When it comes to saving American lives, sanctions are not an obstacle to the provision of life-saving medical equipment. Ramping up sanctions on struggling Iran is okay however – which goes to show the US price tag on human life.
It was a sight that warmed the heart of even the most cynical American opponent of Vladimir Putin’s Russia—a giant An-124 aircraft, loaded with boxes of desperately needed medical supplies, being offloaded at JFK Airport. When President Trump spoke on the phone with his Russian counterpart on March 31, he mentioned America’s need for life-saving medical supplies, including ventilators and personal protective equipment. Two days later the AN-124 arrived in New York.
As the aircraft was being unloaded, however, it became clear that at least some of the equipment being offloaded had been delivered in violation of existing US sanctions. Boxes clearly marked as containing Aventa-M ventilators, produced by the Ural Instrument Engineering Plant (UPZ), could be seen. For weeks now President Trump has made an issue about the need for ventilators in the US to provide life-saving care for stricken Americans.
There was just one problem—the manufacturer of the Aventa-M, UPZ, is a subsidiary of Concern Radio-Electronic Technologies (KRET) which, along with its parent holding company ROSTEC, has been under US sanctions since 2014. Complicating matters further is the fact that the shipment of medical supplies was paid in part by the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), a Russian sovereign wealth fund which, like ROSTEC, was placed on the US lending blacklist in 2014 following Russia’s intervention in Crimea. Half of the Russian aid shipment was paid for by the US State Department, and the other half by RDIF.
According to a State Department spokesperson, the sanctions against RDIF do not apply to purchases of medical equipment. KRET, however, is in the strictest SDN (Specially Designated Persons) sanctions list, which means US citizens and permanent residents are prohibited from doing business with it. So while the letter of the sanctions may not have been violated, the spirit certainly has been.
One only need talk to the embattled Governor of New York State, Andrew Cuomo, to understand the difficulty in trying to purchase much-needed medical equipment during a global pandemic where everyone else is trying to do the same. New York has been competing with several other states to purchase much-needed ventilators from China. “It’s like being on eBay”, Cuomo recently told the press, with 50 states bidding against one another, driving the price up. The issue became even more complicated when the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, entered the bidding war. “They big-footed us”, Cuomo said, driving the price per ventilator up to $25,000. “We’re going broke.”
Cuomo estimates that New York will need upwards of 40,000 ventilators to be able to handle the influx of stricken patients when the outbreak hits its peak. At the moment, New York has 17,000 ventilators available—including 2,500 on order from China—and Cuomo doesn’t expect any more. “We’re on our own.” Plans are in place to begin imposing a triage system to prioritize ventilator availability if and when the current stockpile is exhausted. These plans include the issuance of an emergency waiver that permits health care providers to take a patient off a ventilator to make it available for another patient deemed to be more “viable”—that is, who has a greater expectation of surviving the disease.
Cuomo’s predicament is being played out around the world, in places like Italy, Spain—and Iran, where the outbreak of coronavirus has hit particularly hard. The difference, however, is that while the US, Italy and Spain are able to scour the global market in search of life-saving medical supplies, Iran is not. US sanctions targeting the Iranian financial system, ostensibly imposed to prevent “money laundering” by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Command, which has been heavily sanctioned by the US over the years, have made it virtually impossible for Iran to pay for humanitarian supplies needed to fight the coronavirus outbreak.
As bad as it is for Governor Cuomo, at least he can enter a bidding war for medical supplies. Iran can’t even get its foot in the door, and it is costing lives. Making matters worse, at a time when the international community is pleading for the US to ease sanctions so Iran can better cope with an outbreak that is taking a life every ten minutes, the US instead doubled down, further tightening its death grip on the Iranian economy.
The global coronavirus pandemic will eventually end, and when it does there will be an accounting for how nations behaved. Nations like Russia and China have been repeatedly vilified in the US media for any number of reasons—even the Russian aid shipment containing the sanctioned ventilators has been dismissed as a “propaganda ploy.” What, then, do you call the US’ blatant disregard for select human lives?
The callous indifference displayed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other officials to the suffering of the Iranian people by increasing sanctions at a time when the situation cries out for them to be lifted in order to save lives, when contrasted to the ease in which US sanctions on Russia are ignored when life-saving medical equipment is needed, drives home the point that, as far as the US is concerned, human life only matters when it is an American one. That might play well among American voters (it shouldn’t), but for the rest of the world it is a clear sign that hypocrisy, not humanitarianism, is the word that will define the US going forward.
Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer. He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter
The Washington imperialists and the corporate media are manipulating the narrative around Covid-19 in the same ways that they’ve controlled discourse around the comparably dramatic crisis of 9/11. Just like how the Bush White House immediately concluded (based upon still dubious evidence) that Osama Bin Laden was the one who had directed the attacks in order to justify starting the war in Afghanistan, and like how the Bush team campaigned to associate Saddam Hussein with 9/11 to justify invading Iraq, Covid-19 is being weaponized as a war propaganda tool. And now the designated enemies are China, Iran, Russia, and the other countries which threaten U.S. hegemony.
As was also the case after 9/11, the imperialist narrative managers are using McCarthyism, censorship, and intensive demonization of the designated enemies to hide the growing amount of evidence that the U.S. is connected to the crisis.
The evidence is in favor of the virus having originated in the U.S., not China
Like how the CIA conspired with Saudi Arabia to cover up details about 9/11 which contradicted the official Washington narrative, or how the media has ignored the evidence of Mossad foreknowledge of 9/11, the U.S. State Department and major media outlets are working to conceal and deflect from the questions about America’s potential responsibility for the virus.
There have been many events in the last year that suggest the U.S. brought the virus to China, whether intentionally or unintentionally. The U.S. Army Medical Research Institute in Fort Detrick was closed down in July 2019. Then in October, a team of U.S. troopers who had trained near Fort Detrick traveled to Wuhan, staying a mere 300 meters from the seafood market where the virus spread from. If these troops were deliberately sent there to proliferate the virus, it wouldn’t be unprecedented in U.S. warfare; Washington has a history of transferring viruses to use as diplomatic cargo for secret military programs.
These coincidences, while not necessarily compelling evidence for the bioweapon hypothesis on their own, are accompanied by solid evidence that Covid-19 started in the United States. As Larry Romanoff has written, “the genome varieties of the virus in Iran and Italy have been sequenced and declared to have no part of the variety that infected China and must, by definition, have originated elsewhere. It would seem the only possibility for origination would be the US because only that country has the ‘tree trunk’ of all the varieties.” Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University, has helped support the hypothesized link between the U.S. troops and the original Wuhan outbreak by concluding that “The virus came into that marketplace before it came out of that marketplace.”
But enough with my hesitant language about how it’s supposedly still unclear whether the virus came from America. Chinese spokesman Zhao Lijian has formally accused Washington of bringing the virus to China, saying “When did patient zero begin in U.S? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be U.S. army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! U.S. owe us an explanation!” Iranian Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali has made a similar statement about Covid-19’s origins: “Instead of leveling false accusations against China and Iran, U.S. officials should respond to international demands regarding its role in creating and spreading the coronavirus and the continuation of its crimes against the Iranian people by keeping in place the economic sanctions.”
