Little doubt: it was intentional, a tactical ploy. Trump initially appeared to distance himself from the hawkishness of his team on Iran, by saying that ‘no’, he didn’t want war: No – really, he only wanted the Iranians to call him. He even riffs Bolton for his propensity for war. Since then, the press has been full of stories of ‘channels’ to Iran opening, and of mediators aloft. And we are regaled too with hints of some potential rift between the President and Bolton.
Of course, it was all good PR, and pure Art of the Deal: Invite your counter-party to negotiate precisely at the moment it is experiencing maximum pressure, and is ‘weakened’. And the PR part worked as a charm. Hence the mediation hype in the media. So, why all this ‘hot and cold rhetoric’? Which is it? Is Trump having second thoughts about conflict, or not? Well, in a word: ‘not’. The tactics represent pressure: More pressure on Iran, that’s all.
Whilst all this plays out, the US military build-up against Iran persists, amidst mounting US claims of Iranian intent to threaten the US, and its allies (but absent any evidence). Yes, Pompeo did say, “we’re ready to sit down with them”. But, Pompeo then added, “the American effort to fundamentally reverse the malign activity of this Islamic republic, this revolutionary force, is going to continue”.
First, and foremost, Iran would have to begin behaving as “a normal country”, which as the WSJ observes, only comes about when Iran observes every one of the twelve conditions. “The US hasn’t dropped those demands,” the Journal writes, “and has increased pressure from economic sanctions as well as pursuing its military buildup in the region.”
Is it all bluster? Will Trump go all the way with his threats and pressures – but ultimately pull out, just short of war? That seems to be the general consensus today; but Team Trump’s view of Iran seems based in so many misconceptions, layered on other misconceptions, and on intelligence that amounts to no more than Mossad’s assessment of Iranian future intentions.
The consensus on ‘no conflict’ unfortunately, may turn out to have been overly sanguine. This is not because Trump consciously desires war, but because the hawks surrounding him, particularly Bolton, are painting him into a corner – from which he must either back down, or double down, if Iran does not first capitulate.
And here is the point: the main Trump misconception may be that he does believe that Iran wants, and ultimately, ‘will seek a deal’. Really?
It is quite difficult to imagine what President Rouhani’s response could be, if asked by the Iranian National Security Council: if you (i.e. Rouhani) were to enter talks with US, what precisely would you talk about; what would you say? The Trump Administration’s position is that Iran will not ‘be allowed’ to enrich uranium at all – which is to say that Iran would be precluded – contrary to the provisions of the NPT – from having nuclear generated electricity, as it has sought since the time of the Shah. (To suggest that the West would supply Iran with just enough uranium to work its reactors, but no more, is absurd. Iran would never place its industrial base in jeopardy, to some whimsical western decision to punish Iran for some one, or other, misdemeanor).
This has been the conundrum from the outset: Iran will not accept ‘zero enrichment’; and now Bolton and Pence will not allow it any enrichment. US policy has completed the circle, back to its positions of circa 2004: i.e. No Enrichment.
The Supreme Leader has said some days ago, that he only reluctantly agreed to talks with the Obama team on the assurance that Obama had indeed accepted the principle of Iranian in-country enrichment. With hindsight, Ayatollah Khamenei said, he made a mistake. He should never have allowed the talks to proceed.
Indeed, there is nothing to talk about – except how the US might revert to the status quo ante its JCPOA withdrawal, and how it might quietly re-enter the nuclear accord – without too much loss of face. But this is absolutely not an option for Bolton, or for his US Christian Zionist allies.
And some symbolic encounter, Trump – Kim Jong Un Singapore-style, is not an option for Iran. Nor, is a ‘freeze’ of the situation, as in North Korea. A freeze would mean that Iran continues under maximum US pressure, for as long as the freeze might last, and at no cost to the US.
Why then, is Trump heading down this ‘dead-end’ road that might trip him into an unwanted, and politically costly, conflict of some sort? Well, possibly because Trump has been ‘fed’ some nonsense ‘intelligence’ that Iran is on the cusp of an economic and political implosion – which is about to sweep away the Iranian Revolution into the dustbin of history. This is ‘the line’ currently being purveyed by Netanyahu and Mossad, and by others inside the US (based on the usual, suspect exile stories). Trump might conclude from such assessments that war is not a risk, since the imminent collapse of Iran would make acting out any military threats redundant. He can afford, in short, just to wait out the collapse. If you detect a whiff of Iraq in the run-up to 2003 about all this (i.e. the input of Curveball and Chalabi), you would be right, in more ways than one – it is more than just the part played by embittered exiles in framing the prospect for war.
There is a conception that Bolton, as National Security Adviser, has little clout over the Pentagon. But the American Conservative, in an article entitled ‘Amassing War Powers, Bolton Rips a Page Out of Cheney’s Playbook’, points out the misconception:
“The elevation of Patrick Shanahan to the secretary of defense position will likely make National Security Adviser John Bolton the most powerful voice inside President Donald Trump’s cabinet.
“So say defense analysts who spoke to TAC this week. Former US officials also said they fear that Shanahan’s relative lack of experience may set America on a path to war, and cited a New York Times report that Shanahan had delivered to Bolton a plan to send as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East. Subsequent reports indicate that the Pentagon might be making plans to send even more … Stephen Wertheim, assistant professor of history at Columbia University, added, “when senators ‘think Shanahan’ [at confirmation hearings], they should think Bolton. Because a vacuum at the top of DoD, means that the department becomes a rubber stamp for Bolton””.
But more than this, the America Conservative ‘Cheney Playbook’ tag is right in another way: Bolton chairs at the NSC, the regular and frequent strategic dialogue meetings with Israel – intended to develop a joint action plan, versus Iran. What this means is that the Israeli intelligence assessments are being stovepiped directly to Bolton (and therefore to Trump), without passing by the US intelligence services for assessment or comment on the credibility of the intelligence presented (shades of Cheney confronting the analysts down at Langley). And Bolton too, will represent Trump at the ‘security summit’ to be held later this month in Jerusalem with Russia and Israel. Yes, Bolton truly has all the reins in his hands: He is ‘Mr Iran’.
Daniel Larison writes: “The Trump administration is still chasing after the fantasy that Russia will help push Iranian forces out of Syria”:
“A senior White House official said in a conference call with reporters that the US plans to stress to Russia during its trilateral national security advisers summit in Jerusalem this month that Iranian forces and their proxies have to leave Syria.
“The administration has been seeking Russian cooperation on this front for the last year. It has never made sense. The Russian government has no reason to agree to the US plan. Why would Russia do the US the favor of supporting the administration’s anti-Iranian policy? The administration’s problem is that they wrongly believe that other governments share their opinion of Iran’s role in the region. Reuters quotes an administration official saying this:
“But beyond discussions to prevent any unintended military escalation, the US official said the goal of the talks would be “to see how we can potentially work together to get rid of the primary irritant in the Middle East, which is the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
“The US and Israel may consider Iran to be “the primary irritant,” but Russia doesn’t see things this way and it isn’t going to respond favorably to efforts to enlist them in an anti-Iranian pressure campaign. Russia wants to cultivate good relations with Israel, so they are participating in the meeting, but that participation shouldn’t be taken as a sign that they are interested in giving Bolton what he wants. All in all, this meeting in Jerusalem will make for a curious photo op, but it isn’t going to produce anything significant.”
Yes. Another misconception, it seems. But one that is hugely convenient for Bolton – for, if the US fails to achieve a commitment on the part of Russia to ensure the expulsion of Iran from Syria, then we are likely to witness escalation by Israel – backed by the US – against Iranian elements in Syria. Already, we have seen missiles landing in occupied Golan in recent days – as a signal that Syria and Iran may be ready to activate the Golan as a new front in the conflict with Israel.
The Bolton squeeze with regard to Iran is in high gear. The aim, Col Pat Lang suggests, “is probably to pressure Iran until they lash out somewhere against US forces or interests”.
It may be, (or it may not be), that Trump is bluffing in his menaces to Iran. Trump may indeed be opposed to war – though, on the other hand, he has never missed an opportunity, over the years, to castigate and demonise Iran, whilst lauding Saudi Arabia in extravagant language. Bluffs do get called. And, does Trump really understand how improbable it is that Iran now will ‘lift the phone to call him’? Is he at all familiar with the complexities of more than a decade of nuclear negotiations with Iran?
No? Well Bolton and Netanyahu surely are – as they lead a willing President down the narrowing path, to the point where he has no alternative but either a humiliating retreat back down that path, or to double-down and go further.
So where is this taking us? Well, firstly, there will be Iranian push-back (to Bolton’s delight). For the present, Iran remains within the JCPOA; but it is limiting and curtailing its partial commitments (which is permitted, under the terms of the accord – when a signatory to the accord is not observing the deal). Iran has indeed started to accelerate enrichment, but has not breached the limits on its holding of uranium or heavy water – though it likely soon will. After 60 days, if the EU is not moving towards normalizing of its economic relations with Iran, we may see Iran increase the level of enrichment above 3.67%. And secondly, Iran has clearly signaled that US Gulf Allies who have urged, and supported the US attrition against Iran, will begin to experience pain, too. Iran has warned that any new ‘Gulf War’ would include the destruction of the energy infrastructure of some Gulf States. It would take twenty years for the Gulf to recover from such an event,
And whilst it is true that the US is not in a position to mount a full war on Iran, this does not mean that the US cannot escalate military pressures on Iran via Special Forces working with insurgent ethnic minorities inside the country to destabilize it, or to degrade Iranian infrastructure through missile or ‘bunker-buster’ attacks.
