly 100 km from Amsterdam. Eyewitness video from the scene shows fire crews battling the blaze on the roof.
The cause of the fire is as yet unknown, but it may have started after work was carried out on the roof recently, according to a spokesperson for the Gelderland-Zuid Safety Region, who added that there may be gas bottles up there. Nearby residents have been told to remain indoors and lock all doors and windows and cut off any ventilation systems.
Police have established a security cordon, while asking cyclists, motorists and other passers-by eager for a look at the incident to leave the area immediately.
The plant has been out of service since 1997 but is not expected to be dismantled until 2045, when radiation at the site drops to safe levels. All fuel rods were removed from the site in 2003, so there is no immediate danger of radioactive fallout.
The main operational areas of the plant were bricked up and contained within a so-called ‘safe zone’, to prevent areas that previously housed radioactive material from being exposed to the outside world.
The power company conglomerate behind the facility is embroiled in a legal battle with the government over who should cover the estimated €80 million cost of decommissioning.
May 21, 2020 Posted by aletho | Environmentalism, Nuclear Power, Timeless or most popular | European Union, The Netherlands | Leave a comment
Dr Shelton Reports on Vitamin D, Parts 1 and 2
Dr. John Campbell | May 21, 2020
Thank you very much Matt, for you excellent insights and knowledge.
Somalia and Sweden
https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m…
Elderly Vit D
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c…
https://www.change.org/p/1-in-5-in-th…
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.11…
Vit D
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.11…
https://www.gov.scot/publications/vit…
Prevalence and correlates of vitamin D deficiency in US adults About 42% of the US population is vitamin D deficient. However, this rate rises to 82% in black people and 70% in Hispanics
Vit D in Indonesia
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c…
Vit D
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32252…
Vit D and COVID
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3…
Vit D deficiency in Ireland
https://tilda.tcd.ie/publications/rep…
Prevalence and correlates of vitamin D deficiency in US adults
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2…
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/…
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/…
Vit D and COVID
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3…
https://www.researchsquare.com/articl…
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti…
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti…
May 21, 2020 Posted by aletho | Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19 | Leave a comment
Will Washington allow the WHO to investigate its military bio labs?
CGTN | May 19, 2020
In Fort Detrick, Maryland, the U.S. Army has cutting-edge labs researching viruses. In August 2019, Ft. Detrick labs were closed and a number of pneumonia cases, or illness with similarities to pneumonia, occurred in Maryland. What happened when the labs were shut down? What does the U.S. need the labs for? Dr. Qiao tries to connect the dots and get closer to the facts.
May 20, 2020 Posted by aletho | Timeless or most popular, Video | China, Covid-19, United States | Leave a comment
Will Trump Really Start Two Wars Instead of “Just” One?
The Saker | Unz Review | May 20, 2020
Amidst the worldwide pandemic induced scare most of us have probably lost track of all the other potential dangers which still threaten international peace and stability. Allow me to list just a few headlines which, I strongly believe, deserve much more attention than what they got so far. Here we go:
- Military Times : “5 Iran tankers sailing to Venezuela amid US pressure tactics“
- Time : “5 Iranian Tankers Head to Venezuela Amid Heightened Tensions Between U.S. and Tehran“
- FoxNews: “Iran tankers sailing to Venezuela in effort to undermine US sanctions“
Notice that Military Times speaks of “US pressure tactics”, Time of “tensions” and FoxNews of “efforts to undermine US sanctions”?
I don’t think that this is a coincidence. Folks in the US military are much more in touch with reality than the flag-waving prostitutes which some people call “reporters” or “journalists”.
Furthermore, the US has embarked on a new policy to justify its acts of piracy on the high seas with something called Visit, Board, Search and Seizure (VBSS) all under the pretext of the war on drugs. To get a better understanding of the context of these developments I asked a specialist of Maritime issues of our community, NatSouth, who replied the following: (stress added)
If a ship does not comply with the request to be boarded, it is usual that the pursuing authorities must gain the permission of the ‘flag’ state prior to boarding, on the high seas and the pursuit has to have started in the coastal state’s jurisdictional waters. The caveat here is that in the Caribbean – Caribbean Regional Maritime Agreement (CRA) – (long name: Agreement Concerning Co-operation in Suppressing Illicit Maritime and Air Trafficking in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances in the Caribbean Area). So, there is an agreement with participating coastal states on boardings and pursuits in EEZs and the like. You can find more on the legal aspects of boardings at sea here: and more info on so-called “consensual boardings” here.