Was Covid-19 engineered in an American laboratory? While a recent study has provided evidence against this, the scientific debate over whether it was artificially created will continue to go on. Plus, bioweapons don’t even have to be artificially created-just look at all of the already existing diseases that U.S. biowarfare operations have brought to Cuba. And even if the virus came from the U.S. to China by accident, it’s certain that China is not the country where the virus came from.
Painting China’s response to the virus as “incompetent” and “authoritarian”
Anti-Chinese propaganda often takes the form of the Western media observing benign events in China or minor slip-ups in Chinese policy, and twisting them into outrage stories. So was the case for the imperialist propaganda machine’s representation of the story of Li Wenliang, the Chinese doctor who mistakenly spread a false message on WeChat and was subsequently warned about it by Chinese authorities. The government then paid tribute to Li for helping combat the virus and retracted their warning against him after his death, but disingenuous pundits used the incident to score rhetorical points in the information war against China.
The government’s response to Wenliang didn’t have to do with his public revelation of the virus, which was done only a day before the government decided to officially announce that the virus was a problem. Yet it’s been suggested that his decision to speak up about the virus conflicted with the agenda of the government, and that the government had targeted him for his whistleblowing.
This ridiculous distortion of events was used to justify the Western media’s deeply unfair overall portrayal of the Chinese response to the virus, as represented by this paragraph from a recent Vicearticle:
China initially ignored the outbreak that first surfaced in Wuhan in early December, silencing doctors who tried to raise the alarm before eventually enacting a draconian and restrictive lockdown that impacted 50 million people.
Vice, which is one of the outlets that’s been known to promote content under the direct guidance of the U.S. government in recent years, is here engaging in a subtle ploy to associate China’s response to the virus with “authoritarianism.” China’s “draconian restrictive lockdown,” which is another way to say “quarantine,” was entirely necessary and in line with how most other governments have handled the virus. But Vice’s phrasing is meant to reinforce the narratives that China had failed to respond to the virus quickly enough, and that the actions it took against the virus were oppressive and sinister.
The underlying message, which is that those quarantined by China’s government were put in an unusually miserable and repressive state compared to the other quarantined populations around the world, is absurd. Thanks to Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, China’s people have had access to universal healthcare during this crisis. They’ve been in a country that’s virtually eradicated poverty. They’ve been able to contact police officers who go shopping for families in need of assistance during the quarantine. This contrasts with capitalist countries like the United States, where the gutted and highly privatized healthcare system is being overwhelmed, the people who’ve lost their jobs during the quarantine are already largely in financial hardship due to neoliberalism, and the police have continued to act as a terrorizing force which frequently shoots innocent people.
Another claim the Vice article makes is that “even the slightest reference to coronavirus or the government’s response was erased” as a result of China’s censorship. This is also misleading. Most of what the censors deleted was people referring to the military games in regards to the virus, likely as a measure for keeping the public from jumping to conclusions too early about America’s potential role in the crisis. They did not go after posts that referenced the severity of the crisis, but rather material that could be harmful to international relations.
This week, the U.S. propaganda machine expanded upon these claims by alleging that China lied about the extent of the virus. Unsurprisingly, the intelligence agents who are cited as sources for this revelation are anonymous. And the Bloomberg reporters who helped break this story didn’t even see the report behind it, instead having the details outlined to them by these mysterious officials. There was no evidence to back up their claims; all they did was craft another headline that reflects the other baseless insinuations from imperialist propagandists.
These charges and mischaracterizations distract from the enormously effective efforts of the CPC in combating the virus. Because of the party’s rapid construction of medical centers and sustained widespread quarantine, the disease has recently been close to obliterated within the country. China has also provided medical resources to numerous countries, a humanitarian act which the mentioned Vice article somehow tries to spin as a bad thing.
The CPC responded as best as was possible for it to, and keeping a spreading pandemic within a country’s border is essentially beyond the powers of any state. So China can’t be accused of letting the virus spread throughout an unnecessary amount of its people (as the U.S. government can certainly be accused of). Nor can China reasonably be accused of “letting” the virus spread globally.
Using McCarthyism and censorship to shut down those who challenge the warmongering claims
Pandemics create a scary kind of political psychology. Similar to the mass fears of terrorism throughout the last two decades, when people feel threatened by a disease they become hostile towards those who step out of the defined parameters for keeping society safe. While those urging people to disregard all of the Covid-19 safety advice are engaging in dangerous misinformation, this fringe and extreme position is being conflated with voicing dissenting views about where the virus came from and which country is responsible.
Headlines about pro-China Covid-19 content being “foreign disinformation” are promoting the perception that it’s wrong to ask the questions I’ve posed throughout this article, or to point out the falsehoods of Western reporting on China’s handling of the virus. It’s making dialogue about the issue harder to have, and it’s giving leverage to the oligarchic censorship engines within the U.S./NATO empire.
Facebook has been deleting posts about the virus to a far more thorough extent than has been the case for China’s censors. At the same time, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, the BBC, and other entities have joined in on a project called the Trusted News Initiative. TNI partner Noel Curran has said about the project’s goal that “There is a tide of misinformation and bad information, driven mainly through online social platforms, which is threatening to undermine public trust and cause further anxiety for people. This initiative underlines the role of public service media in tackling misinformation head-on and delivering accurate content that audiences can safely rely on.”
It’s an extension of the McCarthyism, censorship, and stigmatization of supposed “fake news” that’s dominated Western politics in recent years. Media hysteria about “Russian interference” after the 2016 election facilitated an unprecedented series of censorship measures from corporations and governments, rationalized by a desire to protect trust in institutions. Amid the last decade’s growing backlash to neoliberalism, the ruling class has been waging a war on dissenting journalism and socialist politics. Now is another opportunity to silence and shame those who challenge imperialist and capitalist narratives.
An example of the emerging hostile atmosphere towards dissent can be found in a recent graphic from Counter Hate UK, which advises people to respond to “Coronavirus misinformation” with the following measures: “Report misinformation to platforms,” “[don’t] reply, share, or quote misinformation,” and “spread official advice” to “drown out fake news.”
This is the psychological weapon that the U.S./NATO empire is using to keep itself on the path of war escalations and internal repression: instilling people with the fear that if they challenge anything the centers of power tell them about the virus, they’ll endanger society. But we need critical thinking and open dissent more than ever during this time. The capitalist ruling class is neglecting the needs of the masses while using the crisis to exacerbate inequality, and we poor and working people need to fight back. We must challenge the narratives which enable the imperialist war campaigns against China and other countries, and we must work to intensify the class struggle.
What seemed to allow this deadly night to descend was that the intellectual patterns that were supposed to be in charge of things, that should comprehend the threat and lead the fight against it, were paralyzed.
Later in the day on 9/11/2001 a third building, WTC Building 7, descended at nearly free-fall speed with such perfect symmetry as to serve as a textbook example of excellence in prepared demolition. The official reason for the collapse of the 47 story, steel-framed skyscraper was given in 2008 by Shyam Sunder of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST): “WTC 7 collapsed because of fires fueled by office furnishings.” It had taken seven years for NIST to fabricate a tortured videotaped explanation obviously out of sync with the actual collapse. The explanation reeked so visibly of scientific fraud that demonstrating that Building 7 was professionally wired for destruction became seen as the factor that could best be used to expose the larger web of lies surrounding the 9/11 events.