And when Iranian push-back starts, as the pressures escalates – and when it becomes clear that Russia will not act as America’s policeman in respect to Iran, Hizbullah or the Hash’d a-Shaibi, as Russia won’t – then the ‘war party’ will urge Trump to send Iran a painful ‘message’ of American ‘deterrence’ – and then what? Is it safe to conclude Trump will demur?
No. It is not possible to assert ‘there will be no conflict’. There is some risk. And Iran knows it.
Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) found himself in hot water recently over comments he made in defense of Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, who faces war crimes charges over his alleged conduct while serving in combat overseas. Gallagher is charged with stabbing a 15 year old ISIS member while in custody, of taking photos posing with the corpse of the teen, and with killing several civilians.
Defending Gallagher recently, Hunter put his own record up next to the SEAL to suggest that he’s an elected Congressman who has done worse things in battle than Gallagher.
That’s where Hunter’s defense earned him some perhaps unwanted attention. While participating in the first “Battle of Fallujah” in early 2007, by Hunter’s own account he and his fellow soldiers killed hundreds of innocent civilians, including women and children. They fired mortars into the city and killed at random.
In the sanitized world of US mainstream media reporting on US wars overseas, we do not hear about non-combatants being killed by Americans. How many times has there been any reporting on the birth defects that Iraqis continue to suffer in the aftermath of US attacks with horrific weapons like depleted uranium and white phosphorus?
Rep. Hunter described his philosophy when fighting in Iraq:
“You go in fast and hard, you kill people, you hit them in the face and then you get out… We’re going to hurt you and then we’re going to leave. And if you want to be nice to America, we’ll be nice to you. If you don’t want to be nice to us, we’re going to slap you again.”
This shows how much Duncan Hunter does not understand about war. When he speaks of hitting people in the face until they are nice to America, he doesn’t seem to realize that the people of Fallujah – and all of Iraq – never did a thing to the US to deserve that hit in the face. The war was launched on the basis of lies and cooked-up intelligence by many of the people who are serving in the current Administration.
And that brings us to the real war criminals. Rep. Duncan Hunter and his fellow soldiers may have killed hundreds of innocent civilians and even felt justified. Their superior officers, after all, established the rules of engagement. Above those superior officers, going up and beyond to the policymakers, the lie was sold to the American people to justify a war of choice against a country that could not have threatened us if it wanted to.
Vice President Dick Cheney knew what he was doing when he kept returning to the CIA headquarters, strong-arming analysts to make the intelligence fit the chosen policy. John Bolton and the other neocons knew what they were doing when they made claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction they knew were false. The Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans played its role in selling the lie. So did the media.
Edward Gallagher will face trial and possibly jail for his actions. Rep. Duncan Hunter may even face punishment – though perhaps only at the ballot box – for his admitted crimes. But until those at the top who continue to lie and manipulate us into war for their own gain face justice, the real criminals will continue to go free and we will continue pursuing a suicidal neocon foreign policy.
The much-acclaimed series ‘Chernobyl’ tells the story of the 1986 nuclear disaster and the authorities’ attempts to play it down. Ironically, 33 years on, it’s Western leaders who need to learn how to be honest and transparent.
It was the accident which some think led directly to the fall of communism. “Reformers in the Soviet Union, and Mikhail Gorbachev himself, used Chernobyl as an argument for more accountability and greater frankness, because the initial reaction of the Soviet authorities was anything but transparent. It became a symbol of what was wrong with the Soviet system,” says Professor Archie Brown, author of ‘The Rise and Fall of Communism’, as cited in yesterday’s Sunday Express newspaper.
Just three-and-a-half years after Chernobyl, the Berlin Wall came down, and in 1991, the USSR itself ceased to exist.
Western ideologues were quick to gloat, saying that a system which kept telling people lies and trying to cover things up was always doomed to fail, but in terms of openness and telling the truth, are we really much better than the Soviet Union of the 1980s?
Consider the way a succession of illegal wars has been sold to the public. We were told in 2003 that Iraq had ‘weapons of mass destruction’ which could be assembled and launched within 45 minutes. It was false, patently so, yet the Chilcot Report was only published 13 years later, and even now, no one has been prosecuted in relation to a war which led to the deaths of one million and the rise of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS).
In 2011, we went to war again, against Libya. Once more, our politicians were less than honest with us. We were told that we had to bomb because Colonel Gaddafi was going to massacre the inhabitants of Benghazi. Only five-and-a-half years later were we allowed to know the truth. In September 2016, a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee report held that “the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence… the Government failed to identify that the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element.”
Again, we were tricked into war. By ‘nice’ Western politicians, mark you, and not ‘lying’ Soviet ones. Once more, there’s been no accountability. Libya, a country which had the highest Human Development Index in the whole of Africa, was destroyed. It was a far worse disaster than Chernobyl, as indeed Iraq was. When will the HBO dramas on these catastrophes be screening?
It’s not just the illegal wars. There have been cover-ups of plenty of other things, too. Three years after Chernobyl, there was the Hillsborough disaster in which 96 Liverpool football fans were crushed to death. It was the worst disaster in British sporting history. To add insult to tragedy, the fans themselves were blamed. Rupert Murdoch’s Sun claimed on its front page that fans had urinated on policemen and picked the pockets of victims. It took nearly 30 years to get the record formally put right and achieve ‘Justice for the 96’ when a jury held that the fans were ‘unlawfully killed’. The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, which wants a public inquiry into the way striking miners in South Yorkshire were ‘brutalised’ by police in the so-called ‘Battle of Orgreave’ in 1984, are still waiting. In 2016, Home Secretary Amber Rudd said there would be no inquiry.
Where’s the openness and transparency here?
Likewise with the cover-ups over suspected Establishment pedophiles and other high-up wrong-doers. We learnt only this year that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had, back in the 80s, personally protected a senior Conservative MP who allegedly had a “penchant for small boys.”
We don’t know whether a leading Soviet politician who was a child-abuser would have been prosecuted. Probably not. But we do know that in Britain in the 1980s, such cover-ups definitely occurred. And who really believes that’s still not the case today?
Bergson and Popper famously divided societies into ‘open’ and ‘closed’ ones, but Western ‘openness’ is not quite as ‘open’ as we’re led to believe. It does not extend to politicians frankly acknowledging the role that Western foreign policy has played in aiding, directly or indirectly, the very same terrorists who have gone on to target Western civilians. That’s a taboo subject, even after the Manchester Arena bombings and the bomber’s link to the MI5-‘sorted’ anti-Gaddafi LIFG, and the slaughter of tourists on the beach in Tunisia by a man who reportedly trained at an IS camp in neighboring ‘liberated’ Libya.
There are many more subjects too that are so taboo I dare not even mention them here. By contrast, dishonest or fact-lite narratives, such as ‘Russiagate’, or the one that holds that the UK Labour Party, an anti-racist party, is ‘awash with anti-Semitism’, hold sway. We CAN talk about these and indeed some commentators talk about little else.
It is the greatest of ironies that at the very same time that we are being told how HBO’s Chernobyl exposes the rottenness of the ‘closed’ Soviet system, a man who does believe in openness and transparency, a free press, and government accountability, is languishing in a maximum security prison in ‘open’ London, facing a possible extradition to the US and sentences of up to 175 years in jail. Julian Assange, whose only crime is wanting to show us what was behind the curtain, is no less persecuted than the Soviet dissidents about whom we heard an awful lot in the 1980s.
It’s been said that if you feud with someone long enough you end up being like them, or at least how you liked to portray them. When we think of the old Cold War and what’s going on today, that seems to have come true.
In its lack of transparency and openness, and the way in which lying has become the new normal, the West is now behaving the way the Soviet Union is supposed to have operated at the time of Chernobyl.
Who, I wonder, will be the equivalent of Mikhail Gorbachev to introduce some much-needed Western Glasnost?
James Bacque discusses his devastating research into allied war crimes against a defeated Germany in post-World War Two Europe, as detailed in his most famous book, Other Losses; Eisenhower imposes starvation on surrendered German soldiers interned in death camps; official records of German POWs and refugees purged and hidden; eyewitness and survivor accounts of American brutality; the Morgenthau Plan to ravage and grind into dust post-war Germany; Geneva Convention not followed; Soviet KGB archival records of refugees and POWs opened; evidence of war crimes and mass deaths of German prisoners still being suppressed by the governments of Germany, the US, France, Britain and Canada; the real life consequences of a reinterpretation of history.
Terry Halbardier, who as a 23-year old seaman in 1967 thwarted Israeli attempts to sink the USS Liberty, died on Aug. 11 in Visalia, California. It took the U.S. government 42 years after the attack to recognize Halbardier’s heroism by awarding him the Silver Star, a delay explained by Washington’s determination to downplay Israeli responsibility for the 34 Americans killed and the 174 wounded.
On June 8, 1967, during the Six-Day War, the Israeli military attacked the USS Liberty, an American spy ship which had been monitoring Israeli transmissions about the conflict. Intercepted Israeli communications indicated that the goal was to sink the Liberty and leave no survivors.
