Global warming. Climate change. Climate weirding. Climate emergency. What’s in a name? A lot, apparently. So much so, in fact, that the advertising execs over at Ad Age are openly wondering whether they can “rebrand” climate change so it sounds scarier. Yipee!
Former Newsweek journalist Tareq Haddad speaks to Eva Bartlett, an award-winning independent journalist and activist.
They discuss Eva’s early history, including her early days in Gaza and the West Bank, and how she transitioned into journalism in addition to addressing the large backlash and smears she faced.
President Trump’s ‘deal of the century’ has been published this week. Mostly, it has been examined as a purely political project – whether in terms of the domestic needs of Trump and Netanyahu, or as a maximum squeeze on Palestinians, which may, or may not, work. But there is another (implicit) dimension, lying – a little out of sight – behind these explicit politics.
It has been argued, by at least one U.S. historian, that the U.S. is no ordinary nation-state, but should be understood as a system leader, a ‘civilizational power’ – like Rome, Byzantium, and the Ottoman Empire. The ‘system leader’, historically, has always sought to embed its particular civilizational vision onto those distant ‘lands’ that serve, or abut, its empire: which is to say that the universalistic vision may be bound to one state, but is forcefully unfurled across the globe, as ‘our’ inevitable destiny.
It is not hard to see what we are talking about when it refers to America: politically it is liberal markets, liberal capitalism, individualism and laissez-faire politics – and the metaphysics of Judeo-Christianity, too, if you like. For most Americans, their victory in the Cold War spectacularly affirmed the superiority of their civilizational vision, through the defeat and implosion of communism. It was not just a political defeat for the USSR, more significantly, it represented a triumph for America’s full cultural paradigm: It was a Civilisational ‘win’.
What has this to do with what happened in the East Room of the White House this Tuesday? Well, it gives us a better vantage point to perceive something less obvious than just the explicit politics to the spectacle. Something more often ‘felt’, than explicitly considered.
That is because Jewish Zionism, as expressed by Netanyahu this week, though ostensibly secular, is not just a political construct: It is, too, as it were, an Old Testament project. Laurent Guyénot observes, that when it is asserted that Zionism is biblical, that doesn’t necessarily mean it to be religious. It can, and does, serve as key leitmotiv for secular Jews too. For secular Zionists, the Bible is on the one hand, a ‘national narrative’, but on the other, a particular civilizational vision, bound around a modern state (Israel).
Ben-Gurion was not religious; he never went to the synagogue, and ate pork for breakfast, yet he could declare: “I believe in our moral and intellectual superiority, in our capacity to serve as a model for the redemption of the human race”. Dan Kurzman, in his biography (Ben-Gurion, Prophet of Fire, 1983) writes that “[Ben Gurion] was, in a modern sense, Moses, Joshua, Isaiah, a messiah, who felt he was destined to create an exemplary Jewish state, a ‘light unto the nations’ that would help to redeem all mankind”. This is the inner Universalist vision (tied to a state). These backstage, half acknowledged, convictions – of being ‘elect’, as an example – clearly do condition political actions, (such as disregarding legal norms).
Ben-Gurion was in no way a special case. His immersion in the Bible was shared by almost every Zionist leader of his generation, and the next. And the Israel of today, is no longer as secular as it once was, but rather, is in transit back towards Yahweyism — which is to say, away from the law of a secular state founded by the Zionists, towards traditional Hebraic law as revealed in the Tanakh (the Old Testament of the Christians). Netanyahu implicitly reverts to Hebraic tradition (from secular norms), when he states flatly that as ‘leader’, he should not be removed from power. In other words, Israel is becoming more, not less, ‘biblical’.
So, back to last Tuesday, when an Israeli leader speaks of Trump having secured Israel’s destiny, he is not just resorting to flowery flattery for the US President. The emphasis on ‘destiny’ is flagging something lurking in the background: “Zionism cannot be a nationalist movement like others”, Guyénot writes, “because it resonates with the destiny of Israel as outlined in the Bible … Israel is a very special nation indeed. And everyone can see that it has no intention of being an ordinary nation. Israel is destined to be an empire”.
An ‘empire’ – as in Isaiah, which describes the messianic times as a Pax Judaica, when “all the nations” will pay tribute “to the mountain of Yahweh, to the house of the god of Jacob”; when “the Law will issue from Zion and the word of Yahweh from Jerusalem,” so that Yahweh will “judge between the nations and arbitrate between many peoples.”
Further on in the same book, we read: “The riches of the sea will flow to you, the wealth of the nations come to you” (60:5); “For the nation and kingdom that will not serve you will perish, and the nations will be utterly destroyed” (60:12); “You will suck the milk of nations, you will suck the wealth of kings” (60:16); “You will feed on the wealth of nations, you will supplant them in their glory” (61:5-6). Pretty clear: this is not just run of the mill nationalism.
Aren’t such quotes just too historically arcane? What has this to do with last Tuesday? Well, a lot. Because these notions of election, of an exceptional mission and destiny are literally believed by many Americans, as well as by Jews. The point about last Tuesday – from this implicit vantage point – is that it then becomes evident that Trump’s “deal” is not about any two-state solution. Why would Trump encourage a rival state to emerge, or for that matter anything that would impede the path towards Israel’s becoming the dominant civilisational power in the Middle East? What Tuesday was about was firstly, conditioning the Palestinians – squeezing them – to accept that they have no alternative, but to offer their fealty to the regional ‘system leader’ (Israel). And secondly, as phase two, to assimilate subordinated Sunni components, under the regional Pax Judaica umbrella.