The anti-drug/ counterterrorism angle allows the U.S. Navy and the USCG to carry out interdictions on the high seas. Important point to note whether this approach will be taken to interdict the tankers, given that Venezuela is a declared narco-State. The absurdity is that Venezuela isn’t the primary transit point in the region, Colombia holds that honour.
If I could add at this point, the origins are that Venezuela didn’t wish to play ball with Washington anymore, specifically with the DEA back in 2005, squaring the circle of sorts, (or should that be a vicious circle cunningly used by Washington, because who is going to argue with that narrative, aka the war on terror). March: SOUTHCOM’s Adm. Faller: “There will be an increase in US military presence in the hemisphere later this year. This will include an enhanced presence of ships, aircraft, & security forces to reassure our partners… & counter a range of threats to include illicit narco-terrorism.” At the same time, the State dept released this tweet, so the US could effectively carry out boardings under the guise of counterterrorism as well.
While the Iranian tankers were in the Mediterranean, Washington released a (delayed) “Global Maritime Sanctions Advisory”, to the maritime industry, setting out guidelines to shipowners and insurers to enable them to avoid the risks of sanctions penalties related to North Korea, Syria and Iran. This also concerns oil exports from Iran, (but doesn’t apply to Iranian flagged ships). This came after the State Dept gave warning notice to oil companies to stop operations, including Rosneft (Russia), Reliance (India) and Repsol (Spain).

Then NatSouth concluded the following:
Under international law, every merchant ship must be registered with a flag state, which has jurisdiction over the vessel. Hence, this time, the use of Iranian-flagged tankers, as a direct response from Washington’s latest version of restating “maximum pressure” campaign on enforcement of Iran and Venezuela sanctions, (back in Feb, literally the same language as in Aug 2019). There was talk back then of a naval embargo, which would a serious notch up in tensions. There was mention of the 4 U.S. warships in the Caribbean, the U.S. Navy tweeted about, but one the Preble went through the Panama Canal into the Pacific).
Pretty clear, isn’t it?
What the US is doing is substituting itself for the United Nations and it is now openly claiming the right to board any vessel under whatever kind of pious pretext like, say, narco-trafficing, nuclear proliferation, sanctions against so-called “rogue states”, etc. Clearly, the AngloZionists expect everybody to roll over and take it.
How likely is that?
Let’s look at a few Iranian headlines, all from PressTV:
- PressTV, May 16th: “Iran’s fuel shipment to Venezuela guaranteed by its missile power“
- PressTV, May 17th: “US aware Iran will respond ‘very strongly’ if Venezuela-bound ships attacked: Analyst“
- PressTV, May 18th: “Iran: US bears responsibility for any foolish act against tankers heading to Venezuela“
Three days in a row. I think that it is fair to assume that the Iranians are trying very hard to convince Uncle Shmuel not to mess with these tankers. Does anybody seriously believe that the Iranians are bluffing?
Before we look at some of the aspects of this potential crisis, let’s just mention a few things here.
First, the US is acting in total and official illegality. Just like the bombing of Syria, the threats to Iran, or the US murderous sanctions Uncle Shmuel imposes left and right – the blockade of Venezuela is a) totally illegal and b) an act of war under international law.
Second, if USN commanders think they can operate with impunity only because the Caribbean is far away from Iran, they are kidding themselves. Yes, Iranian forces cannot defend these tankers so far away from home, nor can they take any action against the USN in the Atlantic-Caribbean theater of naval operations. But what they can and will do is retaliate against any AngloZionist target in the Middle-East, including any oil/gas tanker.
Third, while Venezuela’s military is tiny and weak compared to the immensely expensive and bloated US military, being immensely expensive and bloated is no guarantee of success. In fact, and depending on how the Venezuelan leadership perceives its options, there could be some very real risk for the USA in any attempt to interfere with the free passage of these ships.
What do I mean by that?
Did you know that Venezuela had four squadrons of Su-30MKV for a total of 22 aircraft? Did you know that Venezuela also had an unknown number of Kh-31A supersonic anti-shipping missiles? And did you know that Venezuela had a number of S-300VM and 9K317M2 Buk-M2E long range and medium range SAMs?