In years following 9/11, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth was formed, as were similar truth-seeking organizations for pilots, lawyers, scientists, firefighters, religious leaders, and many more (even cops). But mainstream journalism has been silent, dismissive or openly hostile to individuals and groups questioning the official account. The now jaded epithet of “conspiracy theorist”, a 1960s invention of the CIA, soon gave way to the insults of “truther”, and even “troofer”. But perhaps the best indicator of governmental/media defense of the preposterous but official account of 9/11 may be seen in a March 8, 2010 Washington Post editorial that threatened a prominent Japanese politician and his entire Party for suggesting controlled demolition as cause for the 9/11 collapses, and that Japan should have its own independent investigation. The Post, long linked to the CIA, used in its threat identical derogatory language seen widely in attacks on people and groups aware of the physical impossibilities inherent in the government’s explanation: “bizarre”, “half-baked”, “intellectually bogus”, “lunatic fringe”, “fact-averse”, as if the terminology had derived from a single source. Well, imagine that!
In 2015, researchers at the University of Alaska’s Institute of Northern Engineering, funded by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, began a four-year study of details of the WTC7 collapse. The Final Report, released on March 25, concluded that WTC7 was destroyed not by office fires but “by the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.” Four years and a third of a million dollars, and that’s IT? What is so maddeningly frustrating – now after nearly two decades – is that all these engineers and architects refuse to take the next appropriate step and openly state, as a “working hypothesis”, that the building was prepared for demolition. All were trained in the physics of Isaac Newton’s universe, and all of their data point to that and nowhere else.
In the name of science and good sense, all of these engineering physicists have an obligation to speak much more clearly. I am a zoologist and therefore lack the professional standing to frame a hypothesis for an engineering issue, but there is a crying need for an openly-stated hypothesis from the professional community. What other than professional demolition could cause dozens of massive steel columns to “fail” simultaneously to such an extreme degree as to allow for free fall of a skyscraper, even for a moment? I’m serious. If there is another possible explanation that makes physical sense, all of these architects should just state it. Instead, what they suggest people do is send the Final Report to their members of Congress. Really! Such a level of naïveté is unacceptable and is merely a recipe for more years of failure to win a “new” investigation — as if the 9/11 Commission whitewash could qualify as a legitimate investigation.
One might argue that US journalism had some excuse to be blind to the demolition of WTC7 as long as the NIST report could be cited, but as of now, the reputation of NIST is a smoking ruin, and rightly so. Leaders of the NIST report lied before the eyes of the world, and if they have a shred of decency remaining they would be publicly begging for forgiveness. And the same would apply to the members of the 9/11 Commission who certified the deception, Max Cleland the sole exception, his having resigned in disgust early on. In particular, consider the 9/11 Commission’s Executive Director, Phillip Zelikow. Look over the array of governmental positions the man has enjoyed, and then reflect on what it must say about inner workings of the U.S. Government that he remains honored and in key positions rather than behind bars. Further, what does it say about political involvements of the University of Virginia that he heads its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences?
Becoming aware of the depth of rot and corruption throughout upper levels of government, media and academia is absolutely heartbreaking. Elements within and without the U.S. Government, in concert with a mercenary journalism, have executed a monstrous and convoluted deception on the American people and the world, and as Ben Bagdikian wrote in The New Media Monopoly, “Once a basic untruth is rooted, it blurs a society’s perception of reality and, consequently, the intelligence with which society reacts to events.” As psychologist Robert Griffin has put it: “9/11, and facing the truth about it, is important to the soul of America. Values that have come from the official story have corrupted us emotionally, mentally and spiritually.” Accordingly, the engineering community, rather than just dumping years of accumulated data onto a lay society, has a moral obligation to state, in clearest terms, a hypothesis as to what caused the steel of WTC7 to fail.
Bill Willers is an emeritus professor of biology, University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. He is founder of the Superior Wilderness Action Network and editor of Learning to Listen to the Land, and Unmanaged Landscapes, both from Island Press.
President Donald Trump saw the same day that bombs must have been used on the WTC towers on 9/11/2001. He quickly knew that the official Bush Story of 9/11 (BS911) was a lie. From his experience building steel sky scrapers, he knew they were built to be strong, even against a jet. He stated to the reporter that bombs must also have been involved. Donald showed what a nice guy he is, as he called his competitor Larry Silverstein to see if he was ok. He did not suspect Larry let 3000 of his tenants die for over $4 billion from insurance. Never investigated by George Bush’s 9/11 Commission:
* Controlled Demolition: Thermitic explosive residue has been found in the WTC dust by scientists.
* WTC Building 7: Collapsed at near free fall speed at 5:20 pm and not hit by a plane
* Ace Elevator Company in the shafts 1994 – 2001 the perfect place to plant explosives next to columns http://www.aneta.org/Ace
* LVI Services removing illegal asbestos above the ceiling panels, another perfect place to plant explosives
* SecuraCom: the security guard company with his brother Marvin Bush on the Board of Directors
* Larry Silverstein purchased landlord rights a few months before 9/11 doubled the insurance was not in his usual office and received over $4 billion
Note: This was an audio-only interview by reporters at Channel 9. Rolland Smith, Alan Marcus The photo in the thumb nail is actually from another interview by a German reporter on 9/11/2001, who looks similar to Alan.
On March 25, 2020, researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks issued the final report of a four-year computer modeling study on the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7.
The 47-story WTC 7 was the third skyscraper to be completely destroyed on September 11, 2001, collapsing rapidly and symmetrically into its footprint at 5:20 PM. Seven years later, investigators at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) concluded that WTC 7 was the first steel-framed high-rise ever to have collapsed solely as a result of normal office fires.
Contrary to the conclusions of NIST, the UAF research team finds that the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11 was not caused by fires but instead was caused by the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.
The ongoing and unfolding reactions to the Corona Virus look set to have wide-ranging and long-lasting effect on politics, society and economics. The drive to close down all activities is extraordinary as are the measures being promoted to isolate people from each other.
The deep-rooted fear of contagious disease, hardwired into the collective consciousness by historical events such as the ‘Black/Bubonic Plague’ and maintained through popular culture (e.g. the Hollywood movies Outbreak and Contagion), means that people are without question highly susceptible to accepting extreme emergency measures whether or not such measures are rational or justified. The New York Times called for America to be put on a war footing in order to deal with Corona whilst former Army General Stanley McChrystal has been invoking his 9/11 experience in order to prescribe lessons for today’s leaders.
At the same time, political actors are fully aware that these conditions of fear and panic provide a critical opportunity that can be exploited in order to pursue political, economic and societal objectives. It is very likely, however, that the dangers posed by the potential exploitation of Corona for broader political, economic and societal objectives far outweigh the immediate threat to life and health from the virus. A lesson from recent history is instructive here.
9/11 AND THE GLOBAL ‘WAR ON TERROR’
The events of September 11 2001 represent a key moment in contemporary history. The destruction of three skyscrapers in New York after the impact of two airliners and an attack on the Pentagon, killing around 3000 civilians, shocked both American and global publics. The horror of seeing aircraft being flown into buildings, followed by the total destruction of three high rise buildings within a matter of seconds, and the spectre of a shadowy band of Islamic fundamentalists (Al Qaeda) having pulled off such devastating attacks, gripped the imagination of many in the Western world.
It was in this climate of paranoia and fear that extraordinary policies were implemented. The USA Patriot Act led to significant civil liberty restrictions whilst the mass surveillance of the digital environment became normalized.
In the United States torture was authorized in the name of preventing terrorism whilst the Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba became a site in which accused individuals have been held without any adequate legal protection or due process.