These old prophesies may not be uppermost in the daily consciousness of many contemporaries. But they are alive, and present in the Hebraic world. And they are wholly present in one key US constituency: Trump’s Evangelical base (one in every four Americans say they are Evangelists). They see the actualisation of Israel’s destiny as an eschatological necessity: It was they who insisted on the move of the US Embassy to Jerusalem; they supported the Trump’s assertion of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan; they support the annexation of Israeli settlements; and they were behind the demand that the US scrap the JCPOA. The Evangelicals may be unlikely to switch to vote Democrat, but if enough simply sit on their hands and don’t vote Trump, it could tip ‘swing constituencies’ in the November US Presidential elections.
The Evangelicals were, of course, very happy with Tuesday’s outcome. Israel’s civilisational imperium is, they believe, now assured – at least between the west bank of the River Jordan and the sea. The actualisation of these prophesies has the effect of hastening the arrival of the Redeemer (for these Christian Zionists).
And here again, our vantage point helps to understand a wider paradigm, which centres around the term ‘Judeo-Christianity’. American leaders today increasingly refer to the US as having a Judeo-Christian culture. Might the term not seem something of an oxymoron: Wasn’t Christianity supposed to represent a fundamental break with Jewish textual law? Certainly, Saint Paul proclaimed Christianity was exactly that. The question is: does this Judeo-Christian self-labelling imply some subtle change: That some American élites are becoming unconsciously more Hebraic? In which direction is the core cultural ‘vision’ travelling? Israel originally was viewed as a recipient outpost for western Christian ‘values’ (in the days when Zionism largely was secular). Tuesday’s events suggest that the travel of values may be reversing.
But why this ‘Judeo-Christianity’ nomenclature in the first place? What is going on here? After the fall of Rome, circa 800, the leaders of the Frankish church precisely turned to the Old Testament as the basis to legitimise cultural war on Orthodox (Eastern) Christianity, which the Franks then labelled (pejoratively) as ‘Greek’ – with its clear connotation of eastern ‘paganism’ and apostasy. And they further leveraged the Old Testament in order to reign Dei Gratia: as divine sovereignty, whether as Popes or Emperors (i.e. Charlemagne), demanding the unreserved fealty and discipline of their subjects. This Frankish ‘turn’ towards a ‘Judeo-Christianity’ gave Europe its feudalism; resulted in the obliteration of the Cathars as an exemplar punishment for ill-discipline; and saw the imposition of its Civilisational model (Judeo-Christianity) on the Middle East, via militarised Crusades. West Christianity was infused with the Hebraic textual tradition, then – and again, of course, with the rise of Protestantism. East Christianity (Orthodox Christianity) never was. The two Churches were split asunder at the Great Schism (1054).
This is the point: The Israeli civilisational vision may not be exactly the same as America’s, but America’s archetypal cultural stories – Abraham commanded to sacrifice his son – come from the Hebrew Bible. In short, the American exercise of power has never been more ‘Frankish’, as it were. And the exercise of it, increasingly is justified in terms of Israeli language – viz the targeted assassination of Qasem Soleimani.
This is the principal message to Tuesday’s events: When those on the American Right (such as Steve Bannon) speak incessantly of the need to sustain America’s Judeo-Christian heritage, they almost certainly would see an Israeli project to spread its Pax Judaica right across the Middle East as a clear civilisational ‘win’ for America too. Trump may not be prepared to go to war for Israel, but others in the US Establishment view America ‘winning again’ in the wider civilisational war, as an existential issue for America.
And this latter understanding perhaps offers yet another vantage point onto today’s politics. Why are American Evangelists so hostile to Iran? Because Iran presents the greatest obstacle to Israel’s Pax Judaica hegemony; or, is it more the case that the demise or implosion of the Islamic Republic, would constitute a civilisational ‘win’ for America and Israel, almost on a par with America’s Cold War ‘win’ over Communism? Is that what the withdrawal from the JCPOA – for the Evangelists, at least – was all about? A step on the way towards America, starting to ‘win again’ – towards Judeo-Christianity maintaining ‘system leadership?
If you haven’t watched my video yet, you should definitely do so. And then you should go read that New York Times article for yourself. (But read it at this link to avoid giving the Old Grey Presstitute your click.)
When you do read the article, you’ll see that it is an obvious limited hangout—that is, the deliberate revelation of some information in order to prevent the discovery of other, more important information. This observation tells us two things:
That there is novel and compelling information about the CIA’s covert propaganda programs contained in the article; and
that that novel and compelling information is not the whole story.
In order to understand the hangout the Times is attempting here, we first have to examine the article itself and the information that the article does contain.
The report concerns the so-called “Mighty Wurlitzer,” the propaganda network of “800 news and public information organizations and individuals,” including “newspapers, news services, magazines, publishing houses, broadcasting stations and other entities” that the CIA either owned outright or exerted editorial control over.
That the article is indeed a limited hangout is evident right from the start. Within the first few paragraphs of this extensive investigation, the author is quick to reassure readers that the incredibly vast, incredibly powerful CIA propaganda network that he is documenting was never actually used to forward propaganda.
“Although the C.I.A. has employed dozens of American journalists working abroad, a three-month inquiry by a team of reporters and researchers for The New York Times has determined that, with a few notable exceptions, they were not used by the agency to further its world-wide propaganda campaign.”
This claim is not just disingenuous, it’s downright ridiculous. Indeed, the remainder of the article serves as one giant rebuke of that preposterous lie. But only a tiny percentage of the population makes it more than a few paragraphs into a story, so placing such a claim up front makes sure to placate the majority of readers and convince them that this propaganda network must not be so bad after all.
The report then goes on to detail a number of media entities that the CIA owned or controlled during the period in question (primarily the 1950s and ’60s), including:
Radio stations like Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and Free Cuba Radio;
Newspapers like The Rome Daily American, The Okinawa Morning Star, The Manila Times, The Bangkok World and The Tokyo Evening News;
Magazines and journals like Quest, East Europe and Paris Match.
Book publishers like Allied Pacific Printing in India and the Asia Research Centre in Hong Kong.