True, that is nowhere near the amount of weapons systems Venezuela would need to withstand a determined US attack, but it is more than enough to create some real headaches for US planners. Do you remember what the Argentinian Air Force did to the British Navy during the Malvinas war? Not only did the Argentinians sink two Type 42 guided missile destroyers (the HMS Sheffield and the HMS Coventry) which were providing long-range radar and medium-high altitude missile picket for the British carriers, they also destroyed 2 frigates, 1 landing ship, 1 landing craft, 1 container ship. Frankly, considering how poorly defended the British carriers were, it is only luck which saved them from destruction (that, and the lack of sufficient number of Super Étendard strike aircraft and Exocet missiles). I would add here that the British military, having been defeated on many occasions, has learned the painful lessons of their past defeats and does not suffer from the cocky-sure attitude of the US military. As a result, they were very careful during the war against Argentina and that caution was one of the factors which gave a Britain well-deserved the victory (I mean that in military terms only; in moral terms this was just another imperialist war with all the evil that entails). Had the Argentinians had a modern air force and enough anti-shipping missiles, the war could have taken a very different turn.
Returning to the topic of Venezuela, war is a much more complex phenomenon than just a struggle of military forces. In fact, I strongly believe that political factors will remain the single most important determinant factor of most wars, even in the 21st century. And chances are that the Venezuelans, being the militarily weaker side, will look to political factors to prevail. Here is one possible scenario among many other possible ones:
Caracas decides that the US seizing/attacking the Iranian tankers constitutes an existential threat to Venezuela because if that action goes unchallenged, then the US will totally “strangle” Venezuela. Of course, the Venezuelan military cannot take on the immense US military, but what they could do is force a US intervention, say by attacking one/several USN vessel(s). Such an attack, if even only partially successful, would force the US to retaliate, bringing US forces closer not only to Venezuelan air defenses, but also closer to the Venezuelan people which will see any US retaliation as an illegitimate counter-counter-attack following the fully legitimate Venezuelan counter-attack.
Then there is the problem of defining victory. In the US political “culture” winning is usually defined as pressing a few buttons to fire off some standoff weapons, kill lots of civilians, and then declare that the “indispensable nation” has “kicked the other guy’s ass”. The problem with that is the following one: if they other guy is very visibly weaker and has no chance for a military victory of his own, then the best option for him is to declare that “surviving is winning” – meaning that if Maduro stays in power, then Venezuela as won. How would the USA cope with that kind of narrative? Keep in mind that Caracas is a city of over two million people which even in peacetime is rather dangerous (courtesy of both regular crime and potential guerilla activities). Yet, for Maduro to “win” all he has to show is that he controls Caracas. Keep in mind that even if the US forces succeed in creating some kind of “zone of real democracy” somewhere near the Colombian border, that will mean nothing to Maduro, especially considering the terrain between the border and the capital city (please check out this very high resolution map of Venezuela or this medium resolution one). As for the notion of a USN landing on the shores of Venezuela, all we need to do is to remember how the immense Hodgepodge of units which were tasked with invading Grenada (including 2 Ranger Battalions, Navy Seals, most of an Airborne Division, etc. for a total of over 7,000 soldiers(!) against a tiny nation which never expected to be invaded (for details, and a good laugh, see here for a full list of participating US forces!) was defeated by the waves of the Caribbean and the few Cuban military engineers who resisted with small-arms fire (eventually, most of the 82AB was calling in to fix this mess).
In other words, if Maduro remains in power in Caracas then, in political terms, Venezuela wins even though it would loose in purely military terms.
This phenomenon is hardly something new, as shown by the following famous quote by Ho Chi Minh: “You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.”
By the way, this is exactly the same problem the Empire faces with Iran: as long as the Islamic Republic remains an Islamic Republic it “wins” in any exchange of strikes with the USA and/or Israel.
Still, it is pretty obvious that the US can turn much of Venezuela into a smoking heap of ruins. That is true (just like what the USA did to Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or Serbia and Israel what did to Lebanon in 2006). But that would hardly constitute a “victory” in any imaginable sense of the word. Again, in theory, the US might be able to secure a number of landing locations and then send in an intervention force which could try to take key locations in Caracas. But what would happen after that? Not only would the hardcore Chavistas trigger a guerilla insurrection which would be impossible to crush (when is the last time the USA prevailed in a counter-insurgency war?), but many Venezuelans would expect the US to pay for reconstruction (and they would be right, according to the rules of international law, “once you take it, you own it” meaning that the USA would become responsible for the socio-economic situation of the country). Finally, there is always the option of an anti-leadership “decapitating” strike of some kind. I believe that in purely military terms, the US has the know-how and resources to accomplish this. I do not believe that this option would secure anything for the USA, instead – it would further destabilize the situation and would trigger some kind of reaction by the Venezuelan military both outside and inside Venezuela. If anything, the repeated failures of the various coup attempts against Chavez and Maduro prove that the the bulk of the military remains firmly behind the Chavistas (and the failed coup only served to unmask the traitors and replace them anyway!).
