This film is about how the French army secretly used chemical weapons in the Algerian independence war, in contravention of international law. The documentary presents archival evidence and personal testimony from former French soldiers and Algerian fighters, exposing France’s violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Historian Christophe Lafaye’s evidence includes a letter from a senior army commander to the government in 1956, which refers to the “use of chemical means”.
France set up a Special Weapons Unit in December 1956, using the same CN2D gas as in World War I, to target Algerian fighters in mountain caves. Of the estimated 8,000 to 10,000 incidents, only 440 attacks have been documented so far. One of the most devastating attacks was at Ghar Ben Shatouh in March 1959, in which an estimated 150 civilians were killed. Despite this, France did not formally ban chemical weapons until 1993, more than 30 years after Algeria’s independence.
That bottle of sunscreen in your beach bag may be doing more harm than good. New research reveals the hidden dangers lurking in conventional sunscreens and highlights safer, natural alternatives that can protect your skin without toxic side effects.
For decades, we’ve been told that slathering on sunscreen is one of the best ways to protect our skin from the sun’s harmful rays. However, mounting evidence suggests that many conventional sunscreens contain ingredients that may be hazardous to our health and the environment. From hormone-disrupting chemicals to potentially carcinogenic nanoparticles, the risks associated with common sunscreen ingredients are cause for serious concern.
At the same time, researchers have discovered that many natural plant oils offer significant sun protection, often rivaling or exceeding the SPF of chemical sunscreens. These botanical alternatives not only shield skin from UV damage, but also nourish and moisturize without introducing synthetic toxins into the body.
This article will explore the dangers lurking in your sunscreen bottle, examine promising research on herbal oil alternatives, and provide practical guidance for safer sun protection. By understanding the risks and exploring natural options, you can make informed choices to safeguard your skin and overall health.
The Trouble with Conventional Sunscreens
Chemical Cocktails: Questionable Ingredients in Popular Sunscreens
Many best-selling sunscreens contain a slew of synthetic chemicals that act as UV filters, preservatives, fragrances and more. Some of the most concerning ingredients include:
Oxybenzone: This common chemical UV filter has been shown to disrupt hormones, cause allergic reactions, and damage coral reefs. Studies have found oxybenzone in 97% of Americans tested.1
Octinoxate: Another chemical filter linked to hormone disruption and environmental damage. It’s been banned in Hawaii and Key West due to its impact on coral.2
Homosalate: An endocrine disruptor that may increase the absorption of pesticides through the skin.3
Octocrylene: Can produce free radicals that may damage cells and accelerate skin aging when exposed to UV light.4
Parabens: Synthetic preservatives with estrogenic activity, detected in breast cancer tumors.5
Fragrance: Often contains undisclosed phthalates linked to reproductive issues and cancer.6
The Nanoparticle Problem: Are Mineral Sunscreens Any Safer?
In response to concerns over chemical sunscreens, many consumers have turned to mineral-based formulas containing zinc oxide or titanium dioxide. While these ingredients are generally considered safer, the increasing use of nanoparticles in mineral sunscreens has introduced new risks:
Potential for cellular damage: Nanoparticles may be small enough to penetrate skin cells and cause oxidative damage to DNA.7
Respiratory concerns: Inhaling nanoparticles from spray sunscreens could potentially cause lung inflammation or damage.8
Environmental impact: Like chemical UV filters, nanoparticles can accumulate in waterways and harm aquatic life.9
Systemic absorption: A 2010 study found that nanoparticle zinc oxide from sunscreen was detectable in human blood and urine after topical application.10
The Skin Absorption Dilemma
One of the biggest issues with conventional sunscreens is their potential for systemic absorption through the skin. Multiple studies have detected common sunscreen chemicals in blood, urine, and breast milk after topical use.11,12
This is concerning because the skin is not merely a barrier, but a permeable organ capable of absorbing substances into the bloodstream. In fact, transdermal drug delivery systems take advantage of this property to administer medications through the skin.
When it comes to sunscreen, we’re essentially slathering a chemical cocktail over a large surface area of our bodies, often repeatedly throughout the day. This creates significant potential for absorption and accumulation of questionable ingredients in our tissues over time.
Understanding SPF: Debunking the High Number Myth
Before exploring natural alternatives, it’s important to understand what Sun Protection Factor (SPF) really means. Many consumers believe that higher SPF numbers offer dramatically better protection, but the reality is more nuanced:
SPF measures how much longer skin covered with sunscreen takes to burn compared to unprotected skin. For example, SPF 2 means you can stay in the sun twice as long before burning compared to wearing no sunscreen.
However, the percentage of UVB rays blocked doesn’t increase linearly with SPF numbers:
SPF 2 blocks 50% of UVB rays
SPF 15 blocks about 93% of UVB rays
SPF 30 blocks about 97% of UVB rays
SPF 50 blocks about 98% of UVB rays
As you can see, the difference between SPF 30 and SPF 50 is only 1% in terms of UVB protection. This reveals a common misconception that very high SPF values are necessary for adequate sun protection. In reality, even a relatively low SPF of 15 blocks 93% of UVB rays, and an SPF of just 2 cuts UVB exposure in half.
While higher SPFs do offer incrementally more protection and may be beneficial for those with very fair or sensitive skin, the difference is not as dramatic as many people assume. This understanding is crucial when considering natural alternatives, which may have lower SPF values but still offer significant protection.
Environmental and Health Consequences
Beyond personal health concerns, conventional sunscreens pose serious risks to the environment:
Coral reef destruction: Oxybenzone and octinoxate have been implicated in coral bleaching, leading to bans in reef-adjacent areas.13
Aquatic toxicity: Sunscreen chemicals can accumulate in lakes and oceans, harming fish and other marine life.14
Soil contamination: UV filters have been detected in agricultural soils, with unknown impacts on crops and ecosystems.15
The cumulative effects of widespread sunscreen use are just beginning to be understood. As these chemicals build up in our bodies and the environment, they may contribute to a range of health and ecological issues:
Hormone disruption and reproductive problems
Increased risk of certain cancers
Allergies and skin irritation
Coral reef die-offs and marine ecosystem collapse
Contamination of water supplies
Natural Alternatives: Herbal Oils as Sunscreen
In light of the risks associated with conventional sunscreens, many consumers are seeking safer, more natural alternatives. Emerging research suggests that certain plant-based oils may offer significant sun protection without the drawbacks of synthetic chemicals.
A groundbreaking 2010 study published in Pharmacognosy Research evaluated the SPF (sun protection factor) of various herbal oils commonly used in cosmetics. The researchers used a spectrophotometric method to determine the in vitro SPF values of both volatile and non-volatile herbal oils.16
Their findings revealed impressive sun protection potential in many natural oils:
These results are particularly noteworthy because many of the oils tested demonstrated significant UV protection levels. For example, olive oil with 87.5% UV protection (SPF 8) is substantial considering it’s a natural, non-toxic alternative. Also, consider the vast number of therapeutic actions olive oil demonstrates in the scientific literature.
It’s important to remember that even oils with lower protection values, such as tea tree oil at 50% (SPF 2), still cut UVB exposure in half compared to unprotected skin. This level of protection, combined with other sun-safety measures, can contribute significantly to overall sun safety without relying on potentially harmful synthetic chemicals.
Benefits of Herbal Oil Sunscreens
Natural plant oils offer several advantages over conventional chemical sunscreens:
Broad-spectrum protection: Many oils contain compounds that shield against both UVA and UVB rays.
Antioxidant activity: Plant oils are rich in antioxidants that can neutralize free radicals and combat UV-induced skin damage.
Skin-nourishing properties: Unlike synthetic sunscreens that can be drying, natural oils moisturize and support skin health.
No toxic buildup: Plant-based oils are biodegradable and do not accumulate in tissues or the environment like synthetic chemicals.
Multiple health benefits: Many oils offer additional skincare perks like anti-aging, anti-inflammatory, and wound-healing properties.
Environmentally friendly: Natural oils do not contribute to coral bleaching or aquatic toxicity.
Spotlight on Top Performing Oils
Olive Oil (87.5% UV protection, SPF 8)
Rich in polyphenols and vitamin E, olive oil offers potent antioxidant and anti-inflammatory benefits. Its high oleic acid content helps maintain skin moisture and elasticity.
Coconut Oil (85.7% UV protection, SPF 7)
Known for its moisturizing and antimicrobial properties, coconut oil creates a protective barrier on the skin. It also contains lauric acid, which has been shown to have photoprotective effects.17
Peppermint Oil (85.7% UV protection, SPF 7)
This refreshing essential oil not only offers sun protection but also provides a cooling sensation that can help soothe sunburned skin. Its menthol content has analgesic properties.
Revered in Ayurvedic medicine, tulsi oil boasts powerful antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and adaptogenic properties. It may help combat UV-induced oxidative stress and support overall skin health.
Practical Applications and Considerations
While herbal oils show promise as natural sunscreens, it’s important to note that their protection levels are generally lower than those of high-SPF commercial products. To maximize sun protection when using natural oils:
Layer multiple oils: Combining oils with complementary properties can enhance overall sun protection.
Reapply frequently: Natural oils may not be as water-resistant as synthetic sunscreens, so reapply often, especially after swimming or sweating.
Use in conjunction with other sun-safety measures: Seek shade, wear protective clothing, and limit sun exposure during peak hours.
Consider adding zinc oxide: For higher protection, some people mix non-nano zinc oxide powder into their preferred oil base.
Patch test first: As with any new skincare product, test oils on a small area to check for allergic reactions or irritation.
Be aware of photosensitivity: Some essential oils, particularly citrus oils, can increase sun sensitivity. Use caution and dilute appropriately.
Realistic Expectations for Natural UV Protection
When using herbal oils for sun protection, it’s crucial to have realistic expectations. While these natural alternatives may not match the high protection numbers of commercial sunscreens, they still offer meaningful defense. An oil with 75% UV protection (SPF 4), for instance, represents a significant reduction in UV exposure. By layering oils, reapplying frequently, and combining their use with other sun-safety measures, you can achieve effective protection without resorting to synthetic chemicals. Remember, any reduction in UV exposure is beneficial for skin health, and these natural oils offer that protection along with additional skincare benefits.
The Petrochemical Problem: Why Slathering on Toxins is a Bad Idea
The widespread use of petrochemicals in personal care products, including sunscreens, raises serious health and environmental concerns. Here’s why coating our largest organ in fossil fuel derivatives is problematic:
Bioaccumulation and Body Burden
Petrochemicals are lipophilic, meaning they have an affinity for fats. This allows them to penetrate the skin easily and accumulate in fatty tissues throughout the body. Over time, this can lead to a significant toxic burden.
A 2011 study found that women who used mineral oil-based cosmetics had higher levels of mineral oil saturated hydrocarbons (MOSH) in their body fat compared to non-users. The researchers concluded that cosmetic products were likely a relevant source of MOSH contamination in the population.18
Endocrine Disruption
Many petrochemicals used in sunscreens and other personal care items are known or suspected endocrine disruptors. These compounds can interfere with hormone signaling, potentially leading to reproductive issues, developmental problems, and increased cancer risk.
For example, parabens, which are commonly used as preservatives in sunscreens, have been shown to mimic estrogen in the body. A 2004 study detected parabens in human breast tumors, raising concerns about their potential role in breast cancer development.19
Skin Irritation and Sensitization
Petroleum-derived ingredients can cause skin irritation, allergic reactions, and increased sensitivity in some individuals. This is particularly concerning for sunscreens, which are applied to large areas of skin and often used on children and those with sensitive skin.
A 2018 review in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice found that up to 70% of people with sensitive skin reported adverse reactions to sunscreens, with chemical UV filters being common culprits.20
Environmental Contamination
When we use products containing petrochemicals, these substances don’t just affect our bodies – they also enter the environment. Sunscreen chemicals wash off in water, contaminating lakes, rivers, and oceans.
A 2015 study estimated that between 6,000 and 14,000 tons of sunscreen wash off into coral reef areas each year, with devastating effects on marine ecosystems.21
Fossil Fuel Dependence
The widespread use of petrochemicals in personal care products contributes to our overall dependence on fossil fuels. This not only perpetuates environmental damage from oil extraction and refining but also supports an industry with a vested interest in downplaying the risks of its products.
By choosing natural, plant-based alternatives, consumers can reduce their exposure to potentially harmful petrochemicals while supporting more sustainable and environmentally friendly practices.
Conclusion: Embracing Safer Sun Protection
As awareness grows about the potential risks of conventional sunscreens, the shift towards natural alternatives is gaining momentum. Herbal oils offer a promising solution, providing effective sun protection along with additional skin benefits, without introducing synthetic toxins into our bodies or the environment.
While more research is needed to fully understand the photoprotective properties of plant oils, the available evidence suggests they can be valuable tools in our sun safety arsenal. By combining the use of natural oils with sensible sun exposure habits, we can safeguard our skin health while minimizing our chemical burden.
Ultimately, the choice between conventional and natural sunscreens is a personal one. However, given the mounting concerns over petrochemical-based products, exploring safer alternatives is a wise investment in both personal and planetary health. As we continue to uncover the hidden costs of our chemical-laden lifestyles, returning to nature’s time-tested remedies may prove to be the smartest path forward.
References
1. Calafat, A. M., et al. “Concentrations of the Sunscreen Agent Benzophenone-3 in Residents of the United States: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2003-2004.” Environmental Health Perspectives, vol. 116, no. 7, 2008, pp. 893-897.