Perhaps more important to the CIA than its control over these media organs, however, were the journalists and editors who were willing to aid the agency in publishing its propaganda. Some were on the CIA payroll directly, others worked on contract. Names dropped in the article range from the familiar—like Tom Braden and William F. Buckley, Jr.—to the long-forgotten. Readers are left with the impression that the agency’s propaganda efforts were (emphasis on past tense) more extensive and far-reaching than anyone had imagined to that point.
The article must have been a bombshell for the relatively information-deprived New York Times readers of 1977. Given how difficult it was to discover any reliable information about the CIA and its operations in that pre-internet era, finding such a treasure trove of information in no less a publication than the USA’s “newspaper of record” must have been incredible.
This, of course, poses the question: Why, then, was this article published? Surely the details of this report had been known to journalists for some time previously. So why was the Times publishing it at that precise moment?
To answer that, we have to look at the context of what was happening in 1977. The issue of the intelligence agencies and what they were really doing under the cover of national security had been blown wide open in the Church Committee hearings of 1975. The Committee, set up after a series of revelations about US military and intelligence agency abuses of Americans’ rights, released reports on a wide variety of issues that had hitherto been under wraps, from the existence and operations of the National Security Agency to the workings of covert assassination programs (including the infamous heart attack gun).
One of the issues to arise during the committee’s hearing was that of the intelligence agencies’ relationship with the media. One journalist who was working to document these ties was Carl Bernstein, who, in October of 1977, published his own report on the subject, “The CIA and the Media,” in Rolling Stone magazine. Bernstein’s extensive article revealed a number of long-suspected links between the agency and leading publishers, including the fact that Arthur Sulzberger Sr. (then publisher of The New York Times) worked hand-in-hand with the CIA.
I’ll allow you a moment to recover from your shock.
In fact, Bernstein not only identified Sulzberger (along with Henry Luce of Time Inc., William Paley of CBS and numerous other media moguls) as working directly with the CIA, but he revealed that there were ten CIA operatives working at the New York Times in the 50s and 60s alone.
Perhaps you’re starting to see why the Times was suddenly motivated to publish a report exposing the CIA’s “worldwide propaganda network,” but conveniently omitting its own role in that network. Neither will you be surprised to learn that the Times “forgot” to note the fact that its American media brethren (Time, CBS, NBC, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, The Saturday Evening Post, Newsweek and many others) were named by Bernstein as “organizations which cooperated with the CIA.”
In fact, the Times article goes out of its way to stress that the “Mighty Wurlitzer” was only directed abroad, not at the American public. In a section with the prominent subhead “Agency Charter Bars Propaganda in U.S.” (emphasized in italics and bold, unlike any of the article’s other sections), the report is at pains to stress that the CIA has been legislatively prohibited from propagandizing American citizens directly. It then presents a limited hangout argument that some of the agency’s foreign propaganda may have been “accidentally” relayed back to American media by “unwitting” correspondents abroad, thus propagandizing the American public (which totally wasn’t the CIA’s intention, guys!).
As Bernstein had already shown, however, the agency was actively involved with spreading propaganda to the American public via American media organs like the New York Times. For some reason, this fact was left out of the Times’ report.
In the end, the entire Times article serves as a case study in the art of the limited hangout. It shows us exactly how and why these types of “bombshell revelations” are dropped on the public in the pages of mainstream publications. These revelations—containing true and verifiable information, including information of real importance—can help to obscure other, more embarrassing facts and shift the public debate from matters of vital importance to peripheral issues.
To be sure, the article is still worth reading. It does contain true and verifiable information about the CIA’s propaganda activities. But, like all such limited hangouts, it can only be properly understood when one understands what has been left out of the story.
The propagandists never do make it easy to get to the bottom of their lies, do they?
Don’t be fooled into thinking that the only road to reform is through the ballot box. Whether you vote or don’t vote doesn’t really matter.
What matters is what else you’re doing to push back against government incompetence, abuse, corruption, graft, fraud and cronyism.
After all, argues John W. Whitehead, there is more to citizenship than the act of voting for someone who, once elected, will march in lockstep with the dictates of the powers-that-be.
There is a real danger for foreign policy advisors and analysts – and especially those they serve – when they are in a bubble, an echo chamber, and all of their conclusions are based on faulty inputs. Needless to say it’s even worse when they believe they can create their own reality and invent outcomes out of whole cloth.
Things seldom go as planned in these circumstances.
President Trump was sold a bill of goods on the assassination of Iran’s revered military leader, Qassim Soleimani, likely by a cabal around Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the long-discredited neocon David Wurmser. A former Netanyahu advisor and Iraq war propagandist, Wurmser reportedly sent memos to his mentor, John Bolton, while Bolton was Trump’s National Security Advisor (now, of course, he’s the hero of the #resistance for having turned on his former boss) promising that killing Soleimani would be a cost-free operation that would catalyze the Iranian people against their government and bring about the long-awaited regime change in that country. The murder of Soleimani – the architect of the defeat of ISIS – would “rattle the delicate internal balance of forces and the control over them upon which the [Iranian] regime depends for stability and survival,” wrote Wurmser.
As is most often the case with neocons, he was dead wrong.
The operation was not cost-free. On the contrary. Assassinating Soleimani on Iraqi soil resulted in the Iraqi parliament – itself the product of our “bringing democracy” to the country – voting to expel US forces even as the vote by the people’s representatives was roundly rejected by the people who brought the people the people’s representatives. In a manner of speaking.
Trump’s move had an effect opposite to the one promised by neocons. It did not bring Iranians out to the street to overthrow their government – it catalyzed opposition across Iraq’s various political and religious factions to the continued US military presence and further tightened Iraq’s relationship with Iran. And short of what would be a catastrophic war initiated by the US (with little or no support from allies), there is not a thing Trump can do about it.