The bottom line is this: if Uncle Shmuel decides to seize/attack the Iranian tankers, there is not only a quasi certitude of a war between the US and Iran (or, at the very least, an exchange of strikes), but there is also a non-trivial possibility that Maduro and his government might actually decide to provoke the USA into a war they really can’t win.
Is Trump capable of starting a process which will result in not one, but two wars?
You betcha he is! A guy who thinks in categories like “my button is bigger than yours” or “super-dooper weapons” obviously understands exactly *nothing* about warfare, while the climate of messianic narcissism prevailing among the US ruling classes gives them a sense of total impunity.
Let’s hope that cooler heads, possibly in the military, will prevail. The last thing the world needs today is another needless war of choice, never mind two more.
May 20, 2020 Posted by aletho | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Iran, Latin America, Sanctions against Iran, United States, Venezuela | Leave a comment
Israel strikes Syria to keep the USA in the Levant

By Elijah J. Magnier – 19/05/2020
Following its defeat in the second war on Lebanon, Israel discovered that its only way to suppress Hezbollah would be to close the supply line between Lebanon and Syria. That could only be achieved by removing President Bashar al-Assad from power, disrupting the “Axis of the Resistance” that extends from Tehran to Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Gaza. But Israel and the US, supported by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the Emirates, Turkey, Europe and many other countries all failed to achieve their goal of making Syria a failed state. President Assad called upon his allies whose own national security was in jeopardy. If Syria were to fall, jihadists of al-Qaeda and the “Islamic State” would be fighting in the streets of Beirut, Baghdad and Tehran. The jihadists would also be powerful enough to remove Russia from its Syrian naval base and to export the war beyond the Levant’s borders. So, Israel and the US failed to destroy Syria and to corner Hezbollah. On the contrary, Hezbollah has become stronger than ever. The Resistance has reaped the harvest of its victory. It has become the decision-maker with key institutions in Lebanon.
Israel sought to destroy Hezbollah because it is an obstacle to Israel’s expansionist plans in Lebanon, namely to steal Lebanon’s water and some of its territories, to force a peace deal of unconditional surrender, to break Lebanon’s alliance with Iran and deprive Tehran of its strongest ally in the Middle East. For the last forty years, since the victory of the “Islamic Republic” in 1979 led by Imam Ruhollah Khomeini which unseated the US proxy ruler, the Shah of Iran, Washington has imposed sanctions, because Iran has refused to submit to US power and because it supports its allies in the Middle East, mainly Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, to stand against Israel.
In 2006, the US was involved in the planning of Israel’s war on Lebanon. At the 2006 G8 Summit, President George W. Bush described the relationship between Hezbollah, Iran and Syria as one of the root causes of “instability”: “The World must deal with Hezbollah, with Syria, and continue to work to isolate Iran.” (Roshandel J. & Lean C.N. (2011) Iran, Israel and the United States, ABC-CLIO, CA, p. 109).
US Secretary Condoleezza Rice refused to mediate a ceasefire unless “the conditions are conducive”, thinking Israel would win the war. Hezbollah was not only left on its own to face the US and Israel, but Lebanese US-Saudi proxies (Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and Druse leader Walid Jumblat) supported the position of the US and Israel, and argued that there was “no point in a ceasefire.” (Wilkins H. (2013). The Making Of Lebanese Foreign Policy: understanding the 2006 Hezbollah-Israeli War, Routledge, Introduction).
When Israel failed to achieve its objectives, the US agreed to mediate an end to the war. Negotiations concentrated on ceasing all hostilities (not a ceasefire) between the two countries. Tel Aviv and Washington failed to obtain the deployment of United Nations Forces in Lebanon, UNIFIL, on the borders with Syria. The US sought to accommodate Israel in its attempt to gain by negotiation what it failed to achieve using its huge war machine in 33 days of the war in 2006. “Israel’s objective was never realistic”, said Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.
When its attempt to control the Lebanese-Syrian borders failed after its defeat in the 2006 war, Israel had one remaining option with which to counter Hezbollah: close the road via Damascus and find a way to curb Hezbollah’s supply line. This required war on Syria.