2. Downs, C. A., et al. “Toxicopathological Effects of the Sunscreen UV Filter, Oxybenzone (Benzophenone-3), on Coral Planulae and Cultured Primary Cells and Its Environmental Contamination in Hawaii and the U.S. Virgin Islands.” Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, vol. 70, no. 2, 2016, pp. 265-288.
3. Krause, M., et al. “Sunscreens: Are They Beneficial for Health? An Overview of Endocrine Disrupting Properties of UV‐Filters.” International Journal of Andrology, vol. 35, no. 3, 2012, pp. 424-436.
4. Hanson, K. M., et al. “Sunscreen Enhancement of UV-Induced Reactive Oxygen Species in the Skin.” Free Radical Biology and Medicine, vol. 41, no. 8, 2006, pp. 1205-1212.
5. Darbre, P. D., et al. “Concentrations of Parabens in Human Breast Tumours.” Journal of Applied Toxicology, vol. 24, no. 1, 2004, pp. 5-13.
6. Heudorf, U., et al. “Phthalates: Toxicology and Exposure.” International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health, vol. 210, no. 5, 2007, pp. 623-634.
7. Shukla, R. K., et al. “ROS-Mediated Genotoxicity Induced by Titanium Dioxide Nanoparticles in Human Epidermal Cells.” Toxicology in Vitro, vol. 25, no. 1, 2011, pp. 231-241.
8. Grassian, V. H., et al. “Inflammatory Response of Mice to Manufactured Titanium Dioxide Nanoparticles: Comparison of Size Effects through Different Exposure Routes.” Nanotoxicology, vol. 1, no. 3, 2007, pp. 211-226.
9. Minetto, D., et al. “Ecotoxicity of Engineered TiO2 Nanoparticles to Saltwater Organisms: An Overview.” Environment International, vol. 88, 2016, pp. 60-72.
10. Gulson, B., et al. “Small Amounts of Zinc from Zinc Oxide Particles in Sunscreens Applied Outdoors Are Absorbed through Human Skin.” Toxicological Sciences, vol. 118, no. 1, 2010, pp. 140-149.
11. Janjua, N. R., et al. “Systemic Absorption of the Sunscreens Benzophenone-3, Octyl-Methoxycinnamate, and 3-(4-Methyl-Benzylidene) Camphor after Whole-Body Topical Application and Reproductive Hormone Levels in Humans.” Journal of Investigative Dermatology, vol. 123, no. 1, 2004, pp. 57-61.
12. Schlumpf, M., et al. “Exposure Patterns of UV Filters, Fragrances, Parabens, Phthalates, Organochlor Pesticides, PBDEs, and PCBs in Human Milk: Correlation of UV Filters with Use of Cosmetics.” Chemosphere, vol. 81, no. 10, 2010, pp. 1171-1183.
13. Danovaro, R., et al. “Sunscreens Cause Coral Bleaching by Promoting Viral Infections.” Environmental Health Perspectives, vol. 116, no. 4, 2008, pp. 441-447.
14. Giokas, D. L., et al. “Occurrence and Removal of Chemical UV Filters in Wastewater Treatment Plants.” Environmental Science and Pollution Research, vol. 22, no. 12, 2015, pp. 9089-9100.
15. Chen, F., et al. “Distribution and Accumulation of Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals in Wastewater Irrigated Soils in Hebei, China.” Environmental Pollution, vol. 159, no. 6, 2011, pp. 1490-1498.
16. Kaur, C. D., and Saraf, S. “In Vitro Sun Protection Factor Determination of Herbal Oils Used in Cosmetics.” Pharmacognosy Research, vol. 2, no. 1, 2010, pp. 22-25.
17. Korać, R. R., and Khambholja, K. M. “Potential of Herbs in Skin Protection from Ultraviolet Radiation.” Pharmacognosy Reviews, vol. 5, no. 10, 2011, pp. 164-173.
18. Concin, N., et al. “Mineral Oil Paraffins in Human Body Fat and Milk.” Food and Chemical Toxicology, vol. 46, no. 2, 2008, pp. 544-552.
19. Darbre, P. D., and Harvey, P. W. “Paraben Esters: Review of Recent Studies of Endocrine Toxicity, Absorption, Esterase and Human Exposure, and Discussion of Potential Human Health Risks.” Journal of Applied Toxicology, vol. 28, no. 5, 2008, pp. 561-578.
20. Rozas-Muñoz, E., et al. “Sensitive Skin: A Review of Prevalence, Pathogenesis, and Management.” Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice, vol. 6, no. 6, 2018, pp. 1898-1908.
21. Downs, C. A., et al. “Toxicopathological Effects of the Sunscreen UV Filter, Oxybenzone (Benzophenone-3), on Coral Planulae and Cultured Primary Cells and Its Environmental Contamination in Hawaii and the U.S. Virgin Islands.” Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, vol. 70, no. 2, 2016, pp. 265-288.
In December 2007, Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine published a study by Ian Paul and colleagues at the Penn State College of Medicine. One hundred five children between the ages of two and eighteen, all with cough and runny nose of seven days or less, were randomized into three groups. One group received a single nocturnal dose of buckwheat honey. One received an age-appropriate dose of honey-flavored dextromethorphan, the leading over-the-counter cough suppressant in America, sold in many formulations under brand names including Robitussin, Delsym, Vicks, and NyQuil. The third received nothing.
Parents scored their children on cough frequency, cough severity, how bothersome the cough was, the child’s sleep quality, and their own sleep quality.
Honey improved every outcome measured. Dextromethorphan showed no statistically significant advantage over no treatment on any of them.¹
The comparison that mattered, the one the study was designed to run, put a spoon of honey against a mass-market pharmaceutical and found the honey better. The comparison the authors did not lead with, but which sat plainly in the pairwise data, put the mass-market pharmaceutical against nothing and found no measurable difference.
The Paul trial was partially double-blinded (honey cannot be blinded from taste), which is the obvious objection. A 2018 Cochrane review pooled the Paul study with later replications from Israel, Iran, and Brazil, all of which used various blinding designs, and reached the same conclusion. Honey outperforms no treatment. Honey outperforms dextromethorphan. It does so consistently.²,³
Six weeks after the Paul study appeared, on 17 January 2008, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a Public Health Advisory recommending that over-the-counter cough and cold products not be used at all in children under the age of two, citing “serious and potentially life-threatening side effects” including convulsions, rapid heart rates, decreased consciousness, and death.⁴ The Centers for Disease Control had documented over fifteen hundred children under the age of two treated in emergency rooms in 2004 and 2005 for adverse events after receiving these products.⁵ Manufacturers voluntarily pulled infant formulations from the shelves before the advisory issued, and relabeled their remaining children’s products as not for use in children under four.⁶
Two facts arrived within weeks of each other. A peer-reviewed randomized trial found the leading OTC cough medicine indistinguishable from placebo. The FDA determined that its use had been killing children.
None of this was breaking news to anyone who owned a copy of Folk Medicine.
The recipe
D.C. Jarvis was a Vermont country doctor. For decades he cataloged the folk practices of his patients, most of them families who had farmed the same land for generations. His 1958 book Folk Medicine was a New York Times bestseller for over a year. Chapter nine gives the cough syrup as he recorded it:
Boil one lemon slowly for ten minutes. This softens the lemon so that more juice will be got out of it, and also softens the rind. Cut the lemon in two and extract the juice with a lemon squeezer. Put the juice into an ordinary drinking glass. Add two tablespoonfuls of glycerine… Stir the glycerine and lemon juice well, then fill up the drinking glass with honey.⁷
Dose: one teaspoonful for a daytime coughing spell. One at bedtime and again in the night if the cough wakes the child. For severe cough, six teaspoonfuls across the day. As the cough eases, the doses taper.
Jarvis’s observations on the preparation were specific. “It does not upset the stomach, as many cough syrups do. It can be taken by children as well as adults. It will relieve a cough when all other cough syrups fail.”⁷
He noted the recipe was “many generations old” in his region in 1961. That places its lineage well into the nineteenth century, among people who kept bees, grew lemons in glasshouses or bought them from the general store, and used glycerine (a viscous byproduct of soap-making, cheap at any pharmacy in that era) as a household remedy for coughs, sore throats, and dry skin.
The recipe survives in Jarvis’s book with one further detail that matters. Immediately after giving the formula, he adds an anecdote from a farmer patient.
Speaking of using lemons to compound a cough remedy, I recall the remark of a farmer. When he was explaining how well the suggested remedy had worked he laughed and said, “Fact is, we didn’t have any lemons. I used apple-cider vinegar. Just as good.”⁷
The farmer had substituted vinegar for citrus and got the same result. This is not a marginal detail. It tells you what the acid is doing in the recipe. It is thinning mucus and providing a light astringent action, a function any acid can perform, which is why the substitution worked and why the medieval European oxymels (honey-and-vinegar preparations used for coughs since Hippocrates) sit in the same family as this Vermont formula. The mechanism does not depend on lemon specifically. It depends on a small quantity of acid, dissolved in honey, held long enough in the throat to coat the irritated tissue.
Jarvis’s Vermont formulation is one documentation of a broader folk tradition. The base was constant across regions and centuries: honey plus acid. The additions varied by kitchen and by climate.
Jethro Kloss, working the same tradition from a different angle, published Back to Eden in 1939 with parallel preparations drawn from the Tennessee-Wisconsin herbal lineage. His lemon syrup began identically. “Boil one pint of lemon juice ten minutes.”⁸ His fig cough syrup combined honey and lemon in the same architecture. His entry on coltsfoot (Latin Tussilago farfara, literally “coughwort”) notes the leaves are “excellent when combined with other herbs and made into a cough syrup,” sweetened with honey. Kloss’s book documents lemon for colds, influenza, asthma, and fever across seven pages. “I wish that humanity would understand the real value of the lemon and learn to make a real medicine of it.”⁸
Kloss also documented thyme. His entry on Thymus vulgaris lists its medicinal properties as tonic, carminative, antispasmodic, and antiseptic, and describes it as “valuable in whooping cough, asthma, and lung troubles. For small children, give small and frequent doses.”⁸ His caution alongside was equally specific: “Use sparingly. Do not make a habit of using thyme.” Concentrated action, careful dosing.
Thyme’s principal active compounds, thymol and carvacrol, are phenolics concentrated in the plant’s volatile oils. Their actions on airway tissue are documented and specific. Thymol is antispasmodic on bronchial smooth muscle: it relaxes the involuntary contractions that produce coughing spasms. It is expectorant: it thins mucus and stimulates the ciliated cells lining the airway to move it upward for clearance. And because the volatile oils vaporize at warm-drink temperatures, a portion of the thymol is delivered by inhalation as well as by swallowing when the syrup is taken warm. Aromatic herbs work through two routes at once. Germany’s Commission E, the mainstream regulatory body for herbal medicines and roughly the German equivalent of a plant-medicine FDA, approves thyme for symptomatic treatment of bronchitis, whooping cough, and catarrh of the upper airway.¹⁵ European folk medicine has used it continuously in that role for centuries.
The recipe this essay recommends draws on both traditions. Honey and lemon supply the demulcent and osmotic base, as in Jarvis. Thyme adds the antispasmodic and aromatic action, as in Kloss. The formulation is in the appendix. Jarvis’s exact Vermont version, with glycerine, is in the appendix as well, for readers who want the historical formulation as he wrote it. Glycerine is a more processed component than the others (a purified single compound rather than a whole food), but it has been in continuous folk use since the nineteenth century as a pharmacy-counter demulcent, and it extends the throat-coating time beyond what honey alone provides. Both formulations work. The primary is closer to whole-food preparation.
The recipe was not Jarvis’s discovery. Jarvis was writing down what he saw farmers using. Kloss was doing the same in a different region.
A note before proceeding. Honey is not given to infants under one year. The concern is toxicological, not infectious. Clostridium botulinum spores can be present in raw honey. In older children and adults, established gut flora and stomach acid prevent the spores from germinating, and they pass through without effect. In an infant’s immature digestive tract, the same spores can germinate and produce botulinum toxin, a potent neurotoxin. The organism is not causing an infection. The toxin is doing the damage. The caution predates the Paul trial by decades and is not disputed by any party, mainstream or otherwise. The Paul study enrolled children aged two and above for the same reason.
What a cough is
A cough is an expulsive reflex. Irritation of the airway lining, from mucus, dust, smoke, particulate matter, gastric reflux, dryness, or cold air, triggers rapid contraction of the diaphragm and intercostals against a closed glottis. The glottis opens. Air explodes out at velocities exceeding twenty-five meters per second, carrying whatever the airway is trying to clear.
The reflex exists because the airway lining is thin, delicate, and constantly exposed to material that shouldn’t be there. Without the cough, particulate matter accumulates. Mucus produced to trap that material accumulates with it. Untreated, the accumulation moves down. What began as a throat irritation becomes a chest cough. What began as an acute condition, resolved in days by the body’s clearance of the trigger, becomes chronic.