Remarkably, the individual accused of leading the alleged 9/11 plot, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who ‘confessed’ to CIA interrogators after being ‘waterboarded’ 183 times, has recently received his trial date, set for January 11 2021 and 20 years after 9/11. Civil liberty restrictions, mass surveillance and torture were only a sub-strand of the major war-fighting-policy that was enabled by 9/11.
Presented at the time as America’s ‘New Pearl Harbour’, 9/11 provided the conditions for a series of major regime-change wars which persist until today.
Critically, these wars have not been primarily about combatting ‘Islamic fundamentalist terrorism’/Al Qaeda, but rather attacking ‘enemy’ [of Israel] states. Indeed, the evidence that the 9/11 event and the alleged threat of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ was then exploited in order to pursue a geo-politically [Zionist] motivated set of regime-change wars which had little connection to the purported Al Qaeda threat is well established.
Former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, Wesley Clark, famously went public in 2006/7 stating that immediately after 9/11 he had been informed that the US was intending to attack seven countries within five years including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. Clark stated:
He [the Joint Staff officer] picked up a piece of paper, he said I just got this down from upstairs, from the Secretary of Defence’s office today, and he said this is a memo that describes how we are gonna take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran.
Clark’s claims have recently been corroborated by retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (chief of staff to Colin Powell and Iraq War planner) who stated that he had actually seen the same plans Clark was referring to many months prior to 9/11:
My first briefing in the Pentagon from an Air Force three-star general in February of 2001 I almost fell of my chair because their briefing included on the one hand the Air Force’s ability to take out 80 to 90% of the targets in North Korea in the first few hours of an aerial strike on that country to hey when we do Iraq we’re gonna do Syria and Lebanon and we’re going to do Iran and maybe Egypt … but this was more than that [just contingency planning] Wes Clark is right they had these plans they were going to go right through all these countries that they felt threatened Israel all through those countries that they felt threatened 25-30% of the world’s oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
Documentary evidence for these claims has come by way of the UK Chilcot Inquiry into the 2003 Iraq War. For example, a report quoted a British embassy cable, dated 15 September 2001, explained that ‘[t]he “regime-change hawks” in Washington are arguing that a coalition put together for one purpose [against international terrorism] could be used to clear up other problems in the region.’ Another document released by Chilcot shows British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George Bush discussing phases one and two of the ‘war on terror’ and when to hit particular countries. Blair writes:
If toppling Saddam is a prime objective, it is far easier to do it with Syria and Iran in favour or acquiescing rather than hitting all three at once.
The regime-change wars that have flowed directly and indirectly from 9/11 continue to this day. War and conflict continues in Afghanistan and Iraq whilst the nine-year-long war in Syria has borne witness to extensive and illegal policies pursued by Western governments including the funding and arming of extremist groups coupled with support for groups actually aligned with Al Qaeda. Iran continues to be subjected to US hybrid warfare tactics including sanctions and covert operations whilst the threat of military action is very clear and present.
The human cost of these wars, built upon the ruthless exploitation of public fear of terrorism in order to pursue multiple ‘regime-change’ wars, has been huge. According to the Brown University ‘Costs of War Project’, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have killed a combined 480,000 to 507,000 civilians, coalition military members, and foreign fighters, with an untold number having been maimed and disfigured. IPPNW estimated that the first ten years of the ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan killed 1.3 million people.
Since 2011, in Syria alone, over 400,000 people have died as a result of war. The numbers of people displaced as a result of these conflicts are also extremely high; wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria have wrought a combined 9.39 million refugees, 10.78 million internally displaced peoples, and 830,000 asylum seekers. In addition, there are persisting and very serious concerns with respect to the possible involvement of state actors with the event of 9/11.
Overall, the 9/11 global ‘war on terror’ is increasingly coming to be understood particularly across the world as, first and foremost, a remarkable propaganda campaign designed to enable violent conflict in the international system and with its effects and objectives being far wider and deeper than had been suggested by official narratives regarding the need to combat Al Qaeda.
CORONA VIRUS: A NEW 9/11?
The lesson of 9/11 is that major events can become what scholar Peter Dale Scott describes as deep events which are exploited by political actors in order to precipitate and manage major political, economic and social shifts. 9/11 became, in effect, the deep event that enabled 20 years of unfettered Western warfare abroad and severe civil liberty restrictions and extensive surveillance at home.
At the time of 9/11 many people in the West were terrified of terrorism. Public opposition to the invasion of Afghanistan (the first regime war to flow within months of 9/11) was almost impossible without being accused of being reckless in the ‘fight against terrorism’ or of being an ‘Al Qaeda’ sympathizer. Muslims throughout the West were widely despised. US President George Bush declared that ‘you are either with us or against us’. The parallels with what is happening today are obvious.
Is the Corona Virus a new 9/11, a new deep event? We cannot yet be sure, as of this writing. Perhaps the current strategy of suspending basic liberties will work to effectively eliminate all threats posed by the virus. Governments will then restore the civil liberties currently being suspended and all will fairly quickly return to the way things were before. Perhaps the economy will confidently weather the fallout from the ‘lockdowns’ and everything will return to business as usual.
And perhaps a sober ‘lessons learned’ review will lead to public health officials developing reasonable and balanced plans, such as developing sufficient capacity for rapid testing and tracing, which can be deployed the next time a sufficiently dangerous virus starts to spread thus avoiding terrifying publics and implementing draconian measures that inflict significant damage to the social and economic fabric of society.
Or perhaps not. It may be that, as British journalist Peter Hitchens has been warning, the loss of liberty and basic rights will continue indefinitely as governments greedily hold on to their increased powers of control over their citizenry.
Similarly, Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi has warned about the risks in Italy of state authorities, hostile to open societies and the political left, exploiting Corona in order to increase their control.
An obvious concern here is whether there will be a permanent impact on mass gatherings and protests. James Corbett warns of a permanent state of ‘medical martial law’ and there is certainly the very real possibility of the normalization of government-imposed quarantine and other freedom of movement restrictions.
Margaret Kimberley of the US-based Black Agenda Report warns that Corona may be used as a way of covering up both economic crisis and collapse. She notes that the Federal Reserve ‘recently threw Wall Street a $1.5 trillion lifeline which only kicked the can down the road. The can has been kicked ever since the Great Recession of 2008’. The likely destruction of small businesses might allow for ever greater corporate choke-hold on the economy with more people forced into the corporate workforce.
There is certainly the danger that Corona will be exploited in order to distract from severe economic problems whilst also enabling the pursuit of new economic strategies which worsen rather than mitigate the social inequalities that already tarnish Western countries.
And, of course those actors behind the regime-change wars that flowed from 9/11 may use the Corona Virus to increase pressure on the countries they have been targeting for the last 20 years and those they wish to target in the future.
ABC news report that, despite the Corona Virus, US and UAE troops have held a major military exercise ‘that saw forces seize a sprawling model Mideast city’. It is also worth nothing here the recent US assassination of Iranian General Solemeni and the on-going proxy battles between US forces and Iranian-backed groups in Iraq. The possibility of Corona being exploited in order to further the regime change wars we have seen over the last 20 years is extremely likely and it would be naïve in the extreme to think otherwise.