USS Liberty receives assistance from units of the Sixth Fleet, after she was attacked and seriously damaged by Israeli forces off the Sinai Peninsula on June 8, 1967. (US Navy photo)
Warplanes and torpedo boats had already killed 34 and wounded 174, when Halbardier slid over the Liberty’s napalm-glazed deck to jury-rig an antenna and get an SOS off to the Sixth Fleet. The Israelis intercepted the SOS and broke off the attack immediately. In effect, Halbardier prevented the massacre of all 294 onboard. Still, the infamy of the attack on the Liberty was two-fold.
First, the Liberty, a virtually defenseless intelligence collection platform prominently flying an American flag in international waters, came under deliberate attack by Israeli aircraft and three 60-ton Israeli torpedo boats off the coast of the Sinai on a cloudless June afternoon during the six-day Israeli-Arab war. Second, President Lyndon Johnson called back carrier aircraft dispatched to defend the Liberty lest Israel be embarrassed, the start of an unconscionable cover-up, including top Navy brass, that persists to this day.
Given all they have been through, the Liberty survivors and other veterans who joined Halbardier to celebrate his belated receipt of the Silver Star on May 27, 2009 can be forgiven for having doubted that the day of the hero’s recognition would ever come.
In the award ceremony at the Visalia (California) office of Rep. Devin Nunes, the Republican congressman pinned the Silver Star next to the Purple Heart that Halbardier found in his home mailbox three years ago. Nunes said, “The government has kept this quiet I think for too long, and I felt as my constituent he [Halbardier] needed to get recognized for the services he made to his country.”
Terry Halbardier got off an SOS message saving the Liberty from Israeli destruction
Nunes got that right. Despite the many indignities the Liberty crew has been subjected to, the mood in Visalia was pronouncedly a joyous one of Better (42 years) Late Than Never. And, it did take some time for the moment to sink in: Wow, a gutsy congressman not afraid to let the truth hang out on this delicate issue.
Treatment Accorded the Skipper
I was present that day and I could not get out of my head the contrast between this simple, uncomplicated event and the earlier rigmarole that senior Navy officers went through to pin a richly deserved Medal of Honor on another hero of that day, the Liberty’s skipper, Captain William McGonagle.
Although badly wounded by Israeli fire on June 8, 1967, McGonagle was able to keep the bombed, torpedoed, napalmed Liberty afloat and limping toward Malta, where what was left of the bodies of the 34 crewmen killed and the 174 wounded could be attended to. Do the math: yes, killed and wounded amounted to more than two-thirds of the Liberty crew of 294.
I remembered what a naval officer involved in McGonagle’s award ceremony told one of the Liberty crew: “The government is pretty jumpy about Israelthe State Department even asked the Israeli ambassador if his government had any objections to McGonagle getting the medal.”
When McGonagle received his award, the White House (the normal venue for a Medal of Honor award) was all booked up, it seems, and President Lyndon Johnson (who would have been the usual presenter) was unavailable.
So it fell to the Secretary of the Navy to sneak off to the Washington Navy Yard on the banks of the acrid Anacostia River, where he presented McGonagle with the Medal of Honor and a citation that described the attack but not the identity of the attackers.
Please don’t misunderstand. The Liberty crew is not big on ceremony. They are VERY-not-big on politicians who wink when Navy comrades are killed and wounded at sea. The Liberty survivors are big on getting the truth out about what actually happened that otherwise beautiful day in June 1967.
The award of the Silver Star to Terry Halbardier marked a significant step in the direction of truth telling. Halbardier said he accepted his Silver Star on behalf of the entire 294-man crew. He and fellow survivor Don Pageler expressed particular satisfaction at the wording of the citation, which stated explicitly — with none of the usual fudging — the identity of the attackers: “The USS Liberty was attacked by Israeli aircraft and motor torpedo boats in the East Mediterranean Sea.”
In the past, official citations, like Captain McGonagle’s, had avoided mentioning Israel by name when alluding to the attack. I think former U.S. Ambassador Edward Peck put it best in condemning this kind of approach as “obsequious, unctuous subservience to the peripheral interests of a foreign nation at the cost of the lives and morale of our own service members and their families.” Strong words for a diplomat. But right on.
Just a Guy From Texas
Were it not for Halbardier’s bravery, ingenuity, and technical expertise, the USS Liberty would surely have sunk, taking down much if not all of the crew.
You see, the first thing the Israeli aircraft bombed and strafed were the Liberty’s communications antennae and other equipment. They succeeded in destroying all the antennae that were functional. One antenna on the port side, though, had been out of commission and had escaped damage.
In receiving the Silver Star, Halbardier made light of his heroism, claiming that he was just a guy from Texas who could do a whole lot with simple stuff like baling wire. (In the infantry we called this kind of thing a “field expedient.”)
In any case, with his can-do attitude and his technical training, he figured he might be able to get that particular antenna working again. But first he would have to repair a cable that had been destroyed on deck and then connect the antenna to a transmitter.
The deck was still being strafed, but Halbardier grabbed a reel of cable, ran out onto the deck, and attached new cable to the antenna so a radioman could get an SOS out to the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean.
Voila. “Mayday” went out; almost immediately the Israeli aircraft and torpedo ships broke off the attack and went back to base; the Israeli government sent a quick apology to Washington for its unfortunate “mistake;” and President Johnson issued orders to everyone to make believe the Israelis were telling the truth, or at least to remain silent.
To their discredit, top Navy brass went along, and the Liberty survivors were threatened with court martial and prison if they so much as mentioned to their wives what had actually happened. They were enjoined as well from discussing it with one another.
The shot-up Liberty
As Liberty crewman Don Pageler put it, “We all headed out after that, and we didn’t talk to each other.” The circumstances were ready-made for serious Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
The stories shared by Liberty survivors after the award ceremony, including descriptions of the macabre but necessary effort to reassemble torpedoed body parts, and the plague of survivor’s guilt, were as heart-rending as any I have heard. They are stories that should be shared more widely for those muzzled far too long.
These were the deep emotional scars to supplement the ones all over Halbardier’s body, some of which he uncovered when asked by the local press gathered there in Visalia. Typically, Halbardier made light of the shrapnel that had to be plucked out of his flesh, emphasizing that he was lucky compared to some of the other crew.
No Mistake
Despite Israeli protestations, the accumulated evidence, including intercepted voice communications, is such that no serious observer believes Israel’s “Oops” excuse of a terrible mistake. The following exchanges are excerpts of testimony from U.S. military and diplomatic officials given to Alison Weir, founder of “If Americans Knew” and author of American Media Miss the Boat:
Israeli pilot to ground control: “This is an American ship. Do you still want us to attack?”
Ground control: “Yes, follow orders.”
“But sir, it’s an American ship, I can see the flag!”
Ground control: “Never mind; hit it!”
Haviland Smith, a CIA officer stationed in Beirut during the Six-Day War, says he was told that the transcripts were “deep-sixed,” because the U.S. government did not want to embarrass Israel.
Equally telling is the fact that the National Security Agency (NSA) destroyed voice tapes seen by many intelligence analysts, showing that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing. I asked a former CIA colleague, who was also an analyst at that time, what he remembered of those circumstances. Here is his e-mail reply:
“The chief of the analysts studying the Arab-Israeli region at the time told me about the intercepted messages and said very flatly and firmly that the pilots reported seeing the American flag and repeated their requests of confirmation of the attack order. Whole platoons of Americans saw those intercepts. If NSA now says they do not exist, then someone ordered them destroyed.”
One need hardly add at this point that the destruction of evidence without investigation is an open invitation to repetition in the future. Think the more recent torture-interrogation videotapes.
As for the legal side: the late Captain Ward Boston, unburdened himself on his accomplice role as the Navy lawyer appointed as senior counsel to Adm. Isaac Kidd, who led a one-week (!) investigation and then followed orders to pronounce the attack on the Liberty a case of “mistaken identity.” Boston signed a formal declaration on Jan. 8, 2004, in which he said he was “outraged at the efforts of the apologists for Israel in this country to claim that this attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity.’” Boston continued:
“The evidence was clear. Both Adm. Kidd and I believed with certainty that this attack was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew Not only did the Israelis attack the ship with napalm, gunfire, and missiles, Israeli torpedo boats machine-gunned three lifeboats that had been launched in an attempt by the crew to save the most seriously wounded, a war crime
“I know from personal conversations I had with Adm. Kidd that President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity’ despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”
W. Patrick Lang, Col., USA (ret.), who was the Defense Intelligence Agency’s top analyst for the Middle East for eight years, recounted the Israeli air attacks as follows: “The flight leader spoke to his base to report that he had the ship in view, that it was the same ship he had been briefed on, and that it was clearly marked with the U.S. flag
“The flight commander was reluctant. That was very clear. He didn’t want to do this. He asked them a couple of times, ‘Do you really want me to do this?’ I’ve remembered it ever since. It was very striking. I’ve been harboring this memory for all these years.”
Lang, of course, is not alone. So too Terry Halbardier, who told those assembled at his Silver Medal award ceremony, “I think about it [the attack on the Liberty] every day.”
Why Sink the Ship?