Kloss described this progression plainly in Back to Eden. On chronic bronchitis: “Acute bronchitis may become chronic if it is not properly treated and relieved. When a cold is allowed to continue, the infection may extend down into the lungs and become chronic. Occasionally, if it is not cured, it may encourage the development of tuberculosis or some other serious chronic lung disease.”⁸ On why the cough arose in the first place: “Colds would not be so prevalent if the body were not filled with mucus and waste products, so one should immediately rid the body of these poisons.”⁸
The framework is not obscure. Herbert Shelton, the twentieth-century natural hygienist, called it the acute-to-chronic mechanism. The body’s efforts to expel accumulated toxins produce acute symptoms. Suppression of those symptoms leaves the toxins in place. The body attempts expulsion by other routes. Those routes are suppressed in turn. The process, driven long enough, produces chronic disease that presents as a distinct condition, apparently unrelated to the accumulated cause.
The cough is the body clearing the airway. To decide what a cough syrup should do, you have to decide what you think a cough is for. That decision determines everything downstream.
The suppressor
Dextromethorphan was patented in the 1950s as a non-narcotic replacement for codeine. Codeine had a long history as a cough suppressant, and a long history as an opioid: sedating, addictive, respiratory-depressant at high doses. Dextromethorphan was developed to keep the antitussive function without the opioid liability.
It works centrally. The drug reaches the brainstem through the bloodstream and depresses the medullary cough center, which is the neural relay where signals from an irritated airway would normally trigger the expulsive reflex. It achieves this by binding to receptors in the brainstem, blocking NMDA glutamate receptors and activating sigma-1 receptors. It also weakly affects serotonin and norepinephrine.⁹ The signal from the airway still arrives at the relay. It no longer produces a cough.
Nothing about this mechanism addresses the airway. Dextromethorphan does not soothe irritation. It does not thin mucus. It does not accelerate its removal. It does not resolve whatever prompted the cough. It sits on receptors that normally allow the cough signal to fire, and it prevents them from firing.
The signal was the body’s alarm. The cough was its response to the alarm. Dextromethorphan silences the response by muting the alarm at the central switchboard.
At therapeutic doses, this produces the intended effect (the person stops coughing) for as long as the drug is active. At supratherapeutic doses the NMDA antagonism produces dissociation and hallucination similar in character to phencyclidine.⁹ The recreational abuse of dextromethorphan-containing cough syrups (known as “robotripping”) is a documented clinical phenomenon. At high doses in combination with serotonergic drugs, it produces serotonin syndrome. At high doses generally, it produces respiratory depression.
In children specifically, the Paul team ran their earlier study in 2004, dextromethorphan versus diphenhydramine versus placebo, and found none of the three superior for nocturnal cough or sleep quality.¹⁰ This was not an isolated result. By the time the American Academy of Pediatrics reviewed the evidence, it did not recommend dextromethorphan for children. The American College of Chest Physicians reached the same conclusion.¹
By 2007 the leading over-the-counter cough drug in America had been tested against an inert control in two randomized trials, first against placebo and then against no treatment. It had shown no measurable advantage in either. Six weeks later the FDA advisory arrived, citing convulsions and deaths.
The soother
The folk cough syrup does something categorically different.
Kloss defined the two active mechanisms in the glossary of Back to Eden. A demulcent is “an agent that soothes, protects, and relieves the irritation of inflamed mucous membranes and other surfaces.” An expectorant “promotes the thinning and ejection of mucus or exudate from the lungs, bronchi, and trachea.”⁸
The preparation is both, and with thyme it is also antispasmodic.
Honey is a supersaturated sugar solution with a water activity of around 0.6 (too low to support most microbial growth) and a pH of around 3.9. Held on the tissue of the throat, it draws water osmotically from the inflamed lining, which reduces local swelling and provides mechanical soothing. Its viscosity coats and protects the irritated surface. Lemon juice, at a pH of around 2.2, thins mucus on contact and provides light astringent action from citric acid and phenolic compounds. Vinegar, at a similar pH, does the same thing, which is why the farmer’s substitution worked.
Thyme adds two further actions to the base. Thymol, its principal phenolic compound, relaxes bronchial smooth muscle: the involuntary tension that produces coughing spasms eases. Thymol also stimulates the ciliated cells of the airway lining to move mucus upward for clearance, which is exactly what a productive cough is trying to do. The syrup helps the cough finish faster. The volatile oils vaporize slightly at warm-drink temperature, delivering a portion of the thymol by inhalation alongside ingestion, so the active compound reaches the airway lining directly as well as via the digestive tract.
In Jarvis’s Vermont variant, glycerine adds a further specific function. It is strongly hygroscopic. It holds moisture against tissue and extends the demulcent contact time beyond what honey alone provides. It is not essential to the recipe’s action, but it lengthens the duration of soothing per spoonful.
The syrup soothes the irritation triggering the cough. It thins the mucus the cough is trying to clear. It relaxes the airway spasm. It supports the reflex rather than suppressing it. When the cough is no longer needed, it stops.
The mechanism runs on the airway, not in the brainstem. It leaves the reflex intact and removes its cause.
Honey has other properties that matter here. Its low water activity, low pH, hydrogen peroxide production, and specific plant-derived phenolic compounds create an environment inhospitable to microbial overgrowth on inflamed tissue. This is why traditional cultures used honey on open wounds long before anyone had proposed a theory of infection. Buckwheat honey specifically, the varietal Paul’s team chose, is unusually high in phenolic compounds and antioxidant activity. The World Health Organization’s Department of Child and Adolescent Health, in its 2001 review of cough and cold remedies for young children, cited honey as a potentially effective option six years before the Penn State trial confirmed it.¹¹,¹²
The recipe soothes without suppressing. That is the essential difference. It works with the reflex. Dextromethorphan works against it.
The 2007 trial was measuring, without knowing it, the difference between those two approaches.
Continuity
The medicinal use of honey is documented continuously across every literate culture from the emergence of writing forward. Sumerian clay tablets from around 2100 BC record honey mixed with river dust and oil for infected skin ulcers. Egyptian medical papyri describe honey applied to open wounds. Sushruta, a physician in Vedic India around 1400 BC, wrote of the medicinal properties of eight honey varietals. Athenaeus in Greece around 230 AD recorded that those who ate honey and bread for breakfast “were free from disease all their lives.” Ibn Majah, quoting Mohammed in the seventh century, wrote that “honey is a remedy for every illness.”¹¹
The specific use for cough runs the same length. Every one of these traditions used honey, sometimes alone, more often combined with acid, herb, or spice, for cough, sore throat, and cold.
Sir John Hill, a physician in England in 1759, wrote the first English-language book devoted to the medicinal use of honey. He observed, then, that its virtues were being neglected.
The slight regard at this time paid to the medicinal virtues of Honey, is an instance of neglect men shew to common objects, whatever their value: acting in contempt, as it were, of the immediate hand of providence, which has in general made those things most frequent, which have the greatest uses; and for that reason, we seek from the remotest part of the world, medicines of harsh and violent operation for our relief in several disorders, under which we should never suffer, if we would use what the Bee collects for us at our doors.¹¹
The observation held. The nineteenth century saw the rise of proprietary patent medicines: laudanum-based cough syrups, cocaine-based lozenges, alcohol-heavy elixirs marketed to households through newspapers and mail order. The twentieth century industrialized that market. Dextromethorphan was patented in the 1950s, sold under proprietary brand names, marketed to parents through television. The recipe on the counter (honey with lemon, honey with vinegar, honey with fig, honey with coltsfoot, honey with thyme, honey with glycerine) was displaced not by evidence but by advertising and shelf space.
Jarvis published the Vermont version in 1958. Kloss had published the Tennessee-Wisconsin version in 1939. Fessenden and McInnes catalogued the honey material comprehensively in 2008. The WHO acknowledged honey for cough in 2001. Penn State confirmed it in randomized trial in 2007. The Cochrane Collaboration confirmed it again in 2018.
At each of these points the establishment position on cough treatment in children shifted slightly closer to what Jarvis’s farmers already did.
The recipe did not move. It was where it had been since before Jarvis was born.
What replaced it
The FDA advisory did not arrive by regulatory initiative. It arrived because pediatricians forced it. Joshua Sharfstein, a pediatrician at Johns Hopkins and later a senior FDA regulator, was among the authors of a March 2007 petition that asked the agency to declare these products contraindicated for children under six. His December 2007 piece in the New England Journal of Medicine, published the same month as the Paul trial, described the market the pediatric community was asking the FDA to move against: 39 percent of U.S. households had purchased these products in the previous three years, and consumers were buying about 95 million packages annually for use in children.¹⁴
The mechanism of the withdrawal was industry self-protection. Manufacturers voluntarily pulled infant products before the January 2008 announcement to avoid a mandatory recall. The two-to-four age band was formally excluded by industry relabeling that same year. The remaining products, for children over four, were left in place with warnings, though the same trials that had cleared under-fours had also failed to demonstrate benefit in the older group.¹
The regulatory response was serious. The public messaging afterward was not. Pediatricians were left to tell parents what to do instead. A physician commentary in NEJM Journal Watch put the new recommendation plainly. “Give fluids and control fever, but don’t give cough and cold medicines.”¹³
The old recipe was fluids that soothed the throat and thinned mucus. Any child would take it, because it tasted of honey and lemon. The whole preparation cost pennies. The advice arrived at, after the industry had killed enough children to warrant the FDA advisory, was a diminished version of what a grandmother would have done in 1900.
What made pediatric cough syrup a 95-million-package-a-year business was not that its products worked better than the folk preparation. They did not work better than the folk preparation. On the primary outcomes of two randomized trials in children, they did not work better than nothing. What made them a 95-million-package-a-year business was that they could be branded, patented, shelf-placed, and advertised. Honey, lemon, and thyme could not. There was no company whose share price depended on the survival of a grandmother’s recipe. There were many companies whose share price depended on the survival of dextromethorphan-based products.
The FDA withdrawal removed the infant portion of that market. The revenue from products marketed for children over four continues.
What’s on the counter
Jarvis called the recipe “many generations old” in 1961. He was describing something already ordinary: the syrup a farmer’s wife would make when a child was coughing at night, the same way she would make broth or apply a mustard plaster. It required no prescription, no pharmacist, no marketing budget, no clinical trial. It required a lemon, a jar of honey, a small pinch of thyme from the herb garden, and ten minutes.
The Penn State trial did not discover the recipe. The WHO did not discover it. Cochrane did not discover it. What each of these did was confirm, in the register of institutional science, what farmers in Vermont and grandmothers in every other country had known for as long as anyone had kept bees.
The lemon costs about a dollar. The honey costs between five and fifteen dollars a jar, and one jar lasts a long time. Thyme is a garden herb that grows in a pot on a windowsill. If the lemon is not available, apple-cider vinegar is in the pantry. The whole preparation takes ten minutes to boil the lemon and thirty seconds to assemble. It does not upset the stomach, and it can be given to children over one. It works when the industrial products do not, or more precisely, it works when the industrial products have been shown not to work at all.
Every one of the relevant documents is public. The Paul study is on PubMed and the FDA advisory is in the Federal Register. Jarvis’s book has been in continuous print for over sixty years. Nothing about this argument has been hidden. The disagreement between what the trials established and what the pharmacy shelves offered lasted a full century and cost the lives of children.
The recipe is on the counter. It always has been.
Making the syrup
Ingredients (fills one 8-ounce / 240 ml glass or mason jar)
1 fresh lemon (or 2 tablespoons apple-cider vinegar as substitute)
1 fresh sprig thyme (or ½ teaspoon dried thyme)
About 1 cup (240 ml) of water, for boiling the lemon
Honey to fill the remainder of the glass, roughly ⅔ of the volume (about 5 fluid ounces / 150 ml / 10 tablespoons)
Method
Bring about 1 cup of water to a simmer in a small saucepan. Add the whole lemon and the thyme sprig. Simmer slowly for ten minutes. The heat softens the rind and extracts the lemon juice, and it draws the thymol and volatile oils out of the thyme into the water. Remove the pan from the heat. Fish out the thyme sprig (or strain if using dried thyme) and discard.
Cut the lemon in half and squeeze the juice into your glass or jar. Add 2 tablespoons (30 ml) of the thyme-and-lemon water from the saucepan. Fill the rest of the glass with honey, stirring as you go until the mixture is smooth. You will use roughly 10 tablespoons of honey to fill an 8-ounce glass.
If using apple-cider vinegar instead of lemon, simmer the thyme alone in about ½ cup of water for ten minutes. Strain and discard the thyme. Add 2 tablespoons of the thyme water and 2 tablespoons of apple-cider vinegar to the glass, then fill the rest with honey. The vinegar variant is well-attested in the folk record.
Dose
For an occasional daytime coughing spell: one teaspoonful, stirred before taking.
At bedtime: one teaspoonful, and one more during the night if the cough wakes the child.
For a severe cough: one teaspoonful on rising, one mid-morning, one after lunch, one mid-afternoon, one after supper, one at bedtime. Reduce the frequency as the cough eases.
For small children: half a teaspoonful, taken more often.
Take the syrup warm when possible. The warmth releases the thyme’s volatile oils and delivers a portion of the active compounds to the airway by inhalation as well as by swallowing.