Iran’s retaliatory attack on two US bases in Iraq was initially sold by President Trump as merely a pin-prick. No harm, no foul, no injuries. This despite the fact that he must have known about US personnel injured in the attack. The reason for the lie was that Trump likely understands how devastating it would be to his presidency to escalate with Iran. So the truth began to trickle out slowly – 11 US military members were injured, but it was just “like a headache.” Now we know that 50 US troops were treated for traumatic brain injury after the attack. This may not be the last of it – but don’t count on the mainstream media to do any reporting.
The Iranian FARS news agency reported at the time of the attack that US personnel had been injured and the response by the US government was to completely take that media outlet off the Internet by order of the US Treasury!
Today the US House voted to cancel the 2002 authorization for war on Iraq and to prohibit the use of funds for war on Iran without Congressional authorization. It is a significant, if largely symbolic, move to rein in the oft-used excuse of the Iraq war authorization for blatantly unrelated actions like the assassination of Soleimani and Obama’s thousands of airstrikes on Syria and Iraq.
President Trump has argued that prohibiting funds for military action against Iran actually makes war more likely, as he would be restricted from the kinds of military-strikes-short-of-war like his attack on Syria after the alleged chemical attack in Douma in 2018 (claims which have recently fallen apart). The logic is faulty and reflects again the danger of believing one’s own propaganda. As we have seen from the Iranian military response to the Soleimani assassination, Trump’s military-strikes-short-of-war are having a ratchet-like effect rather than a pressure-release or deterrent effect.
As the financial and current events analysis site ZeroHedgeput it recently:
[S]ince last summer’s “tanker wars”, Trump has painted himself into a corner on Iran, jumping from escalation to escalation (to this latest “point of no return big one” in the form of the ordered Soleimani assassination) — yet all the while hoping to avoid a major direct war. The situation reached a climax where there were “no outs” (Trump was left with two ‘bad options’ of either back down or go to war).
The Iranians have little to lose at this point and America’s European allies are, even if impotent, fed up with the US obsession with Saudi Arabia and Israel as a basis for its Middle East policy.
So why open this essay with a photo of Trump celebrating his dead-on-arrival “Deal of The Century” for Israel and Palestine? Because this is once again a gullible and weak President Trump being led by the nose into the coming Middle East conflagration. Left without even a semblance of US sympathy for their plight, the Palestinians after the roll-out of this “peace” plan will again see that they have no friends outside Syria, Iran, and Lebanon. As Israel continues to flirt with the idea of simply annexing large parts of the West Bank, it is clear that the brakes are off of any Israeli reticence to push for maximum control over Palestinian territory. So what is there to lose?
Trump believes he’s advancing peace in the Middle East, while the excellent Mondoweiss website rightly observes that a main architect of the “peace plan,” Trump’s own son-in-law Jared Kushner, “taunts Palestinians because he wants them to reject his ‘peace plan.’” Rejection of the plan is a green light to a war of annihilation on the Palestinians.
It appears that the center may not hold, that the self-referential echo chamber that passes for Beltway “expert” analysis will again be caught off guard in the consequence-free profession that is neocon foreign policy analysis. “Gosh we didn’t see that coming!” But the next day they are back on the TV stations as great experts.
The dubious legal proceedings at the Guantanomo Bay (Gitmo) prison camp continue to promote the idea of justice for victims of 9/11. Unfortunately, these proceedings do not represent an administration of law but an unstated claim that the Global War on Terror is above the law. More importantly, the Gitmo antics have one obvious objective—to perpetuate willful ignorance of the 9/11 crimes.
There is a dangerous elephant in the Gitmo courtroom, however, and if it ever gets reported it could bring down the terror-torture house of cards.
Reporters covering Gitmo continue to call it a trial but it is not a trial, it is a “military tribunal.” They continue to call the site “Camp Justice” when justice is as far from the prison camp as it has ever been from any human endeavor. What they don’t do is think critically about the information they are parroting from court sources.
The history is profoundly absurd. The suspects were brutally tortured and held without charges for up to 18 years. The alleged evidence obtained from the torture was made secret. Then the records of the secret torture evidence were illegally destroyed. Then the secret evidence simply turned out to be completely false. FBI and CIA officers then began to make a mockery of the whole thing, secretly bugging defense team discussion rooms and covertly inserting themselves as translators and defense team members.
This is not just a matter of an extreme violation of human rights and an utter disrespect for the law. Within this sequence of stupidity looms the mother of all oversights. That is, the secret evidence that turned out to be false was used as the basis for The 9/11 Commission Report.
At the center of the media’s willful ignorance is “forever prisoner” Abu Zubaydah, the first alleged al Qaeda leader captured and tortured. In 2009, the U.S. government began correcting the record by admitting, in habeus corpus proceedings, that Zubaydah was never associated with al Qaeda and that he had no role in, or knowledge of, the 9/11 attacks. That Zubaydah was never associated with al Qaeda is no longer challenged by anyone and is regularly repeated in the mainstream press. What is not mentioned is the astounding implication of that admission.
Abu Zubaydah’s “torture testimony” was used to construct the official narrative of 9/11 that is still accepted as fact today.
Check for yourself. Do a quick search for the word “Zubaydah” in The 9/11 Commission Report. You’ll find it 52 times. As you read these references and claims, ask yourself—how could a man who the government now says had nothing to do with al Qaeda have known any of these things? How could he be a key travel facilitator for al Qaeda operatives when he wasn’t associated in any way with al Qaeda? How could Zubaydah give detailed accounts of Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM)’s plans for 9/11 when he had no knowledge of those plans?
Disassociating Zubaydah from al Qaeda causes so many problems for the official narrative of al Qaeda and 9/11 that people like Lee Hamilton, the co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission, simply develop amnesia when asked about him.