What we know for sure is, as the independent commission headed by former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Thomas Moorer put it, the attack “was a deliberate attempt to destroy an American ship and kill her entire crew.”
What we do not know for sure is why the Israelis wanted that done. Has no one dared ask the Israelis? One view is that the Israelis did not want the United States to find out they were massing troops to seize the Golan Heights from Syria and wanted to deprive the U.S. of the opportunity to argue against such a move.
USS Liberty after the attack
James Bamford offers an alternative view in his excellent book, Body of Secrets. Bamford adduces evidence, including reporting from an Israeli journalist eyewitness and an Israeli military historian, of wholesale killing of Egyptian prisoners of war at the coastal town of El Arish in the Sinai.
The Liberty was patrolling directly opposite El Arish in international waters but within easy range to pick up intelligence on what was going on there. And the Israelis were well aware of that. But the important thing here is not to confuse what we know (the deliberate nature of the Israeli attack) with the ultimate purpose behind it, which remains open to speculation.
Also worth noting is the conventional wisdom prevalent in our Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) that Egypt forced Israel into war in June 1967. An excellent, authoritative source has debunked that, none other than former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin! In an unguarded moment in 1982, when he was prime minister, he admitted publicly:
“In June 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that [Egyptian President] Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”
Thus, the Israeli attack admittedly amounted to starting a war of aggression, and the occupied West Bank territories and the Golan Heights gained by the Israelis in the 1967 war remain occupied to this day. The post World War II tribunal at Nuremberg distinguished a “war of aggression” from other war crimes, terming it the “supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes only in that it contains the accumulated evil of the whole.”
Perhaps the attempt to sink the Liberty and finish off all survivors qualifies as one of those accumulated evils. Terry Halbardier summed it up this way when he was awarded his Silver Star: “There’s lots of theories but let’s just say they didn’t want us listening in to what they wanted to do.”
Getting Away With Murder
In sum, on June 8, 1967, the Israeli government learned that it could get away with murder, literally, and the crime would be covered up, so strong is the influence of the Israel Lobby in our Congress, and indeed, in the White House. And those USS Liberty veterans who survived well enough to call for an independent investigation have been hit with charges of, you guessed it, anti-Semitism.
Does all this have relevance today? Of course. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu understands that there is little that Israel could do that would earn the opprobrium of the U.S. Congress or retaliation from the White House, whether it’s building illegal settlements or slaughtering civilians in Gaza. The Israelis seem convinced they remain in the catbird’s seat, largely because of the Israel Lobby’s influence with U.S. lawmakers and opinion makers.
Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, (DoD Photo by Mass Communication Specialist Chad J. McNeeley)
One of the few moments when a U.S. official has had the audacity to face Israel down came from significantly a U.S. Navy admiral. In early July 2008, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, was sent to Israel to read the riot act to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who seemed to be itching to start hostilities with Iran while President George W. Bush was in office.
We learned from the Israeli press that Mullen, fearing some form of Israeli provocation, went so far as to warn the Israelis not to even think about another incident like the attack on the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967, that the Israelis should disabuse themselves of the notion that U.S. military support would be knee-jerk automatic if Israel somehow provoked open hostilities with Iran.
This is the only occasion I am aware of in which a U.S. official of such seniority braced Israel about the Liberty incident. A gutsy move, especially with Vice President Dick Cheney and national security aide Elliott Abrams then in the White House, two hawks who might well bless, or even encourage, an Israeli provocation that would make it very difficult for Washington to avoid springing to the defense of its “ally.”
The Israelis know that Mullen knows that the attack on the Liberty was deliberate. Mullen could have raised no more neuralgic an issue to take a shot across an Israeli bow than to cite the attack on the Liberty. The Jerusalem Post reported that Mullen cautioned that a Liberty-type incident must be avoided in any future military actions in the Middle East.
Perhaps Mullen had learned something from the heroism of Terry Halbardier
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. After serving as an Army infantry/intelligence officer, he spent a 27-year career as a CIA analyst. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Philip Giraldi is a recognized authority on international security and counterterrorism issues. He is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served eighteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was Chief of Base in Barcelona from 1989 to 1992 designated as the Agency’s senior officer for Olympic Games support. Since 1992 he consulted for a number of Fortune 500 corporate clients.
He was awarded an MA and PhD from the University of London in European History and holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honors from the University of Chicago. He speaks Spanish, Italian, German, and Turkish.
Dr. Giraldi is the Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a group that advocates for more even handed policies by the U.S. government in the Middle East.
He gave this speech at the National Summit to Reassess the U.S.-Israel “Special Relationship” on March 7, 2014 at the National Press Club in Washington DC.
All states in the US mandate vaccines for school children, effectively taking away the right to education for families refusing vaccination. Different states allow one to three exemptions from mandatory vaccination on philosophical, religious or medical grounds. In 2015 the California legislature passed a bill (SB277) removing the philosophical or personal belief exemption. The religious exemption had already been removed. This left only the medical exemption, which is difficult to obtain. because doctors fear losing their medical licenses if they grant the exemption. The Maine state legislature recently followed suit, removing all religious or philosophical vaccine exemptions. Mandatory vaccination depends on the assumption that all recommended vaccines are safe for all children. As state laws are going in the direction of more and more coercion, this is a good time to ask if that assumption is valid.
Dr. Plotkin
In October 2017 the divorced parents of a two year old child brought a case before the Circuit Court of Oakland County Michigan to settle a disagreement as to whether their daughter should have to be vaccinated. The mother was against; the father was for. Dr. Stanley Plotkin, an MD with experience in vaccine research going back to the ’60s, stepped forward as an expert in favor of vaccination. He was questioned by counsel representing the plaintiff (the child’s mother) in a deposition which ended up doing more harm than good not only to the father’s case but to the whole idea that ethics are of any real importance to researchers and industry promoting vaccines.
That he had used orphans to study an experimental vaccine.
That he had used mentally retarded children to study a rubella vaccine.
That he had written a letter to the editor of “Ethics On Human Experimentation” in which he says “the question is whether we are to have experiments performed on fully functioning adults and on children who are potentially contributors to society or to perform initial studies on children and adults who are human in form but not in social potential.”
That he had used babies of mothers in prison to study an experimental vaccine.
That he had used individuals under colonial rule in the Belgian Congo in an experiment involving almost a million people to study an experimental vaccine.
Elsewhere in the deposition, Plotkin said that he had helped create a vaccine advocacy group called Voices For Vaccines. He claimed the group was independent, but admitted on questioning that it was funded by the vaccine industry. Plotkin is a good example of a doctor so immersed in the prevailing dogma about vaccines that he can’t imagine other perspectives, or his own conflicts of interest. Not to mention the criminality of experimenting on people unable to assert their right to informed consent.
Paul Offit
Paul Offit
One of Dr. Plotkin’s students was Dr. Paul Offit, a tireless vaccine industry shill and developer of a rotavirus vaccine which made him a fortune. In October 2018 Robert Kennedy Jr. wrote a letter to Paul Offit to challenge the claim in Offit’s books that medical experts are the only authorities on vaccine safety. Kennedy writes:
“Your book title and press releases suggest that, in contrast to “celebrities, politicians and activists,” you consider yourself to be eminently qualified to furnish health information in a truthful and unbiased manner. I would like to take this opportunity to inquire as to whether your own substantial financial entanglements with the $52 billion vaccine industry—conflicts you deliberately conceal from your allies in the mainstream media—should disqualify you from representing yourself as a neutral and trustworthy voice in this contentious debate. You have accepted tens of millions of dollars from vaccine companies for your work as the primary spokesman for the industry. You occupy a chair at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia endowed with a $1.5 million grant from Merck, and you were a co-developer, with Merck, of the RotaTeq rotavirus vaccine.
Indeed, your financial conflicts of interest with the vaccine industry since the early 2000s, during your tenure on a key Centers for Disease Control vaccine panel, were the subject of two federal investigations. While sitting on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), you voted to add a rotavirus vaccine to the CDC childhood vaccine schedule. You neglected to recuse yourself despite the fact that you had your own rotavirus vaccine patent in development. Six years later, thanks to the inclusion of rotavirus on the CDC schedule, you and your business partners were able to sell your patent for $186 million. This self-dealing transaction in which you effectively “voted yourself rich” was condemned by a 2003 congressional investigation and a 2008 investigation by the HHS Inspector General. Congressman Dan Burton described the “paradox” of the CDC “routinely allow[ing] scientists with blatant conflicts of interest to serve on influential advisory committees that make recommendations on new vaccines, as well as policy matters,” even though “these same scientists have financial ties, academic affiliations, and other vested interests in the products and companies for which they are supposed to be providing unbiased oversight.” When ACIP added your vaccine (RotaTeq) to the childhood vaccine schedule in 2006, policy-makers of the time acknowledged that the vaccine was “one of the most expensive” and potentially lucrative ever added to the schedule. Critics of the decision wondered why we were mandating a ruinously expensive and shoddily tested vaccine for tens of millions of children to combat mild illness that accounts for only a few dozen deaths in the United States annually.
You routinely talk about RotaTeq’s achievements, but you have never publicly commented on the elevated rate of agonizingly painful and sometimes deadly intussusception observed in recipients of RotaTeq nor on the vaccine’s contamination with DNA fragments from two porcine circoviruses known to cause serious wasting disease in pigs. Scientists and public health experts suggest that your vaccine may be infecting millions of children each year with these viruses. Since the vaccine was never properly safety tested against inert placebos, we may never know the truth.”