The Jarvis variant, with glycerine
Jarvis’s original Vermont formulation adds glycerine to extend the throat-coating time. Glycerine is a purified vegetable compound rather than a whole food, but it has been in traditional folk use since the nineteenth century and provides a longer-lasting demulcent film on the throat than honey alone. Readers who want Jarvis’s exact recipe, or who want the extended contact time, use this variant:
Ingredients (fills one 8-ounce / 240 ml glass or mason jar)
2 tablespoons (30 ml) vegetable glycerine, USP grade, from any pharmacy
Honey to fill the remainder, about 5 fluid ounces (150 ml, or roughly 10 tablespoons)
Optional: 1 sprig fresh thyme or ½ teaspoon dried thyme, added at the boiling step
Method
Simmer the lemon in about 1 cup of water for ten minutes (with the thyme if using). Remove and discard the thyme. Cut the lemon in half and squeeze the juice into the glass. Add the glycerine and stir. Fill the rest with honey and stir again.
The dose is the same as for the primary recipe.
Cautions
Do not give honey to infants under one year of age.Clostridium botulinum spores can be present in raw honey. In older children and adults, mature gut flora and stomach acid prevent them from germinating and they pass through without effect. In an infant’s immature digestive tract, they can produce botulinum toxin. The toxin causes the harm, not the organism. The caution is not disputed.
Thyme. Use sparingly, as Kloss advised. A sprig or half a teaspoon of dried herb is enough per glass. Not recommended in medicinal doses during pregnancy. Culinary amounts in food are fine; a therapeutic syrup is the caveat.
Raw versus pasteurized honey. Raw honey is preferable when available. It retains the enzymes, phenolic compounds, and volatile aromatics that pasteurization heat degrades. Pasteurized honey works and delivers the demulcent and osmotic action, but the extra biochemical richness of raw honey is lost in the heating. Darker varietals (buckwheat, if available; otherwise wildflower, manuka, or dark forest honeys) contain more phenolic compounds than pale varietals like clover, but any real honey works. Read the label: some supermarket “honey” is cut with corn syrup or rice syrup and is not honey at all. On the infant botulism question: pasteurization does not eliminate the risk. Clostridium botulinum spores are heat-resistant far beyond standard honey pasteurization temperatures. The under-one caution applies to both raw and pasteurized honey.
Storage. The finished syrup keeps in a sealed glass jar (a mason jar works well) for several weeks at room temperature, and longer refrigerated. The honey’s osmotic action and the lemon or vinegar acidity together create a hostile environment for microbial growth. Give it a stir before each dose, as the honey may settle. If the syrup ever develops off smells, cloudiness that wasn’t there originally, or fermentation bubbles, discard and make a fresh batch.
References
1. Paul IM, Beiler J, McMonagle A, Shaffer ML, Duda L, Berlin CM Jr. Effect of honey, dextromethorphan, and no treatment on nocturnal cough and sleep quality for coughing children and their parents. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine 2007;161(12):1140–1146.
2. Axelsson I. Honey, not dextromethorphan, was better than no treatment for nocturnal cough in children with upper respiratory infections. Evidence-Based Medicine 2008;13(4):106.
3. Oduwole O, Udoh EE, Oyo-Ita A, Meremikwu MM. Honey for acute cough in children. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2018, Issue 4. Art. No.: CD007094.
4. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Public Health Advisory: Nonprescription Cough and Cold Medicine Use in Children. Issued 17 January 2008.
5. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Infant deaths associated with cough and cold medications, United States, 2005. MMWR Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 2007;56(01):1–4.
6. Consumer Healthcare Products Association. Voluntary withdrawal of oral infant cough and cold medicines announced October 2007; pediatric labeling change announced October 2008.
7. Jarvis DC. Folk Medicine: A Doctor’s Guide to Good Health. First published New York: Henry Holt, 1958. UK edition consulted: London: Pan Books, 1961. Chapter 9, “An Old-Fashioned Cough Remedy,” pp. 105–106.
8. Kloss J. Back to Eden. First published 1939. Revised edition, Back to Eden Publishing, 2009. Glossary; entries on lemon, coltsfoot, thyme, and bronchitis; Section II, Chapter 3, Herbal Syrups.
9. Journey JD, Bhattarai S, Agrawal S. Dextromethorphan. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing, 2024. See also: Nguyen L, Thomas KL, Lucke-Wold BP, et al. Dextromethorphan: An update on its utility for neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. Pharmacology & Therapeutics 2016;159:1–22.
10. Paul IM, Yoder KE, Crowell KR, et al. Effect of dextromethorphan, diphenhydramine, and placebo on nocturnal cough and sleep quality for coughing children and their parents. Pediatrics 2004;114(1):e85–e90.
11. Fessenden R, McInnes M. The Honey Revolution: Restoring the Health of Future Generations. 2008. Chapter 9, “Honey That Soothes and Heals,” pp. 141–146.
12. World Health Organization, Department of Child and Adolescent Health. Cough and Cold Remedies for the Treatment of Acute Respiratory Infections in Young Children. Geneva: WHO, 2001.
13. NEJM Journal Watch. FDA warns against use of cough medicines in children younger than 2 years. Commentary published 12 September 2007.
14. Sharfstein JM, North M, Serwint JR. Over the counter but no longer under the radar: pediatric cough and cold medications. New England Journal of Medicine 2007;357(23):2321–2324.
15. Blumenthal M, ed. The Complete German Commission E Monographs: Therapeutic Guide to Herbal Medicines. Austin, Texas: American Botanical Council, 1998. Monograph on thyme (Thymi herba).
The most important question we should be asking after Karim Khan’s dismissal last week as chief prosecutor of the ICC – the international war crimes court in The Hague – is not whether he is guilty of “sexual misconduct” against another staff member, identified as “Sarah”.
That can only be decided through a legal process – one, let us note, that has already taken place. A fact-finding body carried out a lengthy investigation of Sarah’s allegations over more than a year; its thousands of pages of evidence were then evaluated in detail by three senior judges.
Though you would not know it from the media coverage, they concluded that there was no evidence to suggest any kind of misconduct by Khan, sexual or otherwise.
Strangely, that determination was largely confirmed by an extraordinarily deferential “exclusive” CNN interview with Sarah, aired earlier this month.
She declined to give any meaningful details of what Khan had allegedly subjected her to, and celebrity interviewer Christiane Amanpour delicately avoided pressing her for any clarification.
No matter. The purpose of the CNN interview was never about excavating facts. It was designed to offer face-saving cover as an entirely political body called the Assembly of States Parties, comprising diplomatic representatives of the 125 states signed up to the ICC, entirely ignored the legal findings and dismissed Khan.
Paradoxically, it was the Assembly of States Parties that appointed the judges who had concluded that there was no evidence of misconduct or breach of duty by Khan. That inconvenient judgment was simply reversed, despite the Assembly members being in no position to weigh the evidence themselves.
We should not forget that many of these states have an investment in weakening the only international court that can bring their own senior officials to trial for war crimes.
In May 2024 – shortly before Sarah made her allegations – the ICC demonstrated that it was finally ready to prosecute western leaders for war crimes, not just those from the Global South or from the West’s official enemies, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Khan issued an arrest warrant for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant. Both are accused of crimes against humanity for starving the people of Gaza through a prolonged blockade of food, water and power.
Were Netanyahu ever to face trial – and found guilty, as he almost certainly would be – a lot of other leaders would have good reason to fear they might be found culpable next, not least for their complicity in Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.
The question that needs answering now is not whether Khan is guilty of misconduct – that has been decided at a political level, not a legal one. No, we need an answer to an equally political, and far more troubling, question.
“Cui bono?” Or “Who benefits?”
The evidence is hiding in plain sight. The evidence is revealed both in the deeply politicised process that led to Khan’s downfall, and in what that process means for the future of the court.
Covert war
Khan is not the first ICC chief prosecutor to face extreme pressures – and, as with Khan, those pressures surfaced at the very moment Khan’s predecessor tried to take on Israel over its war crimes.
Fatou Bensouda faced a “covert war” waged against her by Israel for the best part of a decade, according to an investigation by the Guardian in May 2024, just as Khan issued his arrest warrant for Netanyahu.
The Guardian’sreport, published nearly three years after Bensouda had completed her nine-year term at the ICC, revealed that, during that time, she had faced threats to herself and her family, the monitoring of her communications, and an intimidating visit to her home.
More recently, Bensouda has confirmed these accounts in an interview with Al Jazeera. Bensouda notes that she repeatedly reported Israel’s campaign of intimidation to the Dutch authorities, but they did nothing to investigate the threats or protect her.
She also says certain “authorities” – she does not name them – warned her that she was going too far in investigating Israeli crimes and that “you could be harmed or you could be killed, or family members could be harmed in some way.”
The campaign of threats – instigated by Yossi Cohen, then the director of Israel’s spy agency, Mossad – intensified as Bensouda considered whether to open a formal investigation into Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories.
Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people, we should remember, predate – by decades – Hamas’ attack on 7 October 2023. In fact, though no one is supposed to mention it, Israel’s sustained crimes of occupation are the self-evident cause of that Hamas attack.
An Israeli source told the Guardian that “the Mossad’s objective was to compromise the prosecutor or enlist her as someone who would cooperate with Israel’s demands”– that is, scrap the ICC’s investigation into Israeli crimes. Another source admitted that Cohen was acting on Netanyahu’s instructions.
During one contact, Cohen reportedly issued a Mafia-style threat to Bensouda: “You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family.”
The Guardian reported that the Mossad “took a keen interest in Bensouda’s family members and obtained transcripts of secret recordings of her husband, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the situation. Israeli officials then attempted to use the material to discredit the prosecutor”.
The paper also noted that there were fears among senior ICC officials that “Israel had cultivated sources within the court’s prosecution division” – the division Khan would inherit from Bensouda.
Cohen was described as “stalking” Bensouda, and personally “ambushed” her in a hotel room in New York in 2018. Afterwards he repeatedly phoned her, in a threatening manner that was said to have escalated over time. When Bensouda asked Cohen how he had obtained her phone number, he reportedly replied: “Did you forget what I do for a living?”
According to the Guardian :
On one occasion, Cohen is said to have shown Bensouda copies of photographs of her husband, which were taken covertly when the couple were visiting London. On another, according to sources, Cohen suggested to the prosecutor that a decision to open a full investigation would be detrimental to her career.
Between 2019 and 2020, the Mossad had been actively seeking compromising information on the prosecutor and took an interest in her family members.
The spy agency obtained a cache of material, including transcripts of an apparent sting operation against her husband.
Israel used the materials to mount a “smear campaign” against her, but one that ultimately proved unsuccessful.
Concerted backlash
When Khan took up the role of ICC chief prosecutor in June 2021, he proved reluctant to pick up where Bensouda had left off on the Palestine case. Presumably, he was only too aware of the retaliation from Israel against her.
Bensouda had announced in December 2019 that she had grounds to open a full criminal investigation into allegations of war crimes in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
However, in the face of a concerted backlash from western states, she delayed opening the investigation. She first sought a ruling from a pre-trial chamber of ICC judges – presumably in the hope it would serve as some kind of insurance policy – on whether the court had jurisdiction over the occupied Palestinian territories.
By February 2021 the judges confirmed what was already self-evident. The court did have such jurisdiction because Palestine had been signed up to the court since 2015.
Bensouda stepped down a few months later.
The door was now open for Khan to prosecute Israeli officials for war crimes. However, the new chief prosecutor gave every appearance – perhaps understandably – of preferring to sit on his hands.
It was not just Israel that had been fearsomely opposed to its officials being tried for war crimes. Washington was equally incensed at the prospect – sometimes, it seemed, more so than over the possibility that US officials might also face arrest warrants for crimes committed by the US military in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Between 2019 and 2020, during Trump’s first presidency, the US imposed severe visa restrictions and financial sanctions on Bensouda. Mike Pompeo, then US secretary of state, linked the sanctions to the Palestine case: “It’s clear the ICC is only putting Israel in [its] crosshairs for nakedly political purposes.”
Khan might well have avoided pursuing Israel indefinitely had it not been for the events that followed 7 October 2023.
Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, its devastation of the enclave’s homes and infrastructure, and its starvation of the entire population were actions so criminally abhorrent that UN agencies, major human rights groups and Holocaust scholars were soon all in agreement that they amounted to genocide.
In May 2024, Khan announced arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant, as well as three Hamas leaders subsequently killed by Israel.
Tsunami of threats
Shortly before Khan made that announcement, 12 senior US Senators had sent a threatening letter to the ICC: “Target Israel and we will target you.” The letter ended: “You have been warned.”
Describing Israeli and US sovereignty as inseparable, the senators reminded Khan that Washington had demonstrated “the lengths to which we will go to protect [our] sovereignty.”
A 2002 law, popularly known as “The Hague Invasion Act”, authorises the US president “to use all means necessary and appropriate” to bring about the release US persons and any allies imprisoned or detained by the ICC. Those allies, it goes without saying, include Israeli leaders.
Such threats, it should be noted, are a violation of Article 70 of the Rome Statute.
Following the issuing of the arrest warrants, there followed a tsunami of similar threats – and presumably more that have yet to become public – against Khan and the ICC.
A British-Israeli lawyer within the ICC – one known to have ties to Netanyahu’s legal adviser – warned Khan “they will destroy you and they will destroy the court” if the warrants were not rescinded. He urged Khan to “climb down the tree” and drop the case.
The UK’s foreign secretary of the time, David Cameron, phoned Khan to tell him Britain would defund the court and withdraw from the Rome Statute that founded the ICC if Khan did not back down.
Cameron warned Khan that he was “on the brink of making a huge mistake” and urged him to “take a step back and consider things”. He added that applying for arrest warrants for Israeli officials was tantamount to “dropping a hydrogen bomb”.