Whatever the Corona event may or may not be, the fundamental lesson of the last 20 years is that governments can and do exploit, even manipulate, events in order to pursue political, social, military and economic objectives. Fearful populations are frequently irrational ones, vulnerable and malleable. Now is not the time for deference to authority and reluctance to speak out.
It is time for publics to get informed, think calmly and rationally, and to robustly scrutinize and challenge what their governments are doing. The dangers of failing to do this likely far surpass the immediate threat posed by the Corona Virus.
As I write this in late March of 2020, the world is under attack from a deadly strain of coronavirus called COVID-19. Thus far, there have been around 18,000 deaths world-wide, including 550 deaths in the United States where I live. My country has come to a halt: schools and businesses are shut down and people have been warned to stay in their houses or apartments hunkered down in the face of this menacing enemy. We’re in a war, that’s how it is being described in the media. The president has said he is like a war-time president.
Speaking of war, tonight, hunkered down as I usually am in this very late stage of life—I didn’t need to be directed to hide out on this leather couch I’m sitting on at the moment—I read a biography of an American World War II-era air force general by the name of Curtis LeMay (LeMay: The Life and Times of General Curtis LeMay by Warren Kozak, Regnery, 2009). As I was reading along, it hit me that COVID-19 has a long way to go before it’s in a league with General LeMay as a killing machine. Back in 1945, in less than three hours, LeMay got way, way more killing done than COVID-19 has been able to accomplish in three months.
And it’s more than just in the sheer number of deaths that LeMay comes out on top in the comparison.
COVID-19 has been bad at snuffing out the lives of children and people who aren’t already sick with something. With LeMay, young and old, sick and well, he put them all in their graves.
And LeMay wasn’t limited to primly killing people lying quietly in hospital beds with rubber tubes running into them as COVID-19 has been. He set them on fire, deprived them of air to breathe, and heated them up like pot roasts. Imagine that action!
More, COVID-19 seems only to be proficient at x-ing out human life in cold weather; no good in the summer. LeMay demonstrated in both Europe and Asia that he was a man for all seasons, as it were—he was as effective cancelling someone’s existence in July as January.
Plus, Curtis LeMay didn’t just kill people; he also totally leveled the areas they lived in. COVID-19 has accomplished nothing in this regard.
In addition, Curtis LeMay had style and pizzazz—he had a snappy uniform and chewed on a big cigar. COVID-19, tiny and round with little spikes, no snappy uniform, no big cigar, nothing, lacks presence entirely.
Even more, Curtis LeMay was miles ahead of COVID-19 in public relations. He did his killing and came off looking good and got fawned over and invited to dinner parties, while COVID-19 does its killing and comes off looking bad and is shunned and people are brewing up poison to slip into its margarita. No contest there either.
The one area where COVID-19 comes out ahead of LeMay is in the ability to make the stock market plunge. LeMay was lacking in that area, though in fairness to him, he wasn’t dedicated to getting that accomplished—total destruction and super high death counts were his only priorities.
Assuming you don’t know about him, General Curtis LeMay conceived and ordered an incendiary bombing raid—fire bombs, they set everything aflame—on the civilian population of Tokyo, Japan, March 9th, 1945. Here’s a description of how it went down drawn from the LeMay biography I just read:
Across Tokyo, residents looked up in amazement. They had never seen the “B-sans” [B29 bomber airplanes] so low, nor had they ever seen so many at once. German Catholic priest, Father Gustav Bitter, who was there, later wrote, “The fire falling from the sky reminded me of tinsel hung on a Christmas tree. The red and yellow flames reflected from below onto the silvery undersides of the planes in the upper darkness gave them the appearance of giant dragon flies with jeweled wings. I watched as if I were in a trance.”
With sudden fury, tranquility became horror as the incendiaries hit home. They created tornadoes of fire. They sucked away oxygen; people couldn’t breathe and suffocated. Masuko Harino, a factory worker, reported, “Intense heat came from the firestorm. My eyes seemed about to pop out. People’s clothes were on fire. They were writhing in torment.” A young woman described a school that had become a three-story oven: every human being inside it was cooked to death. Strewn everywhere, some in batches, the incinerated bodies were black; they looked like logs from a distance. There was a dreadful sameness about the dead, no telling men from women or adults from children. If they could walk, survivors wandered about like ghosts, silent. Those still alive were left to die in agony; there was no medicine, food, or drinking water for them.
The raid lasted two hours and forty minutes. Sixteen square miles of Tokyo, one of the most densely populated areas in the world, was transformed into a moonscape of twisted reddish-black iron, roasted sheet metal, and rubble. Not a single man-made structure still stood. An estimated 100,000 people died in Tokyo that night. More than a million were left homeless. The grisly retrieval of bodies took weeks. At least 70,000 people were buried in mass pits. A U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey concluded, “More persons lost their lives in Tokyo that night than in any equivalent period of time in the history of mankind.”
How did what Curtis LeMay pulled off that March night in 1945 go over? It went over really big. And LeMay himself went over really big. I read The New York Times every morning, and it’s been non-stop trashing COVID-19 for weeks, not one positive word, and there’s been all kinds of commiserating with the dead and dying. With LeMay, the Times jumped up and down like cheerleaders. Hurray for our hero! The paper pointed out that those people in Tokyo LeMay set on fire, asphyxiated, and baked had it coming—women, children, and infants, every last one of them–because “the people, factories, and small establishments all contributed to Japan’s war effort.” The Times celebrated LeMay’s admirable deed as the start of really good things: to wit, Japanese cities becoming “no more than holes in the ground.” Though the newspaper cautioned readers that the Japanese “have done their deadliest fighting from holes in the ground,” so we need to be diligent and thorough with the killing.
Following the bombing raid, New Yorker magazine had a glowing profile of LeMay. And he was on the cover of Time magazine and given an effusive write-up in its pages. Nothing like that for COVID-19. But then again, COVID-19 hasn’t done the bang-up job of extinguishing human life that LeMay did, and it’s not anihilating the people who most richly deserve to die like LeMay was so good at doing.
LeMay got a promotion to Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, and in 1968, ran for vice-president on a third-party ticket, garnering a hefty 13% of the vote. COVID-19 couldn’t come by a janitor’s job or get on the ballot for dogcatcher.
LeMay got an elementary school named after him, and . . . oh, you get my point. LeMay had it all going, and my best guess is that no matter how good COVID-19 does in the future—including getting up to speed with killing little children—it’s never going to measure up to him.
The Cuban struggle for independence in the 1890s was closely covered by the American press. Some newspapers agitated for American intervention and featured sensational stories of Spanish atrocities against the native Cuban population. Spain posed no threat to the United States, but Cuba had very profitable plantations coveted by American tycoons. On February 15, 1898, the US Navy warship USS Maine was visiting Havana harbor and was rocked by an explosion, killing 260 of the crew and sinking the ship. America’s ruling class used this incident and their money and media to pressure the US Congress to declare war on Spain to seize Cuba.
WASHINGTON DC — Last week, Newsweek published a report entitled “Inside The Military’s Top Secret Plans If Coronavirus Cripples the Government,” which offers vague descriptions of different military plans that could be put into effect if the civilian government were to be largely incapacitated, with a focus on the potential of the current novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic to result in such a scenario.
The article’s author, William Arkin, largely frames these plans as new, though — buried deep within the article — he eventually mentions that such contingency plans can be traced back to the Eisenhower administration (though they were in place before) and have since been developed and updated by most subsequent administrations, largely through the issuance of executive orders. Arkin also points out that some of these “Continuity of Government”, or COG, plans include the “devolution” of leadership and Constitutional authority, which he notes “could circumvent the normal Constitutional provisions for government succession, and military commanders could be placed in control around America.”