The Spanish Flu
In a November 2018 article, Kevin Barry, former federal attorney and president of First Freedoms, looks back at the beginning of the pharmaceutical industry in the early 20th century as it was getting its start under the auspices of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City. US soldiers about to be sent into World War I in Europe provided medical researchers an opportunity for experimentation (in this case on fully functioning adults).
Between 1918 – 19, Barry reports, more soldiers died of a mysterious disease called “the Spanish flu” than from bullets. The Spanish flu, he says, killed an estimated 50-100 million people worldwide. But it was neither Spanish, nor a flu. According to Barry, it appears to have originated at a military base in Fort Riley, Kansas in 1918 where doctors were experimenting with a Rockefeller Institute bacterial meningitis vaccine, using US soldiers. The soldiers who survived were deployed to Europe where they spread a deadly bacterial pneumonia among themselves while the Rockefeller Institute also sent the “vaccine” directly to several countries in Europe, in the end causing the death of millions of people
Gulf War Syndrome
In January1991 The Unites States attacked Iraq in what was called the Persian Gulf War.
An estimated 43,000 US veterans of the war came down with a variety of strange and illnesses attributable to mandatory experimental vaccines and drugs administered without informed consent.
Cornelius Rhoads
In November 1931 a Harvard trained MD named Cornelius Rhoads conducted a cancer experiment in Puerto Rico under the auspices of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations. Rhoads said in a letter:
“Porto Ricans are the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever to inhabit this sphere… They are even lower than the Italians. What the island needs is not public health work, but a tidal wave or something to totally exterminate the entire population… I have done my best to further the process of their extermination by killing off eight and transplanting cancer into several more. All physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of the unfortunate subjects.”
Rhoads should have been tried for murder, but instead found fame and fortune. He went on the establish biological warfare facilities for the US Army, made the cover of TIME magazine in 1949, and became the director of the famous Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
Bill Gates
Art by David Dees
In 1999 Bill Gates launched The Global Alliance for Vaccination and Immunization. Dr. David Ayoub points out that The Global Alliance had membership and goals identical to those set out in US National Security Study Memorandum 200 presented to President Nixon by Rockefeller protegé Henry Kissinger in 1974. Memorandum 200 had an explicit goal of coercive population control in less developed countries.
In 2005 the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded tetanus vaccinations for distribution by UNICEF in Africa. The vaccines were administered only to young women of child-bearing age. In 2014, doctors and Catholic clergy in Kenya had the vaccine independently tested and found that the vaccine contained an antigen called “human gonadotropin” which renders women infertile.
Bill Gates appeared in a 2010 TED talk in which he said: “The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps ten or fifteen percent.”
If vaccines and reproductive health services are meant to save lives, how would they be useful in reducing a population?
To all appearances, the Gates and Rockefeller foundations are working together to promote population control under the guise of vaccine philanthropy.
The Vioxx Scandal
Vioxx was not a vaccine but its marketing reveals a great deal about the ethics of Merck Pharmaceutical, a major player in the vaccine industry. Vioxx was the brand name for a popular painkiller introduced by Merck in 1999. The drug was taken off the market in 2004, more than four years after a clinical trial and plenty of evidence, known to Merck, showed that it caused serious cardiovascular problems. Merck’s response was to “discredit, neutralize, and destroy” doctors critical of Vioxx. One spokesman at the FDA, which was by no means innocent in this scandal, said that the drug had caused “more than 27,000 deaths and heart attacks.” Like other pharmaceutical corporations, Merck considered the payment of damages for these deaths to be the price of doing business.
SIV and SV40
Experimental live polio vaccines, including the Salk polio vaccine, contained a virus found in monkeys which, when given to humans, may have created the worldwide HIV epidemic and untold cases of cancer in children and adults. According to the National Vaccine Information Center,
“an article [was] published in the March 1992 issue of The Lancet in which attorney Walter Kyle provided evidence that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) may have been created after simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) entered the human population when African green monkey kidney tissues infected with SIV were used to produce polio vaccines. The Kyle article pointed out that scientists at the Food and Drug Administration and within industry suspected as early as the 1950’s and knew, by the mid-1970’s, that polio vaccine had been contaminated with simian viruses and that at least one of these monkey viruses – SV-40 – was later found to cause leukemia and cancerous tumors in lab animals.”
According to an archived fact sheet put out by the Centers for Disease Control, “more than 98 million American received one or more doses of polio vaccine from 1955 to 1963 when a proportion of vaccine was contaminated with SV40; it has been estimated that 10-30 million Americans could have received an SV40 contaminated dose of vaccine.”
Thimerosal
Thimerosal was a mercury-containing component of a several vaccines — the MMR (for measles, mumps, and rubella), DTaP (for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis), and flu shots. According to Shane Ellison, “The People’s Chemist“,
“The last entity to fund a thimerosal study in the United States was Eli Lilly, back in 1929. They’re not even a health agency; they’re a pharmaceutical drug company. That hardly offers proof of safety and efficacy. And, their test churned out horrific results, showing that 100% of the kids jabbed with trace amounts of Merthiolate — the trade name for thimerosal — died from meningitis. How could that possibly be considered safe? Meanwhile, the Pharma-funded authors (using ghostwriting) still concluded that there was no causal association between mercury in vaccines and harm.(4) Future court documents revealed, “Upon closer inspection, however, it is apparent that Lilly Scientists, deliberately withheld facts and, in doing so manipulated and distorted their conclusions, leading to corruption of published scientific literature concerning thimerosal.”
Thimerosal was supposedly taken out of vaccines around 2003 but it still appears in flu shots given to children and adults. Cases of autism in children have been linked to thimerosal. Dr. David Ayoub gave a very informative talk on this on a 2005 lecture linked here.
200 ppb mercury = level in liquid the EPA classifies as hazardous waste.
25,000 ppb mercury = Concentration of mercury in the Hepatitis B vaccine, administered at birth in the U.S., from 1990-2001.
50,000 ppb Mercury = Concentration of mercury in multi-dose DTaP and Haemophilus B vaccine vials, administered 4 times each in the 1990’s to children at 2, 4, 6, 12 and 18 months of age.
50,000 ppb Mercury = Current “preservative” level mercury in multi-dose flu (94% of supply), meningococcal and tetanus (7 and older) vaccines. This can be confirmed by simply analyzing the multi- dose vials.
Conclusion
At best, the history of vaccines is an example of gross human ignorance acting through the field of medical science. This ignorance comes from a lack of humility in our interaction with nature; the belief that science has all the answers; the belief that man can act as God.
At worst, vaccines were used knowingly for the purposes of eugenics. This is another kind of hubris — the usurpation of power by the few over the many, by an elite which believes it is in a position to best guide humanity and which is arrogant enough to believe it can engineer the whole world according to its own interests.
It is also clear that for the sake of money and profit, the pharmaceutical industry has knowingly caused disease and death, especially among poor and disadvantaged people in the world. And they have tried to cover it up. It is hard to accept the adage that “vaccines save lives” when we have so many examples of vaccines actually destroying lives.
Does the state have the right to inject anything into the bodies of children against the wishes of the child’s parents? According to the UN’s Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, medical intervention must be accompanied by the “free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information.” What we are seeing today is an all-out war being waged by billion dollar pharmaceutical giants to bring more and more vaccines into a recommended schedule, and to make that schedule mandatory, while at the same time controlling the information parents need to protect their children. After so may lies and coverups, parents and doctors have very little reason to trust anything the pharmaceutical industry tells them.
US data beginning in 1985, shared by Bjorn Lomborg. Rising blue line: percentage of deaths attributable to the cold. Orange line: percentage attributable to heat.
In many parts of the world, we’ve just endured an extra snowy winter followed by a cool, delayed spring. But wait for it. When hotter weather arrives it will take no time at all for media outlets to start ‘educating’ us about heat waves and dangerous climate change.
In anticipation of those ‘news’ stories, here’s an inoculation: Cold weather kills far more people than does hot weather. If we truly care about weather-related suffering and sorrow, heat waves should be near the bottom of our priority list.
On his Facebook page, Bjorn Lomborg is calling our attention to a research paper published last year in Environment International. It contains marvelous news. In 7 out of 10 countries studied, heat-related deaths have decreased since 1985.
The researchers conclude that improved health care and infrastructure (aka increased access to air conditioning), have made us less likely to die from the heat. Normal, everyday upgrades are outpacing heat-related risks. As living standards improve, higher temperatures become less life threatening.
But the news isn’t so rosy on the other side of the ledger, where most deaths connected to extreme temperatures actually occur. Depending on the country and the time frame under discussion, the ratio of cold deaths to heat deaths varies. Since Table 3 of this study includes data for all 10 countries for the years 2000-2004, the numbers below are pulled from that column.
During this five-year period no deaths in Ireland were linked to heat, but 9.34% of all deaths were attributed to cold temperatures. (Compared to the 1980s, cold-related deaths in Ireland have fallen dramatically.)