Meanwhile, Trump issued an executive order imposing aggressive financial sanctions against Khan and other ICC officials, including several of its judges.
Khan himself received warnings that Israel’s Mossad was continuing its operations in The Hague, where the ICC is located, to monitor and compromise the court’s investigators as they compiled evidence on Israel – just as it had done earlier under Bensouda.
Khan publicly stated that retaliatory threats and intimidation were explicitly targeting members of his own family.
Untouchable criminals
What conclusions should we draw from all of this?
Quite aside from the matter of whether Sarah’s allegations of “sexual misconduct” are true or not, it is clear that Israel and the US have been digging for dirt – and apparently ready to fabricate such dirt – on any chief prosecutor who tries to hold them to account for their crimes.
Both have indicated that they are ready to manipulate legal and political processes to ensure the outcome they desire: that they remain untouchable.
We have a template for how this plays out. Julian Assange, founder of the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks, published details in 2010 of US and British war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Almost immediately he found himself entangled in accusations of sexual misdemeanours – in his case in Sweden – that were similarly amplified by an uncritical western media.
Assange faced years in various forms of confinement while the US and UK pressured Sweden to keep alive an investigation against him Swedish prosecutors at least twice sought to drop for lack of credible evidence.
In fact, the US and UK never wanted the evidence tested – they were quite happy with a permanent, unresolved “investigation” – precisely because they knew it would have been unlikely to withstand judicial scrutiny.
The point was simply to generate constant headlines about “rape”, turning Assange into a pariah, justifying his effective disappearance from public life, severely weakening Wikileaks as a whistleblowing platform, deflecting attention from the all-too-real crimes committed by the US and Britain, and paving the way to a political show trial to extradite him to the US on entirely confected “espionage” charges.
This has been repeated in the case of Khan and the ICC. In Khan’s case, the evidence was tested and found inadequate. So the legal process has been replaced by a flagrantly political one.
Khan has been turned into a legal pariah, even stripped of his right to work as a lawyer in the UK by the British Bar Association.
The ICC has been further weakened, just as Israel and the US have expressly stated they wanted it to be. Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, has recently launched an official campaign to dismantle the ICC “brick by brick”.
He says: “Now they [the ICC] are going to see the consequences”. Consequences of what? Of seeking to enforce international law against a key US client state.
Meanwhile, accountability for the all-too-real crimes being committed by Israel in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank – and actively supported by western states like the US, Germany and Britain – recedes yet further into the background
As each brick protecting the ICC is dismantled, a brick is added to the wall of protection around Netanyahu and Israel’s genocidal war machine.
Israel, meanwhile, is barely concealing that it has been masterminding the effort to destroy the ICC.
According to Guy Azriel, the diplomatic correspondent for i24 News, Israeli foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar “oversaw a dedicated task force and employed intensive diplomatic efforts aimed at securing Khan’s removal from office”.
Hillel Neuer, director of the Israel apologist group United Nations Watch, cheered what he called “our campaign to remove” Khan, and warned Francesca Albanese, the UN’s legal expert on the occupied Palestinian territories, “you’re next”.
Like Khan, Albanese has been searching for practical, legal ways – not just rhetoric – to hold Israel and its western allies to account for the crimes in Gaza.
Predatory states
The ICC claims its work will not be affected by Khan’s removal and that the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant will still be pursued under new stewardship. That seems doubtful.
Israel and the US are cranking up the intimidation of the ICC, which has no tools – beyond the support of members states – to enforce its rulings or protect itself from the hostility of a rogue superpower.
Currently the court appears paralysed, allowing Israel to muddy the waters with interminable, and vexatious, appeals against the arrest warrants.
Any lawyer who takes up the post of ICC chief prosecutor will be only too aware of the fate that befell Khan and the campaign of intimidation against Bensouda as soon as each tried to enforce accountability on Israel and its western patrons.
It will take a very brave individual indeed to renew that task. Khan’s successor will understand that, in any further confrontation with Israel and Washington, the US will not hesitate to crush the ICC and, with it, remove the only effective restraint on criminality by powerful states.
More likely, however, the Assembly of States Parties – the political body that ousted Khan – will privately require from his successor reassurances that the new chief prosecutor reliably defer to the principle of Israeli and western impunity. Only someone less willing to ruffle feathers stands any chance of being appointed.
That was the clearest of messages sent by the Assembly when a majority of member states voted to be rid of Khan. The short-lived experiment in creating a mechanism for enforcing international law is over. We are back to the law of the jungle.
Hundred of thousands of people around the world – more likely millions – will now find themselves even more exposed to the criminal actions of predatory states. Unlike Khan’s accuser, they are unlikely to ever get their day in court.
Israel carried out massive detonations involving around 700 tons of explosives around Lebanon’s historic Beaufort Castle – a UNESCO World Heritage site – with the huge blasts being heard across large parts of the country’s south late on 30 July.
The violent detonations were carried out under the pretext of alleged Hezbollah infrastructure under the Crusader-era fortress. This has been denied by Lebanese authorities.
“Israeli forces carried out unprecedented bombardment in southern Lebanon, triggering a series of powerful explosions that residents said were unlike anything heard in recent years,” Al Manar TV reported on Friday.
Lebanon’s National News Agency(NNA) also reported the blasts, calling them “massive” and “unprecedented,” while confirming that they were heard across the whole south.
“The blasts echoed across all of south Lebanon with unprecedented intensity, and their shockwaves reached the Iqlim al-Kharroub and Khaldeh regions,” the report said, adding that “violent explosions in the Beaufort Castle area shattered the glass of several windows in homes in the town of Qlayaa.”
Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri condemned the violent detonations.
“The shockwaves from these terrorist explosions, caused by 700 tons of explosives, registered 3.8 on seismic monitoring scales and were felt by Lebanese citizens from the South and Mount Lebanon all the way to the outskirts of Beirut,” he said.
Lebanon’s Culture Ministry released a statement saying Beaufort Castle was unharmed.
However, it stressed that because the area remains under Israeli occupation, specialized technical teams have been prevented from accessing the site in order to conduct a proper assessment of any potential damage.
Earlier in July, the castle had been placed on UNESCO’s list of sites “in danger.”
The massive detonations were announced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s War Ministry late on Thursday evening.
In a joint statement, Netanyahu and War Minister Israel Katz claimed a Hezbollah tunnel network under the castle was destroyed.
They also confirmed the unprecedented amounts of explosives used in their “operation.”
Israeli occupation forces will “remain in the security zone in southern Lebanon and will continue to destroy all terror infrastructure to prevent any attempt by Hezbollah to restore its capabilities,” they added.
Lebanon’s Directorate General of Antiquities has previously rejected Israeli claims that the site contained Hezbollah infrastructure.
Israeli maps and videos detailing “terrorist infrastructure” are fabricated, and the fortress has been under Lebanese state administration since 2000, placing under enhanced protection in line with the 1954 Hague Convention.
Lebanese geologists have warned that demolitions of this scale near major fault lines could potentially trigger human-induced seismic activity.
Israeli forces occupied the castle in May 2026 and framed the move as a major strategic victory. Hebrew media challenged this narrative at the time.
Israeli forces were unable to maintain a consistent presence in the historic site due to constant resistance operations – namely Hezbollah’s FPV drone strikes that have inflicted heavy casualties and losses on the Israeli occupation forces since March.
Since the violent detonations near the castle on Thursday night, Israel has continued destroying civilian infrastructure across south Lebanon.
Heavy explosions were recorded in Deir Siryan on Friday, while Israeli shelling continued to target the Ali al-Taher Hill.
Over 4,300 have been killed and more than a million displaced by Israel in Lebanon since 2 March.
Tens of thousands of civilian homes and buildings – amounting to practically all of south Lebanon’s border villages – have been eradicated.
Israeli occupation forces refuse to withdraw, and the Lebanese government has signed a US-brokered deal allowing Tel Aviv to maintain its illegal presence in the country.
Donald Trump entered the July 7th/8th NATO summit having recently condemned the alliance as a “paper tiger” over its collective failure to abet the calamitous Zionist-American war on Iran and repeatedly threatened to withdraw US forces from Europe, with reveries of Greenland’s annexation still abounding. He left boasting of the intense “love” and “unity” within NATO, while praising member states for their reaffirmed commitment to spending ever-increasing vast sums on ‘defense’. Meanwhile, the Ukraine proxy war’s world-threatening continuation appears assured for potentially years to come.
As such, the NATO summit signifies a significant triumph in Britain’s never-ending battle to exploit the US Empire to further its own objectives. Highly revealing leaked files amply spell out how the alliance is a key mechanism by which Washington’s “interest” in Europe and West Asia is insidiously maintained, via London’s covert and overt machinations. NATO provides an invaluable “umbrella”, by which Britain projects economic, intelligence, military, and political power throughout these regions and the wider world, while countering competitors.
The documents were authored in March 2021 by Chris Donnelly, a veteran British military intelligence apparatchik who masterminded NATO expansion into the former Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact, and Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s. Now an influential Ministry of Defense advisor guiding London and Kiev’s escalatory strategies in the proxy war, he writes in the leaks of Britain’s perpetual struggle to retain the “security” provided by “US military power.” This, combined with access to Washington’s globe-spanning intelligence network, “underpins our own position in the world.”
From Britain’s perspective, “the political solidarity between member nations” within NATO and “the permanent political and military mechanisms that enable collaboration between its members and with its partners,” are as vitally important as the alliance’s capacity for “collective defence and security.” For example, “interoperability” between NATO members is considered “both a political and a military asset” and “a valuable product”, enabling countries “with vastly different political and military systems to operate together.” That includes “[undertaking] complex and stressful military activities,” and other joint functions.
This makes NATO “a civilian-led political organisation… whose main tool is armed force,” intimately entrenched within its 32 members. Lacking any democratic structures internally and accountable to none externally, the alliance exerts enormous, often unseen influence over members’ constituent governments, security and intelligence services, militaries, police forces, and more. These “extensive political collaborative mechanisms” mean states can be corralled into adopting policies or taking actions regardless of local public will, or whether such moves actively harm their safety and/or national interests.
“Without the US, there is no NATO,” Donnelly notes. Hence, to “keep the US interested” in the alliance, Washington “must see a return on its (still very large and disproportionate) investment.” The 2026 NATO summit ended with European leaders pledging to plunge tens of billions into US-made military equipment for Kiev over this year and next, a prospect offering Washington quite some “return”. But the British have other means of encouraging and maintaining US hegemony, for their personal profit.
‘Symmetrical exchange’
Elsewhere, Donnelly writes of the “special relationship” – the “political/military/security/intelligence” alliance between Britain and the US, “which has existed since World War II.” He notes how from inception, Washington was driven “by how much the US needed something from the UK to help the US develop and maintain its superpower status.” In other words, “what the UK could provide the US… the US could not itself produce.” Accordingly, London “traditionally contributed” its historical “knowledge and experience” to Washington’s crusade for global domination.
This frequently entailed “intelligence-gathering and analysis; technical expertise, especially inventiveness, ideas, and scientific information; the experience of having dealt with a situation new to the US.” Meanwhile, “political and military support” was provided by London “wherever this supported US policy interests and to help the US get what it wanted in the world.” While Britain’s methods in every regard have evolved significantly over time, these ultimate underpinning and overriding objectives in so many matters military, intelligence, foreign, and even domestic have not changed:
“Being able to provide something the US wants and needs is still the only reliable way to get US respect and to maintain the ‘special relationship’… Today, this is translated into whatever will help the US maintain its position in the world, promote US interests… and ensure US economic well-being. If we can still provide something useful for the US, something they cannot do for themselves, then they will be prepared to reciprocate very generously.”
Donnelly frames this concord as a perpetual “barter deal” – not a “symmetrical exchange” or “issue of cost and payment,” as “if the US can buy what it is deficient in on the world market, then there is no basis for the ‘special relationship’.” He references Britain’s consistent “willingness and ability to deploy a significant contingent of effective army… to reinforce US military operations… readiness to share casualties… [and] continued readiness to host US forces on UK soil or on overseas dependencies” as historic pull factors.
Britain can also “employ other kinds of power to achieve an effect which supports US policy or interests.” This includes “economic power, political influence, a technical ability, such as cyber-warfare, or a civilian state-building or humanitarian relief capability.” Accordingly, files leaked by Edward Snowden indicate British signals intelligence agency GCHQ is acutely aware it “must pull its weight and be seen to pull its weight” by its NSA ‘partner’, to reap vast US funding for elaborate foreign spying operations.
Donnelly concludes, “On balance, the special relationship is of real importance to the UK, but also of some worth to the US… The burden of sustaining the special relationship falls principally to the UK. The US may well lose out if the relationship fails, but it will not notice the loss as much as the UK will. However, the special relationship is neither permanent nor guaranteed. We cannot take it for granted. It needs to be worked at constantly, refreshed and renewed.”
‘Defense capabilities’
On the subject of renewal, Donnelly lamented how London’s utility to the US Empire had been “significantly diminished” over recent years. This resulted from the British Army’s “indifferent military performance in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the “run-down of our intelligence capability,” and “the perception (on the part of the US and other allies) the UK is no longer investing sufficiently in its military to be able to play the leading role it used to do in Europe, both as an operator and as a technical innovator.”