As seen in the 9/11 Commission Report, the official account begins with linking “Mukhtar” (KSM) to “al Qaeda lieutenant Abu Zubaydah,” who we now know was never associated with al Qaeda. Both FBI interrogator Ali Soufan, in a 2009 New York Times opinion piece, and Vice President Dick Cheney, in his 2011 book, claimed that Zubaydah (who never had any knowledge or connection to 9/11) identified KSM as the “mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.” The official account of 9/11, and the ongoing fake trial at Gitmo, all proceeded from there.
But none of it was true.
The latest crime of 9/11 is that this fact is not being reported. The media admits that Zubaydah was never associated with al Qaeda but entirely ignores the devastating consequences of that admission. The false official account for 9/11 is the root cause and ongoing justification for greater crimes—1) wars of aggression in multiple countries that have destroyed millions of lives, 2) the public’s acceptance of torture and indefinite detention, and 3) mass surveillance and an overall attack on freedom.
Instead of reporting that the basis for those greater crimes has been obliterated, the media reduces the subject to a discussion of how torture is bad but perhaps still justified by the gain. Of course, torture is bad but mass murder is much worse and the justification for both the wars and the torture is now indefensible! Until the media reports this fact there will be no justice for victims of 9/11 or for the victims of the resulting wars and torture.
We know that there are many striking anomalies and inexplicable facts about 9/11 that have yet to be resolved. But the fake Gitmo trial stands as a final absurd crime in the history of 9/11 as it is represented as an attempt at justice yet includes more farcical elements every day.
For example, the CIA-driven architect of the torture program recently claimed that he was acting on behalf of the 9/11 families and that he would do it again.
The final proceedings have been set to officially begin in January 2021, aligning with the 20th anniversary news cycle and re-emphasizing that propaganda is the primary goal. The propaganda narrative focuses on setting the false official account in stone and further normalizing torture.
Sadly, reporters and editors covering these events don’t seem to have an interest in challenging any substantial part of the story. Let’s hope that one or more of them comes to their senses and proves that suspicion wrong.
The documentary was produced by French investigative journalist Olivier Berruyer, founder of popular anti-corruption and economics blog Les Crises.
In this third episode, we publish several important testimonials, through exceptional exclusive interviews. You will thus discover the revelations of several personalities, such as the Director of the Ukrainian Action Centre against Corruption, but also a former Prosecutor General of Ukraine, a former Ukrainian diplomat, and other famous specialists on Ukraine… We are particularly grateful to Oleksandr Onyschenko for the importance of his testimony. This oligarch, a former member of parliament, was a close associate of Petro Poroshenko, whose mission included corrupting Ukrainian elected officials. Disgusted by these mafia practices, he repented by becoming a whistleblower. Since our interview, he has been arrested in Germany, where he is awaiting an extradition judgment – Interpol having refused to prosecute him since 2016…
With all the media excitement focused on the impeachment of President Donald Trump, it comes as no surprise that some recent additional insights into how the United States became a torture regime have been largely ignored. It has been known for years that the George W. Bush Administration carried out what most of the world considers to be torture. Acting as if it really cared about illegal activity, the White House back at that time found two malleable Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Busby who would be willing to come up with a defense of torture. They discovered somewhere in their law books that it was possible to do anything to a suspect as long as it did not bring about organ failure. That became the bottom line for interrogations, though in practice some prisoners died anyway, which might be considered the ultimate organ failure. The only one who was subsequently punished over the illegal torture program was former C.I.A. employee John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on it.
Last week there was a hearing at a Guantanamo Bay courtroom in which one of the psychologists who devised the Central Intelligence Agency torture regime testified under oath. Psychologist James Mitchell was testifying in what was a preliminary hearing relating to the eventual trial of five alleged 9/11 conspirators. He discussed how he and his business partner Dr. Bruce Jessup together developed the Agency’s torture program, which internal government documents described by employing the euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques.” They were paid $81 million for their work and were able to produce a training manual that included waterboarding, stress positions and mock burials to physically and mentally destroy the target’s ability to resist. Both Mitchell and Jessup have asserted that their procedures were more designed to make a suspect uncomfortable rather than in pain and they blame interrogators who went too far for the physical and mental permanent damage that resulted.
To understand the depth of depravity that was part and parcel of “enhanced interrogation,” it is useful to consider Dr. Mitchell’s own testimony relating to the torture of prisoner Abu Zubaydah, a procedure that was implemented at one of the Agency’s secret prisons. The prison was likely the one located in Thailand, where current director of Central Intelligence Gina Haspel was in charge. Mitchell, who was also involved in the 183 waterboardings of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, personally participated in the interrogation. Zubaydah reportedly cooperated with his interrogators but then ceased to do so when the torture began. He was waterboarded more than 80 times while also being subjected to other “coercive physical pressure” including being buried alive over concerns that he might be hiding something. He survived and since has been held at Guantanamo for more than 13 years. The United States government has never tried him and has never even charged him with any crime.
Mitchell’s testimony states that he and the other interrogators had wanted the waterboarding to stop due to concerns that Zubaydah’s deteriorating mental processes were rendering any further interrogation unreliable. They sent a message to headquarters at Langley saying that “the intensity of the pressure applied to him thus far approaches the legal limit.” C.I.A. management ordered the interrogators to keep going as Zubaydah might be concealing details of an imminent terrorist attack along the lines of 9/11.
Americans have, of course, seen the use of “imminent” recently to explain away illegal actions that amount to war crimes. Another version exploiting a unknown imminent threat is the “ticking bomb scenario” which is based on the belief that a prisoner has knowledge of another terrorist act that is about to take place. It has frequently been employed by the Israelis to justify their wholesale torture of captured Palestinians. Israeli apologist Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz, among others, has cited the ticking bomb scenario to justify use of torture, but the problem is that there is no evidence to suggest that it has ever worked. No impending terrorist action has ever been prevented by torturing prisoners who have already been detained.