The big picture is that for every person who dies during a heat wave, many more quietly perish from the cold at other times of the year. Here’s the ratio of cold deaths to heat deaths in the locales examined by this study:
Australia: 11:1
Brazil: 6:1
Canada: 13:1
Ireland: cold caused 9.34% of all deaths, heat caused 0%
Japan: 27:1
South Korea: 37:1
Spain: 4:1
Switzerland: 1.5: 1
UK: 28:1
USA: 25:1
When the next heat wave hits, don’t expect journalists and weather broadcasters to provide you with all the relevant facts. In their zeal to hype global warming, they will systematically misinform you. They will encourage you to believe things about weather-related deaths that are the opposite of the truth.
We live in an age in which “we the people” are at the mercy of militarized, weaponized, immunized cops who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”
As such, those who seek to exercise their First Amendment rights during encounters with the police are increasingly finding that there is no such thing as freedom of speech.
This is the painful lesson being imparted with every incident in which someone gets arrested and charged with any of the growing number of contempt charges (ranging from resisting arrest and interference to disorderly conduct, obstruction, and failure to obey a police order) that get trotted out anytime a citizen voices discontent with the government or challenges or even questions the authority of the powers-that-be.
Merely daring to question, challenge or hesitate when a cop issues an order can get you charged with resisting arrest or disorderly conduct, free speech be damned.
In fact, getting charged or arrested is now the best case scenario for encounters with police officers who are allowed to operate under the assumption that their word is law and that there is no room for any form of disagreement or even question.
The worst case scenario involves getting probed, beaten, tasered, tackled, searched, seized, stripped, manhandled, shot, or killed by police.
This mindset that anyone who wears a government uniform (soldier, police officer, prison guard) must be obeyed without question is a telltale sign of authoritarianism goose-stepping its way towards totalitarianism.
Be warned: there can be no free speech for the citizenry when the government speaks in a language of force.
What is this language of force?
Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons.Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Contempt of cop charges.
This is how the government at all levels—federal, state and local—now responds to those who choose to exercise their First Amendment right to speak freely.
In Nieves v. Bartlett, the Court ruled 6-3 to dismiss the case of Russell Bartlett, an Alaska resident who was arrested at an outdoor festival for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest after he refused to be interrogated by police and then intervened when police attempted to question other attendees about their drinking.
In yet another case, a rapper was charged with making terroristic threats after posting a song critical of police on Facebook and YouTube. In refusing to hear the case of Knox v. Pennsylvania, the Supreme Court paved the way for individuals who engage in controversial and unpopular political or artistic expression, by criticizing the police for example, to be labeled terrorists and subject to prosecution and suppression by the government.
These cases reflect a growing awareness about the state of free speech in America: it’s all a lie.
Protest laws, free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws, and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors are aimed at one thing only: discouraging dissent and reminding the populace that resistance to the tyranny of the police state is futile.
Weaponized by police, prosecutors, courts and legislatures, “contempt of cop” charges have become yet another means by which to punish those individuals who refuse to be muzzled.
This is the unfortunate price of exercising one’s freedoms today: you may have distinct, protected rights on paper, but dare to exercise those rights and you put yourself at risk for fines, arrests, injuries and even death.
In theory, of course, “we the people” have a constitutional right to talk back to the government.
The Constitution does not require Americans to be servile or even civil to government officials.
Neither does the Constitution require obedience (although it does insist on nonviolence).
Unfortunately, the brutal reality of the age in which we live is far different from the ideals set forth in the Bill of Rights: talking back—especially when the police are involved—can get you killed.
The government does not want us to remember that we have rights, let alone attempting to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully. And it definitely does not want us to engage in First Amendment activities that challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
We’re in deep trouble, folks.
Freedom no longer means what it once did.
Not only do we no longer have dominion over our bodies, our families, our property and our lives, but the government continues to chip away at what few rights we still have to speak freely and think for ourselves.
Protest laws, contempt of cop charges, and all of the other bogus violations used by cops and prosecutors to muzzle discontent and discourage anyone from challenging government authority are intended to send a strong message that in the American police state, you’re either part of the herd, marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates, or you’re a pariah, a suspect, a criminal, a troublemaker, a terrorist, a radical, a revolutionary.
Over half of the 2020 presidential candidates recorded videos of themselves for this year’s American Jewish Committee Global Forum.
The videos are posted on the AJC website and below.
All the candidates except two spoke in support of Israel, many claiming it is an important American ally. All ignored Israel’s pattern of spying on the US and stealing American technology, attacking a US Navy ship, the cost of Israel to Americans, and the role of Israel partisans in pushing the US into disastrous wars.
The only candidates who did not mention Israel were Tulsi Gabbard (D – HI) and Corey Booker (D-NJ), whose videos focused on opposition to antisemitism. (In the past, Booker has been extremely outspoken in his support for Israel.)
Bernie Sanders (D-VT) went into the greatest detail on the issue, emphasizing his support for Israel while also discussing Palestinian suffering.
Sanders spoke of his Jewish ethnicity and pointed out that as a young man he had lived in Israel for a number of months. He emphasized that he “believes absolutely and unequivocally in Israel’s right to exist in peace and security” and said, “to oppose the reactionary policies of Prime Minister Netanyahu does not make anyone anti-Israel.”
At the same time, Sanders spoke of the “Palestinian people crushed underneath a military occupation now over a half century old, creating a daily reality of pain humiliation and resentment.” [Note: Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians began 72 years ago.] He said: “I do not know how peace can be achieved in that region when in the Gaza Strip poverty is rampant – 53 percent of the people are unemployed….”
Kamala Harris pledges support for Israel
California Senator Kamala Harris and many others emphasized their strong support for Israel. In Harris’s video she mentioned both her past record of working for Israel and her plans to continue this in the future:
“As a member of both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Homeland Security Committee I am deeply involved in ensuring the American-Israeli relationship remains strong.”
Harris promised: “I will do everything in my power to ensure broad and bipartisan support for Israel’s security and right to self-defense, that is why I strongly support America’s security assistance to Israel and I am committed to strengthening the American Israeli security and defense relationship.”
The U.S. currently gives Israel over $10 million per day. A bill before the Senate, favored by Harris, proposes to give Israel a 10-year package in which it will receive a minimum of $38 billion ($7,000 per minute) – approximately $20,000 per each Israeli family of four.
This is expected to pass easily despite the fact that most Americans feel the US already gives Israel too much money.
AJC advocates for Israel, opposes BDS
Founded over 100 years ago, the AJC says it has “more than 30 offices worldwide, plus partnerships with 34 international Jewish community organizations.” The organization, headquartered in New York City, has net assets of approximately $160 million.
According to its website: “Around the world—from the hallways of the UN in New York, to the corridors of the European Union in Brussels, and to the countries of Asia—AJC advocates for Israel at the highest levels. ”
One of the AJC’s priorities is to oppose the international movement to boycott Israel over its human rights abuses against Palestinians. The AJC website says: “We spearhead anti-BDS legislation at all levels of government and rally elected officials to reject the boycott movement.”
AJC states: “We convinced the governors of all 50 states to declare their opposition to BDS. We were also a driving force behind anti-BDS legislation in California and Illinois.
“As the BDS movement has surged on campus, we have brought dozens of university presidents to Israel and trained hundreds of students as advocates for Israel… we have marshalled our allies in the Christian world to oppose such efforts.”
According to AJC, more than 2,500 people from 70+ countries attend the Global Forum. This reportedly includes hundreds of students brought from more than 40 countries. The event is at the Washington Hilton in Washington D.C. from June 2-4. The schedule is here.
It appears that the only prominent candidates that did not provide videos were Beto O’Rourke and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. Jewish Insider reports: “Inquiries to the campaigns of Beto O’Rourke and Sen. Amy Klobuchar about why they didn’t participate went unanswered.”
In the videos below, a number of candidates say they support a “two-state solution,” but do not mention, or are unaware, that this refers to a division in which Israel would get at least 80 percent of the territory, and Palestinians would be left with 20 percent, at most.
The candidates’ messages to AJC
Below are the videos. Underneath each video is an excerpt containing some of the candidate’s statements about Israel from the video.
“… Israel is a strong ally and an important friend to the United States. Good friends can disagree and a candid expression of concerns does not diminish our friendship…”
“… If I’m ever in that exalted place [president] I intend to speak out every chance I get… to speak in favor of a strong democratic Israel and a two-state solution and I hope that people will recognize the contributions of your organization to make sure both of those things happen…”
“… I want to be very clear here at the outset about my position: I will stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel as our strongest ally in the Middle East….. I also reject boycotts, disinvestment, or sanctions on Israel. In 2016 I not only signed on to the American Jewish committees governors United against BDS campaign but also signed into law legislation that mandates Colorado’s retirement program divest from firms that boycott Israel….. I will use America’s leadership to push for a resumption of direct negotiations for a just and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians. While we do not know what the exact details of such an agreement will look like, we do know that without such an agreement there will be no assurance of peace and stability for this or future generations of Israelis or Palestinians. I have called on both parties to avoid undertaking unilateral actions which threaten such a long-term agreement and to respect the fundamental human rights of Israelis and Palestinians….”