Donnelly moreover noted Britain “used to be at the cutting edge of some aspects of military thinking,” but had in many respects “lost this edge.” For example, “we can no longer instruct the US on how best to conduct counter-insurgency operations.” Furthermore, the “special relationship” was “put under pressure” by President Barack Obama’s “reorientation of US strategy to focus on China.” Instituted in 2011, this “pivot to the Pacific” was sustained under subsequent administrations, with varying degrees of intensity.
Donnelly cheered how “the Ukraine and Syrian conflicts have reawakened US interest a little” in Europe and West Asia, meaning “Russia can no longer be ignored” by Washington. Nonetheless, he warned, “we have not yet turned the corner.” Unmentioned by Donnelly was his personal role in disrupting Washington’s “pivot” toward China by inflaming the Ukrainian war, to ensure the Empire didn’t “ignore” Russia. He openly articulated this malign mission while testifying to a British parliamentary defense committee in July 2014.
Donnelly proposed establishing a permanent British “standing force” in the Baltics, to conduct military exercises on Russia’s border, while serving as a “tripwire” to “dissuade and deter” Moscow. He believed it “very important” for London to pursue this strategy, as “Britain’s leadership… will encourage the Americans to take a greater interest in NATO and reinforce their support of the organisation.” He added, “we have an important role to play in bringing the Americans in more,” as “US eyes” had recently been directed “away from Europe.”
Resultantly, London provocatively dispatched thousands of soldiers to Russia’s periphery. Moreover, Britain took the lead in training Ukrainian forces – including notorious Neo-Nazi paramilitary factions such as the Azov Battalion. At the time, Washington adhered to the “Obama Doctrine”, which stipulated the US should avoid escalation against Moscow and prohibited provision of “lethal aid” and other military assistance to Kiev. A February 2015Kyiv Post report on Britain’s training program quoted Donnelly at length, suggesting his central involvement in its delivery:
“This is just the sort of help Ukraine needs now. The British Army obviously brings considerable operational experience and a pretty good reputation.”
As Donnelly predicted in his defense committee testimony, Britain’s tutelage of Ukrainian forces had the desired effect of “bringing the Americans in more.” In July 2015, it was announced the US would formally begin training Kiev’s military by the end of the year. Still, a State Department spokesperson stressed the effort was merely “small unit training… to help strengthen Ukraine’s internal defense capabilities.” They firmly asserted Washington’s focus in the country remained on “nonlethal aid” and “there is no plan to change that.”
Fast forward to December 2017, and Trump greenlit the provision of weaponry to Kiev. It was among a number of hostile acts during his first term that ratcheted tensions between Washington and Moscow, placing Ukraine firmly on the warpath with Russia. The recent NATO summit, and subsequent pledges by the US to assist Ukraine directly with drone and patriot missile production, show the Empire has “turned the corner” at last. US “interest” in Europe is assured, for at least as long as the proxy conflict endures.
The words ‘killed’, ‘injured’, ‘maimed’, and the like often lose a great part of their meaning when they are repeated so relentlessly.
Take, for example, a headline like: “13 Palestinians Killed in Gaza, Others Wounded.” Though many of us can still feel a deep sense of sadness over such a tragedy, the news itself becomes less shocking over time.
According to figures produced by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, Israel has killed and wounded a total of over 250,000 Palestinians since the start of the genocide in 2023.
The tally is updated daily because the killing never stops.
On July 23, six Palestinians were killed in Gaza. A day earlier, 13 were killed, and the day before that, nine others were killed, and so on.
It is this “and so on” that makes us lose our sense, over time, of what these tragedies actually entail. These are innocent people who are burned alive in their tents, bombed in their cars, or killed while attempting to enjoy a brief moment of respite from the scorching heat on the beach.
Among the nine killed on July 21, an entire family, including four young children, was wiped out in a single strike. As reports of Israel’s daily harvest of Palestinian lives in Gaza multiply, journalists too often neglect to humanize those killed.
A photo circulating on social media showed three of those children: a boy wearing a T-shirt that read ‘Santa Monica Beach’; his bespectacled sister in a pink shirt, proudly holding a certificate of achievement from her school; and their youngest sister, posing gently.
These three represent every single Palestinian child killed since the start of this genocide. According to UN and international estimates, over 21,000 children have been killed in Gaza, with tens of thousands more maimed or buried under the rubble.
Though the daily routine of killing makes the tragedy feel less shocking for those merely hearing the numbers, it becomes infinitely more tragic for those who must bear it directly. In Gaza, not a single family has been spared the loss of loved ones, making the grief compound day after day.
There are no words to describe the collective pain of Gaza.
What makes the tragedy even more unbearable is that the entire world knows what has transpired and continues to transpire in Gaza, yet fails to do anything about it. We keep track of the numbers, we point to Israel’s barbarity, we decry the failure of international institutions, and we shake our heads in despair.
Yet the outcome remains unchanged: the death toll rises, and new statistics are generated daily to remind us of the magnitude of the crisis.
A July 23 joint report by the FAO, UNICEF, and the World Food Programme found that 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza face acute food insecurity.
The report also warned that more than 74,000 children under five are expected to require urgent treatment for acute malnutrition over the coming year.
This report was released on the same day that Gaza health authorities updated the official death toll to over 73,311 Palestinians. That number is already higher now, as more have been killed since.
On that same day, Thameen Al-Kheetan of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) stated that “no place in Gaza can be considered safe.”
That statement is true, of course, but it is also the most well-known fact in the world right now. No one is contesting it. And yet, no one acts: Israel keeps bombing, the US Congress continues assigning it more weapons, and the rest of the world tracks the death tally.
Meanwhile, Israel—which has seized control of even more territory in Gaza since the so-called ceasefire—is now constructing massive earth barriers stretching an estimated 23 kilometers across the Strip.
Though it was never fair to begin with, even the original Trump Gaza plan never mentioned the building of interior borders, the theft of additional land, or the concentration of displaced Palestinians into tiny enclaves within an already small piece of land.
Israel’s long-term plan is not only to maintain permanent military control over Gaza, as top Israeli officials have declared, but also to prolong its torment indefinitely.
Even as I write this article, news reports indicate that four more Palestinians have just been killed. It is unlikely the number will remain that low; the Israeli army rarely kills in small numbers.
But even these small numbers represent human beings whose grief cannot be measured in statistics, summed up in official statements, or reduced to clichéd headlines.
Nor do survivors cling to the empty promise of international law prevailing over US-backed impunity. History has made Palestinians cynical. For generations, through every massacre and land theft since the 1948 Nakba, waiting for justice has yielded nothing but hollow promises and rising body counts.
The only difference between the past and the present is that today, we all know, see, and hear exactly what is happening in Gaza and across Palestine.
The very least we can do is refuse to turn our backs or reduce the genocide before our eyes to numbers.
If we allow that to happen, we become culpable, too: Israel does the killing, using American arms, while we sit by, counting the dead and shaking our heads at the sad state of the world.
Author’s Note: The framing of prescription drugs as the third leading cause of death, associated with Peter Gøtzsche and Barbara Starfield, is treated here as an underestimate. When heart disease and cancer are themselves largely produced by the same profession’s pharmaceutical and dietary framework, ranking the profession third against its own products misses the arithmetic. The essay does not argue that individual doctors are malicious. It argues that the training installed by the 1910 Flexner Report was an inversion of what heals, that the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations exported that training globally, and that a century of it has produced the epidemic of chronic disease now called the natural burden of modern life.
The essay operates in two registers. When examining establishment evidence against itself, establishment terminology appears. When stating the author’s own analytical position, terrain language governs.
This essay discusses medical topics for informational purposes. It is not medical advice.
The Prosecution
Sarah Myhill has been investigated by the United Kingdom’s General Medical Council more than thirty times across two decades, more than any doctor in the Council’s history.¹ Not one of the complaints came from her own patients. Every complaint came from other medical professionals and regulatory officials. At the 2010 interim hearing, over 800 patient support letters were submitted alongside a petition with 3,615 signatures. Tom Kark, the Queen’s Counsel acting for the government’s prosecution, described the difficulty of the case in plain terms: the problem with the Myhill cases, he said, was that all the patients had improved and all refused to give witness statements.
The prosecution’s complaint was that her patients got better.
Her practice addresses cellular metabolism through nutritional support and toxin removal. Her patients improve. Her regulator has spent twenty years trying to stop her.
What kind of medical profession prosecutes its healers? A profession whose training was designed to do the opposite of what heals. That training runs across the lifespan of every person the profession treats, from injection in infancy to intubation in the ICU at eighty-three, and it has produced the epidemic of chronic disease now called the natural burden of modern life. The pattern operates in London, Sydney, Toronto, Berlin, Tokyo, and São Paulo because the training that produces it was standardized globally from a single source.
A child has a fever of 102.4. The parent reaches for the cabinet, measures a dose from the red and white bottle, and delivers it to the child’s mouth. The doctor’s advice at the last checkup was clear: bring the fever down.
The child’s body raised the temperature to accelerate metabolic clearing. Higher body heat speeds the enzymatic processes that break down and eliminate whatever the terrain is discarding. The fever is the operation. The intervention interrupts it. The doctor did not fail to know this. The doctor was trained to do the opposite.
The inversion is not confined to fever. It structures every intervention the doctor will offer. The body cleanses through fever, discharge, inflammation, diarrhea, skin eruption; training teaches suppression of each. The body signals distress through cholesterol, glucose, blood pressure; training teaches blocking the signals. The body’s operations and the doctor’s interventions map onto each other with the precision of a mirror.
The pattern was installed deliberately and runs across the lifespan of every person the doctor will treat. The evidence assembles across five thresholds: birth, childhood, adult screening, chronic illness, and death. Applied at scale, this training produces harm at scale. The scale is now planetary.
Joy Garner’s Control Group Survey, conducted in the United States because the American vaccine exemption structure was one of the few environments in the industrialized world where a large fully unvaccinated cohort could still be found, established chronic disease in the fully unvaccinated adult population at 2.64 percent. In the vaccinated it runs at 60 percent.² Standard attributable-fraction methodology assigns 95.6 percent of chronic disease in the vaccinated population to vaccination itself.³ Cancer, heart disease, and the diagnoses that account for the majority of deaths across the industrialized world are conditions Garner counted.
This is the arithmetic behind the essay’s subtitle. Heart disease is ranked first among causes of death in every industrialized country. Cancer is second. Prescription drugs are ranked third by Peter Gøtzsche and Barbara Starfield. The ranking treats the first two categories as phenomena the doctor arrived to treat. They are not. The cholesterol hypothesis that produced the statin era, the seed oil epidemic, and the sugar substitution was invented and sustained by the same profession, and exported through the WHO and every major national dietary guideline body.⁴ The injected substrate from childhood, the screening cascades that route the healthy into oncology pipelines, and the suppression of acute clearing across the adult lifespan produce much of what is later counted as cancer. When the top two categories on the mortality list are themselves iatrogenic, ranking iatrogenic third makes no arithmetic sense. The profession is not the third leading cause of death. It is the first.
Not About Bad People
Most doctors entered medicine because they wanted to help. The individual doctor is not the argument. What was installed in the individual doctor is the argument.
The system runs on convergent opportunism, not coordination. The physician, the researcher, the regulator, the journal editor, the medical school department chair — each pursues rational self-interest within a structure whose maintenance no single actor is responsible for. Upton Sinclair named the local mechanism: a man does not understand what his salary depends on not understanding.⁵ Applied across a profession of a million practitioners, that mechanism produces a system that behaves as if it were coordinated while requiring no coordinator.
There is a category of medical practice this argument does not address: acute trauma care. Broken femurs need setting, gunshot wounds need pressure and sutures, genuine appendicitis needs surgery. These interventions support the body’s repair rather than opposing it, and this is what a critic means by “doctors save lives every day.” They do. The concern here is the other category — the management of chronic illness and the maintenance of ostensibly healthy people through screening, prescription, and intervention. This is the majority of what modern medicine does, and the majority of what it earns.
The life expectancy objection runs like this: populations in the industrialized world lived to roughly 47 in 1900 and to the high seventies today, and medicine is given the credit. The arithmetic does not support it. Most of the increase was compression at the bottom — the reduction of infant and childhood mortality, which the data traces to sanitation, nutrition, and clean water rather than to medical intervention. Life expectancy at age 65 has moved much less: from 76 in 1900 to about 85 today. American life expectancy has been declining since 2014.⁶ British, Australian, and continental European life expectancy has stagnated or reversed across the same period. Cardiovascular disease, overdose, and metabolic collapse are the categories driving the decline — domains the profession has managed with confidence for decades.
The Installation
Ignaz Semmelweis noticed in 1847 that women whose babies were delivered by doctors died at rates several times higher than women whose babies were delivered by midwives. The doctors moved between autopsies and deliveries without washing their hands. He proposed the connection and required his students to wash with chlorinated lime. Deaths in his ward fell dramatically.⁷ His colleagues rejected the finding. He was driven from his position, committed to an asylum, and died there at forty-seven, beaten by guards, according to his autopsy. A century later, Bernard Lown challenged the strict-bedrest dogma for heart attack patients and let his patients sit up in a chair at the end of the bed. His colleagues met him on the ward with Nazi salutes, chanting “Heil Hitler” at a Jewish physician for suggesting that his patients need not lie motionless for six weeks. Strict bedrest is now understood to have killed tens of millions of people worldwide. The man who challenged it received the salute.⁵ Medicine has a documented history of destroying the practitioners who correctly identify iatrogenic harm.