Yet, there are key aspects of COG and its development that Arkin leaves out. For instance, in his timeline on how such plans have developed in the post-World War II era, he conveniently fails to mention any of the Reagan administration’s major changes to COG, including the Reagan-era Executive Order on which all current COG programs are based. Indeed, many of the “extra-Constitutional” aspects of COG that Arkin mentions began during the Reagan administration, when these plans were redrafted to largely exclude members of Congress, including the Speaker of the House, from succession plans and even moved to essentially eliminate Congress in the event of COG being implemented, with near total power instead being given to the executive branch and the military. It was also during this time that the “devolution” aspect of COG was hammered out, as it created three president-cabinet “teams” to be stationed in different parts of the country outside of the nation’s capital. Arkin’s decision to not mention how COG was a major focus of the Reagan administration is striking given that that administration poured hundreds of millions of dollars annually into COG planning and development and also conducted COG drills on a regular basis.
Furthermore, the Miami Herald revealed in 1987, that the COG programs of that era were deeply connected to what the Herald termed “a virtual parallel government outside the traditional cabinet departments and agencies” that began operating “almost from the day Reagan took office” and included many of Reagan’s closest advisers, including then-CIA Director William Casey. The Herald further claimed that this “parallel government” had been responsible for the Iran-Contra scandal (i.e. “involved in arming the Nicaraguan rebels”) as well as “the drafting of martial law plans for national emergencies,” i.e. COG, as well as “the monitoring of U.S. citizens considered potential security risks.”
Other key players in those Reagan-era COG developments, such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, former CIA Director James Woosley and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, are also left unmentioned in Arkin’s article. Not mentioning Cheney and Rumsfeld are particularly glaring omissions given that they were involved in the implementation of aspects of those COG plans that went live in the wake of the September 11 attacks, when both men were serving in key posts in the George W. Bush administration.
While Arkin’s omission of the role of the Reagan administration and leading neoconservatives in the development and use of COG is significant, arguably more significant is his failure to mention one of COG’s major components, one that has gone essentially unmentioned by well-known media outlets for well over a decade – Main Core.
The government’s database of “potential troublemakers”
When Reagan issued Executive Order 12656, he created COG plans that could be implemented during “any national security emergency,” which the E.O. loosely defined as “any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological emergency, or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States.” E.O. 12656 also put the National Security Council (NSC) in charge of developing and administering COG policies. The NSC official placed in charge of this “secret” COG program was Oliver North, whose name would later become infamous for the key role he played in the Iran-Contra Scandal. During the Iran-Contra hearings in the late 1980s, then-Representative Jack Brooks (D-TX) attempted to ask the following question to North: “Colonel North, in your work at the NSC, were you not assigned at one time to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster?” Brooks, however was immediately cut off by Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI), who stated ” I believe that question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area, so may I request that you not touch upon that, sir.” Brooks protested, but North was ultimately not required to give an answer.
As the de facto leader of COG development and planning during the Reagan administration, North oversaw the creation of a controversial database that later became known simply as “Main Core.” The Main Core database, first built using the stolen PROMIS software (more information on PROMIS here and here), was essentially a list of American dissidents and “potential troublemakers.” A senior government official with a high-ranking security clearance and service in five presidential administrations described the database to journalist Chris Ketcham in 2008 as follows:
“A database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.”
“Using PROMIS, sources point out, North could have drawn up lists of anyone ever arrested for a political protest, for example, or anyone who had ever refused to pay their taxes. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon’s enemies list or Sen. Joe McCarthy’s blacklist look downright crude.”
Main Core is the aspect of COG that is most often ignored in reporting on these types of plans, with Arkin’s article being just a more recent example. While most of the rare mentions of COG in the mainstream touch on how those plans would result in the implementation of martial law and the suspension of the Constitution, they even more rarely — if ever — mention Main Core. Indeed, the last “mainstream” reports on Main Core were written over a decade ago — all in 2008 — by Chris Ketcham in Radar, by Scott Horton in Harpers and by Tim Shorrock in Salon.
Given that COG is now creeping back into mainstream reporting, revisiting Main Core is essential as the database still exists and has grown considerably since Oliver North first oversaw its creation in the early 1980s. In Ketcham’s 2008 article on the subject, he quotes then-senior government officials who said that, at the time, the number of “unfriendly” Americans on that database was approximately 8 million. Ketcham further notes that, in the event COG is implemented, these individuals could be subject to anything ranging from “heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.”
Tim Shorrock, in his coverage of Main Core, noted that the database was seen in use at the White House following the September 11 attacks and there is strong evidence pointing to it having been used by the George W. Bush administration to guide its domestic surveillance activities in the post-9/11 era. A government official who had told a reporter about having seen the database operational at the White House following September 11th “turned white as a sheet” when the reporter mentioned the name “Main Core” specifically. Shorrock’s reporting also details how Main Core includes vast amounts of information on those “unfriendly” Americans, including the fruits of the vast domestic surveillance programs of the NSA and other U.S. federal agencies that continue today and are now set to be expanded due to the current coronavirus crisis.
In a report written last year on the involvement of U.S. and Israeli intelligence and their private sector allies in pushing for new, troubling pre-crime programs, I noted that Main Core is not only available to U.S. intelligence but also Israel’s intelligence apparatus and that Israeli intelligence was involved in the creation and expansion of Main Core. That report also detailed how Main Core was used by members of Reagan’s NSC to blackmail members of Congress, a practice that is likely to have continued under subsequent administrations. It also noted how Main Core today likely involves the same software now used by every U.S. intelligence agency and numerous other federal agencies that is marketed by Palantir, a company created and owned by Trump ally Peter Thiel. Palantir’s software boasts “predictive policing” capabilities and tracks a category of person using the label “subversive,” very much in keeping with the spirit of Main Core.
Main Core and Bill Barr’s Power Grab
Though Main Core was reportedly in use after September 11 to target “unfriendly” individuals for increased domestic surveillance, concern that COG plans in the age of coronavirus could take a more drastic turn and involve the detention of Americans included in that database now seems more plausible than ever. On Saturday, Politico reported that the Department of Justice has demanded new “emergency powers” during the current pandemic and these powers include being able to indefinitely detain Americans without trial. Politico also noted that the DOJ’s controversial new requests “span several stages of the legal process, from initial arrest to how cases are processed and investigated.” Per the DOJ’s requests, indefinite detention would emerge through a new ability whereby the Attorney General or a judge could pause court proceedings whenever courts are “fully or partially closed by virtue of any natural disaster, civil disobedience, or other emergency situation.”
What Politico did not include in its report is that current Attorney General William Barr has spent the past several months fine-tuning and implementing a “pre-crime” program. Officially known as the “National Disruption and Early Engagement Program” (DEEP), it aims to “identify, assess and engage” potentially violent individuals “before they strike.” Barr first announced this program last October in an official memorandum and therein stated that the program was to be implemented sometime over the course of 2020 and would involve “an efficient, effective and programmatic strategy to disrupt individuals who are mobilizing towards violence, by all lawful means.”