Since confronting Hezbollah face-face was no longer an option, Syria became the next target in the campaign to isolate Iran, as President Bush declared. The motives behind the war in Syria have been erroneously described by many researchers and analysts around the globe, who have depicted the war as the outcome of an “Arab Spring” against a dictatorial regime. Yet Saudi Arabia, Bahrein and other Gulf countries have been ruled by dictatorships and the same family members for decades and indeed are considered by the west as its closest- oil-rich- partners!
Actually, the war on Syria started just after the al-Qaeda 9/11 attack on the US. Four-star US general Wesley Clark disclosed Washington’s plan as he learned of it in the days after 9/11: “occupy Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finish with Iran.” Just a few months after the US invasion of Iraq, US Secretary of State Colin Powell visited President Bashar al-Assad and warned him that the US would invade Syria if he refused to interrupt his support for the anti-Israel organisations, Hezbollah and the Palestinian groups: the Syrian president would share the same fate as the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq was far from being a piece of cake. The US occupation generated new resistance among both Sunni and the Shia. This encouraged President Assad to rebuff the US threat, unaware of what the future held for Syria. Dozens of states, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey, the Emirates, Europe and the US all supported a regime change operation via Takfiri proxies. But the consequences of destabilising Syria gave a unique opportunity for al-Qaeda to blossom in Syria and a more lethal group emerged, the “Islamic State” ISIS. President Assad called upon his few allies, Iran, Russia and Hezbollah, to stand against the massive coalition gathered to create this failed state in Syria. The Syrian war which ensued offered unprecedented experience to the Syrian army, gave birth to a new Syrian resistance and offered unique warfare knowledge to Hezbollah, with a base for Iran that Tehran could never before have dreamed of having in the Levant.
Hezbollah had forced unconditional Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in the year 2000 and challenged all those Israeli-US plans for a “new Middle East” after the second Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006. And the long nine years of war in Syria forced Hezbollah to refine its tactics and armaments and provided Hezbollah with an unprecedented victory. Just as Israel had boosted the creation of Hezbollah, it taught this quasi-state actor all manner of skills and forced it to acquire more training and weapons to repel wars and dismantle the enemy’s objectives. Israel’s former Chief of Staff and Prime Ministerial candidate Benny Gantz believed that Hezbollah had become one of the strongest irregular-organised armies in the Middle East, capable of imposing its rules of engagement and its “balance of deterrence” on the strongest classical army in the Middle East.

“Show me four or five states with more firepower than Hezbollah: they are the US, China, Russia, Israel, France, & the UK,” Gantz said when speaking at the 2014 Herzliya Conference.
That was Israel’s assessment in 2014. Six years later, last February, Israel’s minister of defence Naftali Bennet said: “For every convoy you hit, you miss five convoys and slowly Hezbollah accumulates the critical mass of rockets [missiles] that threaten us.”
Hezbollah has become stronger than many armies in the Middle East. Hezbollah is no longer the organisation that clashes with the Israelis on a hill or site or ambushes a patrol behind an alley. Rather, in Syria and Iraq, it has successfully experienced different warfare scenarios. It has acquired many advanced weapons and became a strategic threat to Israel if it ever contemplated waging outright war on Lebanon and Syria.
Israel set as its goal bringing down Assad in Syria and separating Syria from the “Axis of Resistance.” Israeli defence minister Moshe Ya’alon said that “Israel prefers ISIS on its borders over Assad.” But Israel, America, Europe, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Emirates have lost the war. Israel has now chosen to maintain the conflict because it fears that America would let go. This is why Israel is hitting hundreds of targets in Syria, – most of the time without no strategic value whatsoever.
Sources in the “Axis of Resistance” in Syria say that:
“Israel targeted the Iranian HQ at Damascus airport (a building with green glass where Israel destroyed two floors). The following day, Iran restored it and it is back in operation. Israel has repeatedly targeted warehouses with Iranian weapons but also an abandoned training centre in the Kiswa area that has been empty for years. Their aim is to signal to the US that Israel is threatened and that the departure of the US forces would constitute a threat to Israel’s national security. It is indeed too late for Israeli jets to make any difference to Syria’s capabilities. Iran is not exporting weapons but manufacturing them. If it took Israel 9 years and 300 bombing raids to destroy Iranian warehouses in Syria, it took Iran only one year to refill and equip the Syrian army with much more sophisticated precision missiles – and all strategic missiles are in underground warehouses.”