The mechanism that produced modern medicine’s training is documented. In 1910, Abraham Flexner, funded by the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, published a report evaluating American medical schools.⁸ Within two decades, the number of American medical schools fell from 162 to 66.⁹ Schools teaching homeopathy, naturopathy, and terrain-based approaches were closed. The surviving schools adopted the curriculum the foundations had specified. Rockefeller money — which was Standard Oil money — flowed to compliant institutions. The American Medical Association’s consultation clause prohibited its members from associating with practitioners outside the approved framework, creating a professional monopoly enforced by economic exclusion.
This is the anti-knowledge point. Flexner did not fill a gap in medical education. The gap did not exist. Many of the 162 schools operating in 1910 taught how the body actually heals — homeopathic, naturopathic, terrain-based traditions with functioning clinical practices and patient outcomes that outperformed the emerging pharmaceutical model. What Flexner destroyed was not ignorance but knowledge. What replaced it was not more knowledge but its inversion: a curriculum designed to suppress the body’s healing responses rather than support them. The distinction matters. A profession that lacks the knowledge to heal can be educated. A profession trained to do the opposite of what heals cannot be corrected without abandoning the training that constitutes it.
The model did not stay inside American borders. Flexner himself was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation to conduct the same evaluation of European medical education in 1912. The Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Division and its China Medical Board carried the template outward across the following decades, funding medical schools in England, Belgium, France, Brazil, Thailand, and China on the same pharmaceutical model, closing or defunding institutions that taught otherwise.¹⁰ The Peking Union Medical College, opened in 1921, became the pharmaceutical training center for East Asia. The World Health Organization, established in 1948, took over the export function internationally. By the middle of the twentieth century, every major medical school on the planet was training doctors on essentially the same curriculum.
John D. Rockefeller personally used homeopathic physicians for his own family throughout his life.¹¹ The man who understood terrain well enough to choose it for himself directed his foundations to fund only allopathic schools, at home and abroad. The framework that produces pharmaceutical dependency was profitable. Terrain medicine was not.
The consequences run through every medical school on the developed continents. Approximately two-thirds of American academic department chairs have financial relationships with pharmaceutical companies, a figure equivalent audits in the UK, Australia, Canada, and continental Europe have found to be broadly comparable.¹² The average medical student, whether in Boston or Manchester or Melbourne, receives roughly twenty contact hours of nutrition instruction across four years, less than one percent of classroom time.¹³ A doctor cannot teach what they were never taught. Taught that symptoms are the malfunction and that the body attacks itself, they prescribe drugs that suppress both. What the training installs is what the training produces.
Birth
The body knows how to birth. Every human being who has ever lived was produced by that process, mostly without medical management.
The training the modern obstetrician receives teaches management, extraction, and control. The process is broken into stages, each with an approved intervention. Consent is technically obtained, in labor, on a hospital bed, surrounded by people in scrubs speaking with confidence and urgency. It is not consent as most people understand the term.
Pitocin, synthetic oxytocin, is delivered by IV during the third stage of labor as a matter of routine.¹⁴ Cochrane reviews show it reduces hemorrhage rates in the overall population, but the absolute risk reduction in low-risk women is small: hundreds of women receive the drug to prevent one hemorrhage that would have occurred. Women who have experienced both physiological and pharmacological third stage describe them as fundamentally different. Natural contractions are productive. Synthetic contractions are violent and overwhelming. Sometimes the drug closes the cervix before the placenta has exited, at which point a doctor’s hand goes inside the uterus to remove the fragments manually.
Fundal massage — deep kneading pressure on the abdomen minutes after delivery — is administered by protocol despite evidence not supporting routine use; many women describe it as the most painful part of their birth. Controlled cord traction is standard. The placenta, left alone, releases in ten to thirty minutes with the mother in a state of physiological calm. Traction rushes what biology completes cleanly and can cause retained fragments that hemorrhage later.
None of these interventions is birth. Each opposes what the body is doing, delivered by a professional trained to consider the intervention a positive contribution.
Childhood
The body of a child clears through fever, discharge, rash, mucus, cough, vomiting, diarrhea, and skin eruption. Every acute episode is the terrain restoring itself. What passes through the child is the accumulated burden the child was carrying: dietary residue, environmental exposure, emotional load. The episode is not the disease. The episode is the resolution of the disease.
Training installs two responses. The first is injection: the introduction of foreign material, including heavy metals, industrial chemicals, and animal-derived proteins, into a body that has developed no method of eliminating them through the digestive tract, because the injection bypasses the digestive tract. The second is suppression: antipyretics for fever, antihistamines for discharge, topical steroids for skin eruption, antibiotics for whatever the acute episode has been diagnosed as.
The pediatric schedule delivers dozens of dose-equivalents of injected pharmaceutical products before the child reaches eighteen. The American schedule has risen from fewer than ten doses in the early 1980s to roughly seventy today. The Australian, British, and continental European schedules are broadly comparable, differing in specific brand names and timing but tracking the same trajectory over the same decades.¹⁵ Each addition is approved by national regulators who move between industry and agency.
The substrate has been photographed. Antonietta Gatti and Stefano Montanari, materials scientists at the Italian National Council of Research, examined forty-four injectable vaccines under electron microscope in 2017 and found tungsten, lead, stainless steel, bismuth, gold, silver, cerium, and rare earth alloys. Nothing on any package insert declared any of it.¹⁶ Pediatric injections had the highest particle counts: Varilrix at 2,723 particles per twenty-microliter drop, Infanrix hexa at 1,821. The body has no enzymatic machinery for breaking down these metals. The particles do not biodegrade. They lodge.
Stanley Plotkin, called an indispensable authority on vaccines by Bill Gates, testified under oath in 2018 that his early vaccine trials had used orphans, mentally disabled children in institutions, and the babies of women in prison.¹⁷ Asked whether he had ethical concerns, he indicated that this was how it had been done. The Nuremberg Code, established after the war to prevent this specific category of medical practice, was not mentioned as a limiting factor in his career.
Roman Bystrianyk pulled the mortality data from archives that had not been digitized.¹⁸ Between 1850 and 1940, measles mortality in the industrialized world fell by 98 percent — the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963. Whooping cough deaths fell from over 1,000 per million children to fewer than 10 per million between 1850 and 1950, before the pertussis vaccine was in widespread use. Scarlet fever, for which no vaccine was ever deployed, declined at the same rate. The mortality collapse was driven by sanitation, nutrition, and clean water. Medical students see charts that begin in 1950, after the decline was complete.
The child is being loaded with substances the body will spend years attempting to sequester and eliminate. When acute episodes arise as the body attempts to clear the burden, the pediatrician suppresses them. The suppression drives the material deeper. Chronic conditions emerge. What is called childhood asthma, eczema, allergy, autism is in significant part the wake of this process. This is the substrate driving Garner’s gradient: 2.64 percent is what a child’s baseline looks like when the loading does not happen. 60 percent is what happens when it does.
The Pipeline
The man at fifty-five is asymptomatic. He walks into his annual checkup because his wife asked him to. He has no complaints. The physician orders a standard panel.
The cholesterol comes back at 225. The blood pressure reads 134/82. The fasting glucose is 108. Each number crosses a threshold. Each threshold has been progressively lowered by guideline panels whose members hold financial relationships with the manufacturers of the drugs used to treat the redefined condition. In 1988, a cholesterol of 240 was considered elevated; by 2001, the threshold was 200.¹⁹ In 2003, the American Diabetes Association lowered the pre-diabetes fasting glucose threshold to 100.²⁰ In 2017, the blood pressure threshold was lowered to 130/80, converting roughly thirty million Americans into hypertensive patients overnight.²¹ British, European, Australian, and Canadian panels typically adopt the American thresholds within a year or two.
The healthy man leaves the office with three prescriptions: a statin, an ACE inhibitor, metformin. Each drug produces the next diagnosis. The statin causes muscle symptoms in 7 to 29 percent of users;²² the aches are attributed to aging, the man walks less, his bone density declines, and a bisphosphonate is prescribed — a class linked to atypical femur fractures and osteonecrosis of the jaw. The ACE inhibitor produces a persistent cough in 10 to 15 percent of patients; it is switched to an ARB, which produces dizziness, which elevates fall risk. The metformin causes gastrointestinal symptoms in up to 25 percent of patients; these are addressed with another medication or attributed to irritable bowel syndrome, which becomes its own diagnostic pathway.
Every number the man’s body produced was information. Cholesterol delivers repair material to damaged blood vessels; blocking the delivery does not repair the vessels. Elevated blood pressure indicates the body is working harder to move blood through compromised tissue; blocking the pressure does not repair the tissue. Elevated glucose indicates the terrain is not processing carbohydrates effectively; blocking the glucose does not restore the processing. Each intervention addresses the signal, introduces new material the body must now cleanse, and produces effects that become the next diagnosis. The man is progressively poisoned by his own care.
The screening industry that generated the initial three thresholds operates continuously alongside the pharmacy. The distinction it buries is between disease-specific mortality and all-cause mortality: a screening program can reduce deaths from breast cancer while total deaths remain unchanged, because the treatment kills as many people as the disease prevented. Across the major screening programs, when all-cause mortality is calculated, the benefit largely disappears.²³
Behind the arithmetic sits a reservoir. Approximately 70 percent of men in their seventies have prostate cancer at autopsy, while only about 3 percent die from it. Up to 39 percent of middle-aged women show evidence of breast cancer at autopsy; lifetime risk of dying from it is under 4 percent. Polyps sit in half of older colons. Every screening test dips into this reservoir. Every person pulled from it becomes a patient who cannot benefit from treatment, because they were never at risk.²³
PSA testing has been called a public health disaster by Richard Ablin, the researcher who discovered the antigen.²⁴ For every man whose life is extended by PSA screening, estimates suggest 30 to 100 are overdiagnosed and treated with surgery or radiation. Impotence and incontinence are the price of the overtreatment. Mammography follows the same pattern: the Cochrane review found that for every 2,000 women screened over ten years, approximately one has her life extended and ten are treated unnecessarily for conditions that would never have progressed.²⁵ The colonoscopy case was decided in 2022 when the NEJM published the NordICC trial, the first randomized controlled study of colonoscopy screening ever conducted. It followed over 84,000 people for ten years and found no significant reduction in deaths from colorectal cancer.²⁶ The CT scan produces the cancers it looks for: a 2025 analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine projected that the 93 million CT scans performed in the United States in 2023 will cause approximately 103,000 future cancers, roughly 5 percent of all new cancer diagnoses each year.²⁷
The system is sustained, in significant part, by the people it overdiagnosed. Every woman treated for a non-progressing DCIS becomes, in her own telling, a survivor. Every man whose indolent prostate cancer was cut out becomes a testimonial at the next fundraiser. They believe the screening saved their lives, and they say so — to their families, their neighbors, and their parliaments. The screening programs’ most effective advocates are the people who never had the disease being screened for. They are not lying. The framework that taught them to be grateful cannot acknowledge the mistake without dismantling itself.²³
The pipeline captures the healthy adult and converts him into a chronic patient by treating the body’s signals as the malfunction.
The count is not small, and it is not confined to one country. Approximately 40 million Americans take statins; global prescriptions run to hundreds of millions. Approximately one million prostate biopsies are performed each year in the United States alone; between 0.5 and 2 percent produce sepsis.²⁸ Nearly 500,000 American women have been diagnosed and treated for DCIS since widespread mammography began, with proportionally similar figures from the UK, Australia, and continental Europe; the majority of those cancers would never have progressed. Peter Gøtzsche estimated prescription drugs to be the third leading cause of death in the industrialized world, at approximately 200,000 attributable American deaths per year. Barbara Starfield’s broader iatrogenic estimate ran to 225,000 American deaths when unnecessary surgery, medication errors, hospital-acquired infection, and adverse drug effects were combined. Neither figure includes the deaths from heart disease and cancer whose upstream causation is the profession’s own framework. At the Gøtzsche rate, American medicine alone kills more Americans every year than the country lost in Vietnam, and more every two years than in World War II. Since 1910, at any defensible average of the annual rate, American medicine has killed more Americans than the country has lost in every war it has ever fought, combined. Applied globally, the iatrogenic death total across the century since Flexner runs into figures that no single war or genocide of the modern era approaches.²⁹
Chronic Illness
Multiple sclerosis is labeled autoimmune, incurable, and progressive. The words function together. Autoimmune assigns cause to the body itself, a self-attack whose origin cannot be investigated because it is defined as intrinsic. Incurable forecloses investigation of resolution. Progressive tells the patient what to expect and enrolls them in a lifetime of pharmaceutical management.
Hal Huggins found that MS patients who had mercury amalgams removed from their teeth showed elimination of specific protein bands in their cerebrospinal fluid that had been present before removal.³⁰ The bands were the establishment’s own laboratory markers. Their disappearance corresponded to clinical improvement. The finding was not integrated into treatment protocols. Herbert Shelton described the mechanism a century ago.³¹ The body attempts to expel accumulated toxic burden through acute symptoms; pharmaceutical intervention suppresses the symptoms and adds new toxic material; the new material triggers new symptoms, which are suppressed in turn. What medicine calls progressive disease is the predictable consequence of continuous poisoning combined with continuous suppression.