A training conference for that program took place this past December and involved members of the Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation and “private sector partners.” One recent DOJ statement regarding an arrest made last year in Nevada, claimed that that specific case was part of the DOJ’s “National Disruption and Early Engagement Program,” suggesting that this program is already in use — at least in some parts of the country.
In his memorandum, Barr further notes that the program’s “early engagement tactics” were “born of the posture we adopted with respect to terrorist threats” following the September 11 attacks, essentially stating that this pre-crime program will utilize methods from the “War on Terror” domestically and on a massive scale.
Given the context of the current coronavirus crisis, the DOJ’s recent request for sweeping new powers and the role of Main Core in COG plans, one part of Barr’s pre-crime memorandum stands out. In the part of the document where Barr outlines what actions will be taken once an individual is deemed potentially violent or threatening, he writes that those individuals will be subject to detention, court-ordered mental health treatment and electronic monitoring, among other measures.
The possibility of pre-crime detention was also present in the DOJ’s recent request for new “emergency powers” in light of the coronavirus crisis, as it specifically asks that those new powers apply to “any statutes or rules of procedure otherwise affecting pre-arrest, post-arrest, pre-trial, trial, and post-trial procedures in criminal and juvenile proceedings and all civil process and proceedings.” Norman L. Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, toldPolitico that the inclusion of the term “pre-arrest” likely means that “you could be arrested and never brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over. I find it absolutely terrifying.”
Thus, if DOJ is granted these new powers it has requested, the William Barr-led Department of Justice will not only be authorized to indefinitely detain Americans without trial, it will be able to detain them without any proof of those detainees having committed a crime or even having plans or the intent to commit a crime. Instead, the DOJ only needs to argue that the individual was “mobilizing towards violence,” an extremely vague phrase that could potentially be used against anyone who expresses discontent with the government or government policy.
Furthermore, with the FBI having recently flagged “conspiracy theorists” (and by extension those who distrust or question government narratives of both past and present) as a “domestic terror threat,” the DOJ could even make the case that failure to blindly trust government narratives presents a threat to the public order. Given that the Main Core database in its current form contains bulk surveillance gathered from social media, phone conversations/messaging apps and even financial information (i.e. purchasing history, etc.) on Americans deemed unfriendly “often for the slightest and most trivial reason,” this unprecedented power grab by the DOJ has an authoritarian and Orwellian potential to target legitimate dissent like never before.
With the specter of COG now snaking its way into mainstream discourse during the coronavirus crisis, it is essential that Americans stay vigilant, as these Orwellian and dystopian “solutions” to allegedly protect us from the current pandemic have been in place long before COVID-19 made its appearance on the world stage or landed on U.S. shores.
It is also essential to remember that COG, Main Core and the DOJ’s pre-crime program were all created and are currently controlled by extremely corrupt and fundamentally untrustworthy individuals who have not only been involved in, innumerable scandals, over the years, but have also installed and supported some of the most authoritarian, savage and horrific dictators the world has ever seen. To trust them with such unprecedented and dangerous powers in a period of national confusion and panic is tantamount to beckoning the horrors of those dictatorships — past and present — to come home to roost.
The question of whether the chickens are coming home to roost was famously posed by Malcolm X. And that was shortly after the JFK assassination. Malcolm X was suggesting that the same forces that the US had deployed to attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro, among others, may have bounced back in a case of blowback and killed President Kennedy.
And of course, we know that there’s a certain amount of truth to that. Today we know that the same CIA assassination squads that were unsuccessfully attempting to kill Castro were in fact involved in killing President Kennedy. So Malcolm X’s words were quite precient. Now does that apply to today’s coronavirus situation in which the United States is now about to become the global epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic according to the World Health Organization?
I think it does, because there is considerable circumstantial evidence that this COVID-19 pandemic was a biological weapon that was deployed against China and Iran and has bounced back against its creators. The experts in biological warfare all say that traditionally, strategists have been skeptical about biological warfare precisely because it has that tendency to bounce back and to create blowback.
Viruses mutate, even if you create an ethnic specific kind of virus, which may have been the case here. The United States has been caught red-handed nefariously collecting genetic material from the Chinese, from Russians and from Iranians. But the problem is that genetic specific weapons mutate. The virus is constantly seeking to find a better way to infect a broader group of people.
So it will typically go after people that may not have been the original targets, and that may be what happened here. The Chinese government is saying this. The Chinese government has all but officially accused the United States of deploying a biological weapon.
The Russian media accepts this as its standard mainstream narrative. This is what happened, according to Russian mainstream media. And in Iran, top leaders including the civil defense chief, and indeed the Supreme Leader himself, have broadly hinted at the same thing. We don’t know the details for sure, we’re not even sure that this hypothesis is correct, but we need to find out.
And at this point, we just don’t have enough information about the coronavirus and about the biological weapons programs. We know that the US has a terrible track record of using biological weapons against populations.
The US dropped more than 100,000 germ bombs on Pyongyang in North Korea during the Korean War, as explained in Dave Chaddock’s book — This Must Be the Place[: How the U.S. Waged Germ Warfare in the Korean War and Denied It Ever Since]. It used the Japanese germ warfare program that had done horrible things to China and Korea during World War Two, and it hired the very experts who had done that, and they became the basis for the US germ warfare program.
The US has also repeatedly attacked Cuba with biological weapons. It actually had a plan to incapacitate the entire Cuban population and kill at least 20% of the Cuban population as a prelude to a US invasion with the US soldiers, of course, protected by vaccines and masks as they went into Cuba. And that might very well have been actually approved; it would have been done if the President Kennedy hadn’t stopped it.
So we have bad historical precedents. We have all kinds of circumstantial evidence about the possibility of this being biological warfare, that blew back and got out of hand and is now affecting the very country that most likely was behind it. But we need to find out if that’s true.
We need a full scale international investigation. If we had had that kind of investigation after September 11, 2001 we will be living in a much better world today. Unfortunately, the same neoconservatives who were behind 9/11 very likely are also behind the coronavirus outbreak. It’s time to investigate, find out the truth, and prosecute the guilty.
The US State Department and media are heavily promoting as theology that COVID-19 is “a Chinese virus and China spread it around the world”, demanding apologies and more. One American law firm in Florida filed a class action lawsuit against the Chinese government, seeking compensation for ‘damages’. (1) I have reviewed and analysed the details available of all first and subsequent confirmed infections in all countries, including infection source, virus strain, and timeline, which data provide ample evidence that this American theology is not supported by the facts. There appears to have been two major ‘waves’ of global infection, the first around the end of January, the second a month later. (2) (3) (4)
It is true that – in the very early stages, the first wave – 22 countries had their first confirmed infections in travelers from China but, soon after this, in the second wave, 34 countries obtained their first confirmed infection in travelers from Italy, and another 16 from Iran. However, so-called “first infection” in these countries, from Chinese citizens or other travelers, proved in all but perhaps two cases to be irrelevant because these first external infections proved to have no links to the subsequent local outbreaks, and because the virus strain in many of those explosive local eruptions did not exist in China but only in the US.