“… As a member of both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Homeland Security Committee I am deeply involved in ensuring the American-Israeli relationship remains strong….. I will do everything in my power to ensure broad and bipartisan support for Israel’s security and right to self-defense. That is why I strongly support America’s security assistance to Israel and I am committed to strengthening the American Israeli security and defense relationship…. The first resolution I sponsored as a United States Senator was to combat ‘anti Israeli bias’ at the United Nations and affirm and reaffirm that the United States seeks a just, secure and sustainable two-state solution….. the only way Israel can remain a Jewish and democratic state is two states for two peoples living side by side. Palestinians should be able to govern themselves in their own state in peace and dignity, just as Israelis deserve a secure homeland for the Jewish people. I believe that a resolution to this conflict cannot be imposed by outside parties. It must be agreed upon by the parties themselves….”
“… I’ve always worked hard to protect the u.s. Israel Alliance, to make sure it is strong. Our nations have intertwined national security issues, which is why I made sure we fund David sling, Aero, and Iron Dome and to make sure Israel always has a qualitative military edge … I’ve always appreciated AJC’s leadership in being the leading voice for our US-Israel relationship… Thank you, AJC, for the wonderful work you do…”
Tulsi did not mention Israel, instead focusing only on opposition to religious bigotry. “… AJC has contributed so much to the advancement of religious tolerance. For years you’ve been on the front lines of breaking stereotypes and harmful assumptions…. I went specifically to visit two extremely important locations: one was Chernobyl and the other was Auschwitz. It was an experience that I will never ever forget, and the world must never forget…”
“… I value our nation’s longstanding friendship and partnership with Israel. I am completely committed to the security of Israel and recognize them as one of the most important and enduring allies to the United States. I am firmly against effort to delegitimize Israel, such as BDS…”
“… it’s almost exactly a year since I had the eye-opening experience of an AJC Project Interchange visit to Israel and the West Bank with a number of my fellow mayors. It was extraordinary to see firsthand the achievements of what’s taking place in Israel….. We need to make sure that we are steadfast in our support for Israel and for the U.S.-Israel alliance, while also continuing to advance a policy direction that is going to lead to peace and security for the Israeli and Palestinian people…. the need for a two-state solution… need to make sure that the U.S.-Israel Alliance is pointing in a direction that is going to be beneficial for Israeli, Palestinian, and American well-being….”
Booker was the one other candidate who did not mention Israel. His one-minute video focused on opposition to antisemitism: “…I want to thank the American Jewish Committee for the work you are doing to combat anti-semitism, to fight for justice, for light, for love in the face of hate and darkness. We know what Hillel said: ‘If I am not for myself who will be for me…”
“… support for Israel is too important to be a political football or a partisan issue. It’s about all that unites us as a people – our shared democratic values, our spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship, our determination to overcome every obstacle and endure. You know I’ll never forget my first visit to Israel as a young senator in 1973… I had a great opportunity to meet Golda Meir… she told me Israel had a secret weapon for her survival. She said, ‘Senator, we have nowhere else to go.’ That’s why I’ve been so adamant that Israel be able to defend itself by itself, but we come to its aid…. I’m proud that an Obama-Biden administration demonstrated unprecedented support for Israel, including… signing a new record-setting 10-year security agreement with with Israel [$38 billion to Israel]… ”
“… let me start by thanking each of you for the work you do to advance the U.S.-Israel relationship….. Israel is a stalwart ally…. it is essential to maintain strong, bipartisan support for our ally….. We must maintain a robust MoU on security assistance to ensure Israel has the tools she needs to prepare for and defend against threats, and our long-standing bond must continue to be bipartisan…”
Sander’s speech was the longest video and the only one to mention Palestinian suffering.”…. [I believe] absolutely and unequivocally in Israel’s right to exist in peace and security…. as a young man lived in Israel for a number of months…to oppose the reactionary policies of Prime Minister Netanyahu does not make anyone anti-Israel.”…..I see a Palestinian people crushed underneath a military occupation now over a half century old, creating a daily reality of pain humiliation and resentment… I do not know how peace can be achieved in that region when in the Gaza Strip poverty is rampant – 53 percent of the people are unemployed… 99 percent of the residents cannot leave that area…. the parameters of a solution are well known. They are based in international law. They are based in multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions…… two states based on the 1967 lines with Jerusalem as the capital of both states……” [Note: Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians began 72 years ago.]
“… We need to recognize…. the very special us-israel relationship and how important it’s been to global security – how important it’s been to both countries. And we need to continue to support that relationship in a variety of different ways – culturally, spiritually, militarily, through soft power and all the rest. It’s a special relationship and Israel is a special country…”
On April 22, 1991, I was only 18 years old; I was out with some of my comrades planning to conduct a march and rally in the streets of our town, Beit Sahour, against the Israeli occupation of our land. This march was one of many peaceful protests held as part of what had become known as the ‘first Intifada’ (popular uprising), which had begun in 1987.
That particular day seemed somehow strange to me, and different from previous marches – usually the Israeli army filled the streets of our town during protests, occupying every corner, but on this day the army remained in their camp, and did not show any presence.
Something felt wrong. Deep inside of me I felt that there was something that did not feel right. Where was the army? What I did not realize was that the army was in fact already present, but in a different shape and form.
On that particular day, it was “the death squads” (as they were known to us), known in Israel as the Dovadim, the Israeli special forces, who were policing and patrolling our demonstration. These are forces which are specially trained for assassinations and are well known for their brutality and their ‘shoot to kill’ orders.
Apparently, after the Israeli prisons were filled with Palestinians, and after the Israeli policies of ‘bone breaking’ and long imprisonment failed to stop the uprising, the army decided on a new policy, a policy of ‘assassinating’ the youth, or at least severely injuring and disabling them.
During the first Intifada, an Israeli high official was quoted as saying that the army should not kill the Palestinian youth, because a youth killed by the army would then be honored as a martyr and thousands would follow their lead. He said that it is better to paralyze and disable the youth, knowing the way society looks down on disabled people.
This official decided that the army, especially the well trained ‘death squads’ should ‘give their utmost effort’ to paralyze the youth of the Intifada.
As for me, on that fateful April morning in 1991, I discovered at one point during the demonstration that I was surrounded by a group of masked men who pretended they were also Palestinian protesters. They tried to talk to me in Arabic and ask me about “the location of the soldiers” in an attempt to fool me, but the man who spoke to me didn’t pronounce the Arabic words correctly. It was at that moment I realized that I was actually surrounded by a death squad.
When the man noticed that I had realized their true identify he pulled a small automatic gun from under his shirt, and I ran away knowing that even if I surrendered to him then, I would have been immediately assassinated, as had happened to so many Palestinian martyrs before me.
The man ran after me, along with the other undercover death squad members, until I came to an area were he was standing above me on a hill, just five meters away from me. When he shouted at me again, I began to turn, and I could see his eyes, or at least, what was visible of them from under his mask. It was at that moment that he started to shoot.
After five or six rounds penetrated my chest and back, I fell to the ground, motionless, soaked with my own blood. I could not feel anything, I could not see clearly, and I could not hear anything.
I fell down face first, injuring my face and breaking my teeth on the ground. Then the man approached me and kicked me in my chest, breaking four ribs, in order to flip me over onto my back.
The last thing I heard before I passed out was that man who shot me saying, “After all that, and you’re still alive!?”
Those are words I can never forget, for they revealed to me at that moment the true identity of the Israeli army, the army of criminals and murderers.
In spite of the fact that the Israeli military ambulance was already present in my town when I was shot, apparently they believed that if the death squad was in town, that meant that death was there too, and they didn’t show up until 30 minutes after I was shot.
When the Israeli ambulance crew finally arrived (no Palestinian ambulance was allowed in to take me), the medics told the soldiers that they should impose curfew because “I was dead”. They thought there was no way I could survive such serious wounds – they were sure I would be dead within hours. During the first Intifada the army would impose a curfew every time they killed someone, thus punishing all the Palestinians in the area for the army’s own misdeed.
Military medics tried to give me first aid there on the ground, I was bleeding so much it was flooding the area were I fell.
After the ‘first aid’ they gave me, they drove the ambulance to a military base in Bethlehem – as my body was fighting to stay alive, they went through their procedures, handing over my identity card to the military, filling out forms and filing their report before they even brought me to the hospital. I was driven out of Bethlehem (where there are two hospitals), and all the way to an Israeli hospital in Jerusalem, where it would be difficult or even impossible for my family to come see me due to the Israeli-imposed closure and checkpoints.
Meanwhile, a military commander in Bethlehem phoned my father at home, and told him that I was mildly injured in my face, leaving out the five bullets which were lodged in my lung and spine – apparently these bullets did not count as injuries.
When they finally transferred me to the Israeli hospital I was operated on for the entire night. The surgeon who operated on me decided that it was easier to cut off one third of my lung and throw it away with the bullets than to take the care needed to extract the bullets from the lung (a move which led a Palestinian reporter to editorialize that my ‘surgeon had been a butcher in his past profession’ in an article he wrote about my injury).
One of the bullets penetrated my spine – it went through my chest and lodged in my spine, causing paralysis. That fateful bullet has led to me being paralyzed from the waist down, for life.
In the morning, one of the doctors told my mother, “You have a new born baby for a son” – that was me, paralyzed, unconscious and half dead.
I woke up for a few minutes three days after my injury. I did not know anything, did not remember anything, I saw my mother next to me, I tried to speak but that was useless, she was tortured to see me there, I could feel it, and could easily notice her health had deteriorated fearing that I would die at any moment.