Iran has only a few hundred advisers and officers in Syria, but it leads some tens of thousands of allies from Lebanon, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and auxiliary Syrian forces that resemble irregular-organised military formations.
In Syria, Hezbollah was able to operate in an area ten times the size of Lebanon, which gave it a unique experience any army in the world would have wished to have. It was also subjected to attacks by a NATO member, Turkey, which used armed drones on the battlefield. That provided Hezbollah with a wealth of experience and taught them lessons that have become integrated into curricula at military schools and colleges in Iran with Hezbollah and their allies.
President Assad does not say that it is time for his allies (especially Hezbollah) to leave Syria. Rather, he says – according to this source – that “Syria has a debt to Hezbollah. Wherever Hezbollah wants to be, it will be also Syria’s wishes.” America and Israel created an unbreakable alliance between Syria, Iran and Hezbollah.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah has started to harvest its gains. Hezbollah was able to impose the name of the President of the Republic, General Michel Aoun, despite repeated opposition from Saudi Arabia and the US, the losers in the Syrian war. Lebanon remained without a president for several months until General Aoun assumed the presidency.
Hezbollah rejected multiple offers from different countries by giving the Presidency of the Parliament to anyone other than President Nabih Berri, leader of the Amal movement, who has been on this throne for decades. Hezbollah holds the real power – though not all of it – in Lebanon to call for the appointment of the President of the Republic and the Speaker of the Parliament.
As for the premiership, it cannot be assumed without Hezbollah’s approval of the candidate. Hezbollah has sufficient political weight within the House of Representatives and the Presidency of the Republic to nominate or accept the nomination or direct the appointing of a prime minister. Former prime minister Saad Hariri is making sure his daily friendly contacts with Hezbollah are maintained because he would very much like to return to power. Hariri knows that the door to the premiership goes through one gate: Hezbollah.
This does not mean that Hezbollah wants to take control of Lebanon as a whole. Hezbollah leaders are aware that the Druse leader Kamal Jumblatt, Sunni leader Rafic Hariri, the Maronite Christian leader Bashir Gemayel and the Palestinians have all failed in controlling Lebanon and seizing the country. Hezbollah does not want to succumb to the same mistakes and doesn’t wish to control all of Lebanon. This means that the counter influence of other countries exists and is well-rooted in Lebanon. For example, the US ambassador in Beirut is threatening the Lebanese government with a warning not to remove the Central Bank Governor Riad Salama. Also, the US removed a Lebanese-Israeli agent, Amer Al-Fakhouri, via a plane which landed him at the US embassy without taking into consideration Lebanese sovereignty. The US supports the Lebanese army and internal security forces to maintain its dominance over certain key figures.
Syria has given the Secretary-General of Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, powers in Lebanon that he would not have obtained without the intervention of Israel and the allies in Syria. Hezbollah has managed to preserve its military pipeline via Syria by defeating the Takfiris (al-Qaeda and ISIS) and has prevented them from establishing an “Islamic emirate” in Lebanon and Syria.
Hezbollah’s victory comes at a price: thousands of martyrs and thousands of wounded. However, the resulting harvest is so abundant and strategic that the Lebanese Shiites now enjoy more power in Lebanon and Bilad al-Sham than they have since the year 661 when the fourth caliphate’s Imam Ali bin Abi Talib was killed.
Proofread by: C.G.B. and Maurice Brasher
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May 20, 2020 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Hezbollah, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Syria, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment
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British Intel Tried to Make N Irish Gang ‘Shoot Up’ School, Documentary Claims
Sputnik – 23.02.2019
A new documentary, based on an interview with a self-confessed member of the Glennane Gang, gives some insights into allegations that British military intelligence was behind a shocking murder plot to cause the situation in Northern Ireland to “spiral out of control”.
In a documentary, Unquiet Graves: The Story of the Glennane Gang, John Weir, a former officer from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), alleges that British intelligence tried to persuade paramilitary group Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) to attack a Catholic primary school at Belleeks in County Armagh.
Weir claimed that the UVF was urged to kill children and teachers in retaliation for the 1976 Kingsmill massacre, in which gunmen stopped a minibus carrying twelve workmen and shot them; only one person survived despite having been shot 18 times.
“The plan that was decided on was to shoot up a school in Belleeks”, he said, adding that the British intelligence plot was to make the situation in Northern Ireland “spiral out of control”. … continue
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