In the case of Zubaydah, C.I.A. even sent a senior officer to the torture room to make sure that no one was holding back on getting the job done properly. During the waterboarding Zubaydah was experiencing involuntary body spasms and was crying. Even the torturers and viewers were visibly upset. Mitchell’s testimony included “I thought it was unnecessary, and I felt sorry for him.”
Mitchell claims that he was pressured by C.I.A. management to always push harder during interrogations. At one point, Mitchell claims he sought to withdraw from the program but was told that “he’d lost his spine and it would be his fault if more people in the US died in a catastrophic attack.” Mitchell added “The implication was that if we weren’t willing to carry their water, they would send someone else who would do it, and they may be harsher than we were.”
Mitchell not unreasonably explained how post-9/11 there was a “climate of fear” over another imminent attack, possibly employing nuclear or biological weapons and he was unapologetic about his role in protecting his country. He said “I’d get up today and do it again… I thought my moral obligation to protect American lives outweighed the temporary discomfort of terrorists who had voluntarily taken up war against us. To me it just seemed like it would be dereliction of my moral responsibilities.”
Inter alia, Mitchell made clear that “C.I.A. was never interested in prosecutions. The C.I.A. was not going to let them set off another catastrophic attack in the United States. They were going to go right up to the line of what was legal, put their toes on it and lean forward.”
There are a number of things wrong with Mitchell and with the C.I.A. managers who first adopted his techniques and then repeatedly applied them in such a fashion as to insure both physical and mental damage. That is torture. Torture and abusive interrogation tactics are illegal under both US law and international law. Torture is prohibited under federal law, as are lesser forms of detainee abuse such as cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. On 10 December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Article 5 states, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
Being patriotic is not a mitigating factor when one is carrying out torture, no matter what Dr. Mitchell might think. The United States is also a party to the Convention against Torture, which was adopted by the General Assembly in 1984, as well as other treaties that ban the use of torture and other ill-treatment. The Convention against Torture requires countries to criminalize the use of torture within their own jurisdictions. Washington enacted such legislation in 1994, when Congress passed the federal anti-torture statute. The treaty also requires countries to conduct credible criminal investigations and prosecutions of those responsible for torture.
And then there is the “ticking bomb,” i.e. the American government’s claimed fear that another 9/11 was about to take place as a justification for its adoption of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The problem with that thinking was that the C.I.A. had no evidence suggesting that another major attack might be impending, but it nevertheless grabbed people off the streets in some cases to “render” them to secret prisons where they were tortured. Many of them turned out to be innocent and it could reasonably be suggested that torturing someone “just in case he or she might know something” is no defense at all.
Finally, the United States government is obligated to prosecute those responsible for torture. That plausibly includes Drs. Mitchell and Jessup, but it certainly includes those Agency officers who were in place from 2001 through 2003 and responsible for implementing the program. They would presumably include the Director of Central Intelligence, Deputy Executive Director, Deputy Director for Operations, and the two Directors of CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center. All of those former officers are now enjoying comfortable retirements to include various sinecures with universities as well as national defense and security contractors and none of them has ever been punished in any way for their involvement with torture.
Holocaust revisionism is perhaps the most institutionally reviled, criminally punished and socially persecuted field of research in modern Western history.
Yet, on the much publicized 75th anniversary of the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz, the gatekeepers of the Holocaust continue to give ground, kicking and screaming along the way.
The latest example is a new book by former Museum of Jewish Heritage director David G. Marwell, “Unmasking the ‘Angel of Death’,” which grants many revisionist challenges to the legend of Joseph Mengele.
Marwell’s work is considered the most well-researched mainstream biography of Mengele to date. In it, he cross references witness testimony from “survivors” with hard evidence and primary sources, only to conclude that their “memories” were “unreliable.” In other words, they are lying.
Stitching together humans to create siamese twins, smashing babies against train cars, attempts to transform boys into girls – all of the barbarism etched into the popular mind about a German in a labcoat, Marwell concludes, is nothing but a pack of atrocious hoaxes.
Marwell does stress that Mengele was a true-believing National-socialist, which in his mind is an act of evil in and of itself. According to the book, he also at times overstepped ethical boundaries, for example when studying the effects of food deprivation on the human body, but the so-called “Angel of Death” made up for this by giving subjects superior accommodations and privileged treatment when the experiments were over. The twins and dwarves he studied were treated kindly, even if looking at living people as laboratory specimens in any context is dehumanizing. By and large, the book admits that what is commonly known about Mengele is fiction constructed by rumors, novels and Hollywood which have been held as true thanks to Jewish “eyewitnesses” substantiating the hoaxes post-hoc.
Mengele’s main achievement at the camp, which Marwell credits him for, was containing and preventing a massive outbreak of typhus at Auschwitz in difficult circumstances. This saved thousands of lives, Jewish and Gentile alike. Mengele was not motivated by hate and sadism. His most intimate letters and confessions show only a passion for advancing medical science.
Majdanek: No Longer a Death Camp?
Another relatively recent victory won by revisionists is a quiet adjustment by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to their page on the Nazi “killing centers,” They have been forced to admit that the Majdanek camp in Poland was not used to exterminate Jews.
The USHMM credits “recent research” for retracting what has traditionally been considered the sixth death camp. This is research dissident historians have contributed to while risking their freedoms, employment prospects and lives.
Majdanek was the first camp liberated by the Soviet Union, in 1944. There, they found Zyklon-B canisters, ovens and showers, which Soviet propagandists used to declare that over a million Jews were systematically murdered by gas. The evidence provided by the USSR were German documents that they asserted held coded references to systematic homicide gassings. The pattern is similar to what they later argued with Auschwitz, also liberated by the Soviets. Multiple camp guards and commanders were charged with war crimes and given the death penalty based on fictitious claims related to Majdanek.