I tried to ask her what I was doing there, and she said, “Relax my son, you are alright”, so I did, and “relaxed” for an additional seven days in another coma.
After those seven days, I was transferred out of the intensive care unit to another branch of the hospital, even though I still felt lost and unconscious even when I was awake.
Then, the hospital administration, after failing to make the army pay for my expenses, decided that I should leave, and told my father he must pay for the expenses. When they realized he could not pay, that he was without money, they told my father, “send him to an Arabic hospital, we saved his life, and he must go”.
But I was in no condition to be moved at all. Out of intensive care, my condition deteriorated rapidly, and I had to go back to intensive care for another ten days. When they decided I was “ok” I had to leave, even though I was nowhere near the condition that would normally be acceptable for releasing a patient with such severe injuries – but after all, I was “just a Palestinian”, and didn’t seem to count for much in the Israeli hospital. In fact, the hospital even insisted that a Palestinian ambulance come to fetch me, for they could not bear the expense of using one of their own ambulances to transport me to a Palestinian hospital. So I was transferred (by a Palestinian ambulance) to Al-Makessed hospital in Jerusalem.
I was hospitalized for three months, during which time I kept losing a lot of blood, internally and externally, due to my injuries (and the part of my lung that had been completely cut out). I still couldn’t think straight, couldn’t figure out why I was there – I had only visions spinning in my head, and vague memories.
After that time, I was transferred to Abu Raya Rehabilitation center in Ramallah. By then I started to realize that my life had changed forever.
I received rehabilitation for several months. I can still remember the first time I could dress alone, it felt good to be able to dress or bathe alone after a lot of work and effort – something that, previously, I would never have thought difficult had become such a challenge in my new body.
Ten months after my injury I enrolled as a student at Bethlehem University, and I studied four years, receiving my B.A degree in English and translation.
Now, many years later, am still paralyzed of course, but my life is a clear proof of the failure of the Israeli vision that paralyzing, injuring and killing us will make us give up. I have learned that the bullet which does not kill us makes us stronger.
So I am in a wheelchair, facing difficulties in life, facing repeated infections and bad health, but I am still the man who stood up to the Israeli occupation day after day and said NO to the occupiers.
One day I saw a program on Israeli TV about the special forces, the so-called ‘death squads’ which shot me. They showed scrambled pictures of soldiers talking about the attacks they carried out in Palestinian areas. Most of them are receiving psychological help now, and therapy. At that moment I felt victorious, after all they failed to kill my will and my internal strength, while these men who shoot unarmed youth with impunity are suffering internal torment and anguish for the crimes they have committed. I sit with my full mind, in honor, knowing I have done no wrong, and even after all they have done to me, I am still here willing to liberate my country, even while sitting on my wheelchair.
Its true, I will live my life on this wheelchair, paralyzed, and that is difficult sometimes to accept. They may have been able to take my mobility away, they may have been able to take my life as a completely healthy young man, but what they could not take, and will never be able to take away is my internal strength, my will and my love of my country.
The spirit of revolution, the path of freedom requires sacrifices we need to be ready and willing to make, until we reach our legitimate goal of freedom and liberation.
After the thousands of sacrifices of the Palestinian people, the thousands of martyrs, and tens of thousands of injured and disabled, we know that there can be no solution without liberation. The revolution will resume, even if it pauses for a while.
Palestine is our dream, our heart and life, the spirit of revolution and the longing for freedom can never die. Their tanks, apaches, shells, and bullets of hatred can never win.
The Judaization of Jerusalem. It used to work under cover of darkness, at least in the mainstream media, but now it’s out in the open with official recognition of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem from the United States.
Israel implements its Judaization of Jerusalem by directly undermining the sanctity of both Muslim (the Haram al-Sharif) and Christian (the Via Dolorosa) holy sites in al-Quds and by continuing to establish irreversible and exclusive control over the holy city as an Israeli-Jewish city.
Israel implements strategies that ensure its physical domination of the city. Since it illegally annexed East Jerusalem after the 1967 war, it has devised numerous policies to create geographic integrity and demographic superiority in favor of a Jewish Jerusalem.
But this strategy did not begin in 1967. In the wake of the 1948 war, the newly-minted Israeli government quickly rejected all calls for internationalizing the city and declared that “Arab aggression” invalidated Israel’s obligation to implement the partition plan, and specifically the UN-sanctioned corpus separatum of Jerusalem — Resolution 181 recommended the creation of independent Palestinian and Jewish States and a Special International Regime for the city of Jerusalem.
Today Israel’s hasbara machine falsely declares that Palestinian “terrorism” invalidated Israel’s obligation to implement final status negotiations for an independent Palestinian state in the Oslo process, when, in fact, it has been busy leaving nothing for the negotiators to decide upon.
Ironically, on 2 Feb 1949, Ben Gurion magnanimously expressed willingness to establish corpus separatum over the Old City, primarily in order to delegitimize Jordan’s hold over the Old City while removing Israel’s own territorial gains from the equation.
Today, unsurprisingly, we hear that Israel’s exclusive control of the Old City is part of the “New Palestine” Deal. At the same time, on June 01, 2019 the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med) released a report that documented 130 violations by Israel against Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem during April.
It was the Labor government of Levi Eshkol which set the precedents for complete Israeli sovereignty over a “united” Jerusalem in 1967, with a flurry of Israeli legislative maneuvering that echoed the 1949 frenzy, immediately according Jerusalem a status different than that of the rest of the occupied territories.
Jewish colonization efforts were to emphasize security in the Jordan Valley and in “Greater Jerusalem” as well as the high ground along the western portion of the West Bank. In other words, preserve the Jewish demographic majority won as a result of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 in the Palestinian lands already grabbed.
Likud’s obsession, an obsession which today has the political upper hand, was/is on creating a Jewish demographic majority in the occupied Palestinian territories with the purpose of acquiring more Palestinian territory for the Jewish state.
Israel’s strategies re Jerusalem implemented at the municipal level (with full backing of the Israeli government) have been the most devastating for Palestinian Jerusalemites. The architect of the Israeli master plan for Jerusalem, as many know, was former mayor Teddy Kollek, who pursued plans to cut “Greater Jerusalem” from the rest of the West Bank and facilitated its annexation with the stated objective of ensuring Jewish demographic superiority as well as geographic integrity.
Here are a few of his words from 1984 regarding what he considered to be the premature establishment of the now vast Jewish colony of Ma’aleh Adumim ringing the city:
“I think it is a mistake to establish it before we have filled Jerusalem. In another five years, we will fill Jerusalem and then we will go there [Ma’aleh Adumim]. In Jerusalem, we took upon ourselves, as Jews, a very difficult urban task, in that we received distant neighborhoods, and we had to connect them …”
Note: Jerusalem was not empty and did not need to be “filled”!
The Jewish colonization of Jerusalem is in direct contravention of UN Security Council Resolution 465 Concerning the Application of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Prohibition to Establish Settlements in the Territories, including Jerusalem, 1 March 1980.
Israel has forced a Jewish majority in all parts of Jerusalem and in the process brutally suffocated the legitimate rights and aspirations of Palestinian Jerusalemites, who, nevertheless, cling to their rights and identity in the holy city as Muslims, as Christians and as Palestinians.
Since 1967, successive Israeli governments have systematically eradicated all other visions of the holy city of Jerusalem except for the vision of Jerusalem as the “eternal, undivided capital of the Jewish State.”
Without question, Israel has always viewed the final status of Jerusalem as already settled. With Trump’s “Deal of the Century”, Israel believes it will finally secure unquestionable legitimacy for its exclusive rule over the holy city.
It’s up to the international community to stop it. In its report mentioned above, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med) “urged the United Nations and its concerned bodies as well as the European Union to closely monitor the situation in Jerusalem and to condemn the harsh acts to which Palestinians are subjected and to shoulder their responsibilities towards the Palestinians under occupation.”
– Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.
Former Pfizer chief toxicologist Helmut Sterz presents a critical examination of the development, approval, and global rollout of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines—particularly those produced by Pfizer/BioNTech. The Vaccine Mafia details the failure of pharmaceutical companies, regulatory authorities, politicians, and international organizations to follow established scientific and ethical standards during the pandemic. Drawing on the author’s decades of experience in pharmaceutical toxicology, Sterz reveals the many ways the vaccines’ inadequate or omitted preclinical safety testing put the world’s population at risk.
Sterz demonstrates how “emergency” approvals allowed manufacturers to bypass long-standing international guidelines governing toxicity testing, especially with regard to reproductive and cancer risks. They also allowed governments and health authorities to ignore or conceal evidence of serious adverse effects that occurred, including myocarditis, reproductive harm, and other long-term health risks.
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
James Bacque discusses his devastating research into allied war crimes against a defeated Germany in post-World War Two Europe, as detailed in his most famous book, Other Losses; Eisenhower imposes starvation on surrendered German soldiers interned in death camps; official records of German POWs and refugees purged and hidden; eyewitness and survivor accounts of American brutality; the Morgenthau Plan to ravage and grind into dust post-war Germany; Geneva Convention not followed; Soviet KGB archival records of refugees and POWs opened; evidence of war crimes and mass deaths of German prisoners still being suppressed by the governments of Germany, the US, France, Britain and Canada; the real life consequences of a reinterpretation of history.
Aletho News