What this means is that while Italy discovered its first two infections in Chinese tourists, these two were unrelated to the subsequent virus outbreak because the strain infecting Italy is different from that in China and in those two Chinese tourists. Italy, like almost all other countries, did not obtain its infection from China and indeed could not have done. The only country with Italy’s variety of the virus is the US, and thus the infection must have originated in America, not in China. Similarly, the locations near China – South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, even Taiwan Province, share an entirely different common strain. China had only a tiny pocket of that strain, and very far from Wuhan. These were not infected by China, either. I have dealt with this in an earlier article. (5)
Much was made in the American media of the “first American virus infection” being a Chinese traveler from Wuhan, but that was also irrelevant because the massive underlying epidemic waiting to break free (as it soon did) was unrelated to that Chinese citizen, the thousands of infections in Washington, California and New York clearly stemming from unidentified (and unsought) local sources.
Given the high volume of Chinese passenger traffic around the world, it isn’t surprising that some infections would have been discovered in Chinese nationals in other countries and, since the first outbreak occurred in China, it was natural to test travelers from China. Because of that focus, few countries thought to check travelers from the United States. Australia did check, the country’s Prime Minister recently stating that 80% or more of all infections in his country occurred in the US, then traveled home. (6) Similarly, Iceland confirmed that some of their coronavirus infections have been traced to Denver. (7) (8) I have a strong suspicion that if all countries review the travel history of their early infections, they will discover more US traffic in the mix, perhaps predominantly so.
If you can get people focused on asking the wrong question, you don’t care about the answers. The wrong question is whether the original virus came from a bat or a pangolin or a banana, but that’s irrelevant. It wasn’t a bat or a banana that infected the people in Wuhan, but a live person – or a person carrying a live virus in a pail. The right questions to ask relate to the identity of that person and the source of the contents of that pail, and those answers seem to lead us to the USA. Certainly, they are not to be found in China.
Let’s take a quick look at those two waves of infections that circled the globe.
The First Wave simultaneously infected 25 nations or provinces within a few days centered around January 25. The infected areas: Macau, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, South Korea, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Cambodia, Nepal, Malaysia, Australia, Thailand, Canada, the US, Germany, Italy, the UK, France, Bavaria, Spain, Belgium, Russia, Finland, and the UAE.
One month later. The Second Wave simultaneously infected 85 nations within a few days centered around February 25. The infected countries: Austria, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Portugal, Luxembourg, Monaco, San Marino, the Vatican, Liechtenstein, Malta, New Zealand, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, the Maldives, Bhutan, Andorra, Bulgaria, Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, the Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Latvia, Croatia, Estonia, North Macedonia, Georgia, Romania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Slovakia, Serbia, Moldova, Albania, Egypt, Iraq, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Palestine, Iceland, Ecuador, Armenia, Norway, Denmark, Costa Rica, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Paraguay, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, Togo, Cameroon, Senegal, Algeria, South Africa, Morocco, and Tunisia. Kosovo, Namibia, Uruguay, the Sudan, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Bolivia, Panama, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mongolia, Burkina Faso, Brunei and Cyprus were simultaneous around one week later.
Source: Geology.com
I make no claim to being a virologist, but this is beginning to look damned peculiar. A natural virus hasn’t the ability to simultaneously infect 85 different countries on all continents of the world, with outbreaks in multiple locations in each country – and to do it without the vehicle of a seafood market full of bats and bananas.
More peculiar is that these countries were by no means all infected with the same variety of the virus, which means the simultaneous infections in these 85 countries were not from the same source. Even more peculiar is that most countries, at least the major ones, reported simultaneous outbreaks in multiple locations, and to date while some nations have been able to identify one or more of their ‘patients zero’, I am aware of no country that was able to definitively identify all their several ‘patients zero’. Considering the above information in light of the known basic facts of virus transmission, intuition suggests at least the possibility of there having been many people carrying a pail of live viruses.
It is interesting to note that high fatality rates are entirely within Italy, Iran, and China. For approximate figures, China’s fatality rate is between 3% and 4%, that of Iran at about 7% and Italy the highest at around 9%. Even more interesting is that if these countries did pass their strain of the virus to other nations, those strains abandoned their lethality when they left home. Of the 34 countries supposedly infected by Italy, for example, all exhibit very low mortality, the same being true of Chinese or Iranian infections. The natural conclusion is that these viruses prefer their ‘home populations’ and pose at best a minor threat to others.
*
Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
21 years ago today, on March 24, 1999, NATO began a massive bombing campaign of Yugoslavia, bombarding the country with thousands of cruise missiles and bombs in what would become the largest military assault in Europe since the Second World War.
NATO’s campaign of air and missile strikes against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which consisted of Serbia and Montenegro, lasted 78 days, ending on June 10, 1999.
During the campaign, dubbed ‘Operation Noble Anvil’ by NATO, alliance warplanes carried out some 2,300 sorties against 995 facilities, firing nearly 420,000 missiles, bombs and other projectiles with a total mass of about 22,000 metric tonnes.
The campaign included multiple violations of the laws of war, including the use of cluster bombs (37,000 of them), and depleted uranium projectiles, which led to major spike in oncological diseases, including juvenile cancer rates, after the war. According to Serbian doctors, the most widespread consequences of the use of such weapons have been thyroid disorders, cancers and foetus mutations. In 2017, Serbian scientist Ljubisa Rakic calculated that the amount of DU dropped on Yugoslavia was equivalent to about 170 Hiroshima bombs.
According to Serbian estimates, the strikes on Yugoslavia left as many as 5,700 people dead, with 12,500 injured.
NATO casualties included a US AH-64 Apache, an F-16C fighter, an AV-8B Harrier and an F-117A Nighthawk stealth bomber (the first and so far only case of a stealth fighter jet being destroyed in combat). On the Yugoslav side, military and police casualties included 631 troops and 325 policemen dead, with more than 50 missing. Due to the effective use of maskirovka or ‘military deception’ doctrine, The Yugoslav army was able to limit losses of military hardware (93 tanks lost out of an estimated 600), and other armoured vehicles, artillery and anti-aircraft systems.
The bombing is estimated to have caused as much as $100 billion in damage, destroying or damaging some 25,000 residential buildings, 470 km of roads, and 595 km of railway infrastructure. 14 airports, 19 hospitals, 20 health centers, 69 schools, 18 kindergartens, 176 cultural monuments and 38 bridges were destroyed. The bombing included a targeted raid on Radio Television of Serbia, which claimed 16 lives, and the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy, which killed 3 Chinese nationals. All told, Serbian officials estimate that over a third of NATO’s targets were civilian.
NATO’s official justification for the strikes was its desire to protect Kosovar Albanians from ethnic cleansing and “a humanitarian catastrophe.” Before the war began, Albanian separatists allied to radical Islamist forces clashed with Serbian army and police forces in Kosovo, attacking authorities and attempting to drive ethnic Serbs out of the region. After the bombing campaign was completed and NATO troops entered the breakaway Serbian region in June of 1999, the separatists continued their campaign of violence against Serbs, in spite of NATO commitments to disarm the Kosovar militants.
In 2008, the province unilaterally declared independence from Serbia. This forced over 200,000 ethnic Serbs to leave their homes. Belgrade, Russia, and many other countries have refused to recognize the breakaway republic. NATO troops, meanwhile, have remained in the province since 1999, establishing Camp Bondsteel, the second-largest US military base in Europe.
In 2015, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg expressed his “sincere regret” over the deaths and suffering of Serbian civilians. However, three years later at an event in Belgrade, the NATO chief emphasized that the bombing was not aimed against ordinary Serbs, but actually meant “to protect civilians and stop the Milosevic regime.” According to Stoltenberg, Serbs should “look to the future” and continue to shore up the “excellent relationship” between Belgrade and the bloc.
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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