This fairy tale was promoted by a variety of Jewish and some non-Jewish scholars. In recent years, the death toll itself has been drastically reduced from 1.3 million victims according to the academic Lucy Dawidowicz, to 78,000 according to the chief historian at the camp’s museum today. Revisionists hold that the numbers of people who died, largely of typhus, dysentary, etc, could be half of even that official figure.
The Immovable Force of Auschwitz
If you’ve noticed that the Holocaust story appears more centered around Auschwitz than usual, it’s because this is the last straw Holocaustians have to grasp on.
An interesting new fad has emerged, particularly with “ex-” revisionists, who admit that all the claims of the Holocaust are lies except the ones made specifically about Auschwitz. Some prominent figures in this sphere today include big names like David Irving and David Cole, two men who simply got tired of being imprisoned and physically beaten for their opinions on history. This is a testament to Auschwitz being the king of all third rails.
But here too, we are beginning to see official omissions of previously claimed homicidal gas chambers, for example at Auschwitz I (Stammlager), the main camp tourists visit. The USHMM now specifically distinguishes only Auschwitz II (Birkenau) as the site of homicide gassings.
Revisionists like Robert Faurisson have always contended that the gas chamber shown to visitors is a fake. Even though the French newspaper L’Express was able to get the Auschwitz Museum to admit that the gas chambers they show to people are phony, official tour guides still present the exhibit as an authentic homicide gas chamber. On the infamous Deborah Lipstadt’s website, it says that the gas chamber isn’t a fake intended to fool visitors, it’s a “recreation” meant to be “symbolic”!
Auschwitz appears to be the fortress those invested in Holocaust mythology are staking their last stand on. It is impossible for them to give any more ground without the whole story collapsing.
But nothing is etched in stone. The aggressive attempt at a Zionist shakedown of Poland, as well as antagonizing its people, could put the myth in danger. The Polish government could shut them up tomorrow by inviting both revisionists and affirmers to do an unrestricted forensic analysis of all the Auschwitz facilities and grounds. I doubt the Israelis will like the results.
The sanctity of the Holocaust narrative becomes even more imperiled thanks to the in-your-face genocidal jingoism of Netanyahu and the unsophisticated political class steering the Israeli ship. International Jewry has spent much of the last 75 years using the Holocaust as the sacred myth guiding the neo-liberal globalist order.
Netanyahu today uses it as a cheap gimmick to push for Israel’s short-term geopolitical goals. The Israelis actively tried to make Vladimir Putin the star of this year’s Holocaust show, even though most Jews see Russia as an affront to the liberal world order. Netanyahu is desperate to do whatever it takes to pull the Russians away from their alliances in Syria and Iran so that the Israeli war machine can continue to advance.
At this point, it’s not a question of historical accuracy but of power. And only power can check power. We are living in the last days of the Holohoax.
The US military-industrial police state has never hesitated to sacrifice the lives of Americans in order to achieve its goal of locking down control of all movement – not just in & out of the country but within the country. Bioweapons, as the Rockefeller Foundation gleefully pointed out way back in 2010, are a fantastic way to convince an already-mentally-supine population to yield control of their physical forms to the state’s machinations as well.
While the interview in this video was recorded in 2014 as an Ebola outbreak ravaged west Africa, Vox’s observations are if anything even more applicable to 2020’s coronavirus outbreak, which has set western powers salivating as China sets into motion its enviable (if you’re a power-mad sociopath) state control machinery to quarantine some 50 million people behind a ‘cordon sanitaire’ that authorities admit has already allowed carriers of the virus to slip out ahead of its imposition – meaning this massive crackdown on free movement serves no purpose other than as a giant human experiment in what liberties a population will thoroughly trash for the fleeting illusion of security. Spoiler alert: too many.
Content like this is prone to sudden disappearance, so in addition to clicking LIKE, SHARE, & SUBSCRIBE, please DOWNLOAD & REUPLOAD to your own channels – it is very important that this information be spread as widely as possible before it’s too late & we’re undergoing temperature checks to leave our homes. anyone who believes this is irresponsible speculation should spare a thought for air travel circa 1999.
Since the 20th century, the West has been and continues to be the most avid users of bioweapons. The United States is the biggest user of biochemical weapons in history, including in Cuba; Iraq, Syria and Iran (by proxy); Serbia, Japan, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and America has eagerly used them on its own people, apparently more often than we care to admit.
At Tuskegee, hundreds of American blacks were allowed to carry syphilis from the 1930s to the 1970s, to act as human petri dishes. This was to track the progress of the disease and observe the eventual macabre deaths that this bacteria is wont to inflict on its victims, in its final stages: insanity, nervous disorders, liver and heart disease.
The United States of America holds the exclusive patent on the Ebola virus: US patent number 20120251502, is owned by the American government. Ebola has been Uncle Sam’s bioweapon plaything since 1976, when it was discovered in Zaire and shipped 3,500km by America’s bio-warfare lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, then to West Africa for cultivation and development (via the UK’s bio-warfare labs in Porton Down and with the help of the World “Health” Organization), specifically, to Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, the current epicenters of the Ebola epidemic on the Great Continent.
The 2014 Ebola outbreak came as a result of another rogue US Military operation in austral Africa from which the Soros/Gates-funded Kenema bioweapons lab in Sierra Leone was involved.
The US has a long history of biowarfare against China. The Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of Facts Concerning Bacteriological Warfare in Korea and China (ISC report) validated claims by North Korea and China that the US had launched bacteriological warfare (biological warfare, BW) attacks against both troops and civilian targets in those two countries over a period of months in 1952. This 667 page truth commission report has the dubious distinction of being the most vilified written document of the 20th Century. The report’s release in September 1952 brought a withering international attack. It was roundly denounced by American and British politicians of the highest rank, ridiculed by four star generals, accused of fraud by celebrated pundits, misquoted by notable scientists, and scorned by a compliant Western press. In subsequent decades, volumes placed in American university library collections were quietly and permanently removed from circulation. When the rare copy came up for auction, it was discretely purchased and disappeared from public view.
In March 2019, in a mysterious event, a shipment of exceptionally virulent viruses from Canada’s NML biological labs ended up in China. Canadian officials say the shipment was part of its efforts to support public-health research worldwide. They claimed that it was just normal procedure. What is unclear is why it was done in secret, and why the Chinese officials lodged a complaint. For certain, if this was just a routine transfer, the Chinese government would have been notified. In July 2019, a group of Chinese virologists were forcibly dispatched from the Canadian National Microbiology Laboratory (NML). The NML is Canada’s only level-4 facility and one of only a few in North America equipped to handle the world’s deadliest diseases, including Ebola, SARS, Coronavirus, etc.
On October 18th, 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in conjunction with the World Economic Forum assembled “15 leaders of business, government, and public health” to simulate a scenario in which a coronavirus pandemic was ravaging the planet. Major participants were American military leadership, and certain neocon political figures. The Chinese were not invited. The members took notes, and then returned to their day to day operations.
In Simulation Run 3 Months Ago, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Predicted Up To 65 Million Deaths Via Coronavirus.
300 US military personnel arrived in Wuhan for the Military World Games on October 19. The first coronavirus case appeared two weeks later, on November 2. Coronavirus incubation period is 14 days.
Two months later a very similar coronavirus pandemic hit China at Wuhan, a major transport hub in Central China and for the high-speed train network, and with 60 air routes with direct flights to most of the world’s major cities, as well as more than 100 internal flights to major Chinese cities right at the Spring Festival travel rush when hundreds of millions of people travel across the country to be with their families.
The Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) is an entirely new strain related to the MERS (MERS-CoV) and the SARS (SARS-CoV) viruses, though early evidence suggested that it was not dangerous. SARS was proven to be caused by a strain of the coronavirus, a large family of mostly harmless viruses also responsible for the common cold, but
SARS exhibited characteristics never before observed in any animal or human virus, did not by any means fully match the animal viruses mentioned above, and contained genetic material that still remains unidentified – similar to this new coronavirus in 2019.
SARS had the hallmarks of a bioweapon. After all, aren’t new biological warfare agents designed to produce a new disease with a new infectious agent? As in prior military experiments, all it might take … to spread SARS is an aerosol can . . .” Several Russian scientists suggested a link between SARS and biowarfare. Sergei Kolesnikov, a member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, said the propagation of the SARS virus might well have been caused by leaking a combat virus grown in bacteriological weapons labs. According to a number of news reports, Kolesnikov claimed that the virus of atypical pneumonia (SARS) was a synthesis of two viruses (of measles and infectious parotiditis or mumps), the natural compound of which was impossible, that this mix could never appear in nature, stating, “This can be done only in a laboratory.” And Nikolai Filatov, the head of Moscow’s epidemiological services, was quoted in the Gazeta daily as stating he believed SARS was man-made because “there is no vaccine for this virus, its make-up is unclear, it has not been very widespread and the population is not immune to it.”
Virologist Dr. Alan Cantwell wrote at the time that “the mysterious SARS virus is a new virus never before seen by virologists, “This is an entirely new illness with devastating effects on the immune system, and there is no known treatment.” Dr. Cantwell noted that the genetic engineering of coronaviruses has been occurring in both medical and military labs for decades. When he searched in PubMed for the phrase “coronavirus genetic engineering”, he was referred to 107 scientific experiments dating back to 1987. To quote Dr. Cantwell: “I quickly confirmed scientists have been genetically engineering animal and human coronaviruses to make disease-producing mutant and recombinant viruses for over a decade.”
The virus outbreak coincides with the trade war on China.
The virus outbreak coincides with the HK “pro democracy” riots fully funded and instigated by the NED / CIA.
The virus outbreak occurred just after Swine Flu decimated the Chinese pork industry.
The virus outbreak occurred just after Bird Flu decimated the Chinese chicken industry.
The virus outbreak occurred just before NED support and training of Uyghur Muslim extremists.
This month, CNN published a gleeful (and untrue) report, “China’s economy is slumping and the country is still suffering the effects of the trade war with America. An outbreak of a new and deadly virus is the last thing it needs.”
Trump claims Iran’s military is routed just as IRGC launched missiles strike American bases
RT | June 10, 2026
The Iranian military has been “completely defeated,” US President Donald Trump has claimed, warning Tehran it will “pay the price” for delaying a deal with Washington.
The warnings came after Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) announced missile and drone strikes on American military facilities in several Arab countries in retaliation for recent US attacks. US Central Command said the operations inside Iran were carried out after an AH-64 Apache helicopter was lost near the Strait of Hormuz, an incident it blamed on Tehran.
Trump posted on Truth Social on Wednesday that Iran “is all talk and no action,” adding that “The Bully of the Middle East is DEAD!!!” … Full article
HEAT exposure could drive a dramatic rise in cardiovascular disease (CVD) burden across the USA over the next 25 years, with researchers warning that climate change and population ageing may combine to reverse decades of progress in heart health.
Heat Exposure Threatens Future Heart Health A new modelling study estimated that heat-attributable CVD burden could more than triple by 2050 under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario, disproportionately affecting older adults and economically disadvantaged communities. … Full article
… Climate change and land use conversion have the potential to increase the frequency of encounters between snakes and humans. This situation arises due to changes in temperature and rainfall, the loss of natural habitats, and shifts in food sources, which drive snakes to move into areas closer to human activity.
Prof Mirza Dikari Kusrini, a lecturer in the Department of Forest Resource Conservation and Ecotourism, Faculty of Forestry and Environment (Fahutan) at IPB University, explained that climate change affects snakes’ behavior, distribution, and movement patterns. … Full article
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