The financial architecture rewards the labeling. Chronic Care Management billing codes provide recurring monthly reimbursement for conditions expected to last at least twelve months. MS drugs cost fifty-seven to ninety-three thousand dollars per year. A 2025 JAMA Network Open study found pharmaceutical companies paid $164 million to doctors treating MS patients between 2015 and 2019, and physicians who received these payments prescribed the paying companies’ drugs at higher rates.³²
The words the doctor uses are physiologically active. A 1983 British trial divided over 400 cancer patients into three groups; two received chemotherapy, the third received saline. Among the 130 patients who believed they were receiving chemotherapy but were actually getting salt water, 31 percent developed hair loss, 35 percent nausea, and 22 percent vomiting.³³ The side effects they expected produced themselves. A meta-analysis of 130 studies covering 8,219 participants found the nocebo effect clinically significant across somatic and affective outcomes.³⁴ In 1992, a man diagnosed with metastatic esophageal cancer died within weeks of his prognosis. His autopsy found a single two-centimeter nodule on his liver. There was no metastatic spread. His doctor stated the pathological cause of death could not be determined.³⁵ The expectation killed him.
When a doctor tells a twenty-five-year-old that his condition is incurable and progressive, the doctor is administering an intervention. It has no informed consent form, no adverse event reporting system. It is delivered with authority to a patient trained since childhood to trust that authority. It measurably worsens outcomes. Neither the doctor nor the patient recognizes it as an intervention at all.
The Specialties
The inversion runs across every branch of medicine. Two specialties demonstrate it with unusual clarity.
Psychiatry invented the diseases it treats. The chemical imbalance theory of depression, offered as biological fact to millions of patients, was never demonstrated in the research literature. Kenneth Kendler, coeditor of Psychological Medicine, wrote in a 2005 editorial that the search for neurochemical explanations of psychiatric disorders had failed to produce the biological markers the field had promised.³⁶ Robert Whitaker’s investigation of American disability data found psychiatric disability rose sixfold between 1955 and 2007 — a curve that inverts what any real treatment would produce. Martin Harrow’s fifteen-year NIMH follow-up of schizophrenia patients found 40 percent of those who stopped taking antipsychotics were in recovery at fifteen years, against 5 percent of those who remained on medication. The FDA’s 2004 meta-analysis of pediatric antidepressant trials found children on the drugs showed twice the rate of suicidal thinking and behavior compared with placebo.³⁶
Dentistry runs the same inversion on the mouth. No dental school in the United States has a preventive specialty; the American Dental Association has been asked to establish one and declined. Weston Price, who chaired the ADA’s research section from 1914 to 1928, documented in the 1930s that fourteen isolated populations on traditional diets showed decay in less than one percent of teeth examined, and that the same populations one generation after the introduction of refined flour and sugar showed decay in thirty to sixty percent. Ralph Steinman’s laboratory work at Loma Linda established that teeth are hydraulic systems governed by an endocrine signal from the hypothalamus, and that sugar reverses the fluid flow, pulling debris inward through microscopic tubules. The bacteria on the tooth surface are not the cause of the cavity; they are pulled in by the reversal of the flow that should have carried them out. Silver amalgam fillings are approximately fifty percent mercury by weight and release vapor for the life of the filling. Ninety-two percent of American adults have had caries. The specialty that could prevent it does not exist because the profession that repairs it cannot fund itself by graduating dentists who advise patients to eat liver and pastured butter.³⁷
Death
Dying used to happen at home. Within living memory, most people died surrounded by family, in their own beds. The process was understood as natural — not comfortable, not painless, not medicalized.
The condition that brings the person into the ICU is often the accumulated wake of substrate delivered by the same profession decades earlier. The terminal cancer at eighty-three is not the natural end of a long life. It is the destination of a trajectory that began with the injection at age two and was compounded across the decades by pharmaceuticals administered for signals the body was sending.
Roughly half of Americans now die in hospitals or nursing facilities.³⁸ The proportions in the UK, Australia, Canada, and continental Europe are comparable. End-of-life spending absorbs between 13 and 25 percent of Medicare program costs, with equivalent audits of the NHS and Australian and Canadian systems showing similar concentrations.³⁹ Chemotherapy administered within two weeks of death — treatment that cannot extend life meaningfully and almost certainly worsens its quality — happens to a measurable percentage of cancer patients across every industrialized nation with a functioning oncology system.
The system does not have a protocol for stopping. It has protocols for doing. Intubating, resuscitating, monitoring, medicating, scanning, testing. The treatment produces complications. The complications produce further treatment. The question “should we continue treating?” is structurally difficult to ask in an environment designed around the assumption that treatment is always the answer.
The dying body is completing a process. The training the ICU physician received teaches indefinite postponement of the ending, not comfort, not honest acknowledgment, not permission to stop. The final weeks of a life become the most medically intensive and most expensive weeks of the lifespan. What is billed for is not the extension of life. It is the extension of dying.
The Tell
If the inversion were ignorance, healers would be welcomed. They are punished instead. The system’s behavior toward its healers is what distinguishes ignorance from inversion.
In 2023, Myhill was suspended for nine months for recommending ascorbic acid, cholecalciferol, iodine, and ivermectin for the condition attributed to COVID-19. The Tribunal stated that her recommendations undermined public health. Erasure from the register was rejected on the grounds that it would “deprive the public of an otherwise good doctor with over 30 years’ experience.”⁴⁰
A doctor whose patients improve. A protocol that addresses cellular metabolism rather than suppressing symptoms. Recommendations that cost pennies compared to pharmaceutical management. Investigated more than thirty times, not for harming patients, but for undermining the paradigm that requires her patients’ conditions to remain incurable.
The pattern is not new. Semmelweis was destroyed in 1847 for observing that his colleagues were killing patients. Lown was met with Nazi salutes in the 1950s. Myhill’s case is contemporary. If the training were simply incomplete, healers would fill the gap. If the pharmaceutical approach were the best available given current knowledge, alternatives would be welcomed as data emerged. Neither is what happens. Terrain medicine schools were closed by Flexner, terrain practitioners are stripped of their licenses, and the doctors whose patients improve most reliably become the doctors most reliably prosecuted. The system knows the right answer well enough to recognize its practitioners and exclude them.
The Kitchen
Every ordinary childhood illness that now fills pediatric waiting rooms was managed at home by mothers and grandmothers for centuries before the pediatrician existed. What they used is still on the shelf. Honey for the cough — in a University of Pennsylvania trial, honey outperformed dextromethorphan for nighttime cough in children over one.⁴¹ Salt water gargles for the sore throat. A warm compress on the ear; four out of five acute middle ear inflammations resolve on their own within three days, per Cochrane review.⁴¹ Ginger and garlic. Broth. Sunlight, water, rest, warmth, sleep. The kitchen holds most of the toolkit. What the toolkit does not hold, the yard and the sun do.
The mechanism is single. The terrain is the patient. The interventions are supportive: they give the terrain what it needs to complete the clearing that the symptoms represent. Fever is metabolic heat that speeds the clearing; give water and rest. Cough is the airway expelling debris; give honey and warmth. Vomiting and diarrhea are the fastest routes the body has for emptying itself; give broth and time. Skin eruptions are the terrain pushing outward; keep the skin clean and let the clearing happen.
Recovery times have not changed. A cold takes about a week. The flu takes ten days. What the pharmaceutical era added to these timelines was not speed. It added the toxicity of the intervention on top of the illness that was already going to resolve.
The kitchen table works the other way as well.
The Kitchen Table Again
The parent’s hand goes to the cabinet. The bottle is red and white. The child’s fever is 102.4. Behind the parent’s hand stands the doctor. Behind the doctor stand the medical school, the Flexner Report, the Rockefeller money that funded it, and the pharmaceutical industry that has become one of the largest industries on the planet.
The parent does not need to understand any of this in the moment. The parent needs to know one thing. The fever is the operation. The intervention interrupts the operation. Leave the child alone. Offer water. Offer rest. Do not administer the drug that opposes what the body has decided to do.
Every choice a parent makes for a child eventually becomes a choice the child makes for themselves. The child learns whether the body is trustworthy or whether the body is the enemy. That lesson accumulates across a childhood and shapes every medical decision the child will make as an adult. Multiplied across the pediatric schedule, the annual physical, the first prescription, the first surgical referral, the first diagnosis of chronic illness — by the time the person arrives in the ICU at eighty-three, the pattern is complete. The final capture is the destination of a trajectory that began with the red and white bottle.
The parent chooses. The neighbor does not. The pediatrician down the street does not. Every industrialized country’s institutions are now hostile in essentially the same way, because the training that produced those institutions came from essentially the same source. The choice remains available. It has never been popular. It is the difference between the 2.64 percent and the 60 percent. It is the difference between the profession that heals and the profession that has become the first leading cause of death.
The One-Minute Elevator Explanation
The doctor is trained to do the opposite of what heals. When the body raises a fever to clear an illness, the doctor gives a drug to lower the fever. When cholesterol rises to repair damaged blood vessels, the doctor gives a statin to block it. When the body signals distress through blood pressure or blood sugar, the doctor blocks the signals without addressing what produced them.
This is not a gap in the doctor’s education. It is the doctor’s education. In 1910, the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations funded the Flexner Report, which closed the American medical schools teaching how the body heals and standardized every surviving school on the pharmaceutical model. The Rockefeller Foundation then exported the same template across Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Every industrialized country’s medical schools now train on essentially the same curriculum. Rockefeller himself kept homeopathic doctors for his own family.
The result runs across a lifetime. In childhood, the pediatric schedule injects dozens of doses of products that contain undeclared tungsten, lead, stainless steel, and rare earth alloys the body cannot break down. In adulthood, the annual checkup pulls asymptomatic people into pharmacy pipelines that produce the very conditions the next round of screening will identify. In chronic illness, the same profession that produced the damage names it autoimmune. In dying, the ICU postpones the ending until the bills exhaust the estate.
Joy Garner’s Control Group Survey found chronic disease in the fully unvaccinated at 2.64 percent. In the vaccinated it runs at 60 percent.
If this were ignorance, healers would be welcomed. They are not. Semmelweis was destroyed in 1847 for observing that his colleagues were killing patients. Sarah Myhill has been investigated more than thirty times, not because her patients complained but because they got better.
The doctor is not the third leading cause of death. The doctor is the first.
If you want to follow this, read Malcolm Kendrick on heart disease, Thomas Cowan on cancer and the water body of the cell, and Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk on the mortality data.
How to Explain This to a Six-Year-Old
Your body knows how to get better when you are sick. When you get a fever, your body is making itself warmer to fix what is wrong. When you cough, your body is pushing something out. When your skin gets red and itchy, your body is sending the bad stuff outside where it can leave.
Doctors go to school for a long time. But most of what they learn is how to make the fever go away, how to stop the cough, how to make the itchy skin stop being itchy. When the body is working to get better and the doctor stops the body from working, the sickness cannot finish. So it stays.
Doctors also give shots. The shots have tiny pieces of metal in them, too small for your eyes to see. Your body knows how to clean up food and dirt. It does not know how to clean up metal. So the metal stays inside, and where it stays, the body gets sick.
Most doctors are kind people who thought they were going to help. But their school did not teach them how the body heals. They are doing what they were taught. What they were taught is not what makes you better.
When something bad happens to your body, the best thing is usually to let the body do what it knows how to do. Rest. Water. Warm blankets. Good food when you are ready. Time.
There are some doctors who know this. But the other doctors get very angry at them and try to take away their license. That is how you know the other doctors know these good doctors are right. If they were wrong, no one would care.
References
General Medical Council. Records of investigations against Dr Sarah Myhill, 2001–2023, obtained by Freedom of Information Act request and compiled at drmyhill.co.uk. The Tom Kark QC statement is drawn from the 2010 Interim Orders Panel hearing transcript.
Garner, J. Health versus Disorder, Disease, and Death: Unvaccinated Persons Are Incommensurably Healthier than Vaccinated. Control Group Survey, 2020. See also thecontrolgroup.org for methodology and state-level breakdown.
Unbekoming. “The Primary Cause: An Essay on One Impost, Three Shadows.” Lies are Unbekoming, July 2026. The attributable-fraction calculation is developed in the section titled The Numbers.
Kendrick, M. The Clot Thickens: The Enduring Mystery of Heart Disease. Columbus Publishing, 2021. Kendrick, M. The Great Cholesterol Con. John Blake Publishing, 2008. Ravnskov, U. The Cholesterol Myths. NewTrends Publishing, 2000.
Unbekoming. “The Mechanics of Stable Falsehood: An Essay.” Lies are Unbekoming, December 2025. The convergent-opportunism framework is developed in Sections IV and X, drawing on Paul Collits. The Bernard Lown case is drawn from Malcolm Kendrick’s account, cited in that essay. The Sinclair maxim is from Sinclair, U. I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked. University of California Press, 1935.
Case, A., Deaton, A. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton University Press, 2020. See also National Center for Health Statistics, “Mortality in the United States, 2018,” NCHS Data Brief No. 355, 2020, and subsequent NCHS annual updates documenting the American life expectancy decline that began in 2014 and continued through the pre-COVID period.
Semmelweis, I. P. Die Ätiologie, der Begriff und die Prophylaxis des Kindbettfiebers [The Etiology, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever]. C. A. Hartleben, 1861.
Flexner, A. Medical Education in the United States and Canada: A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Carnegie Foundation Bulletin No. 4, 1910.
Brown, E. R. Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America. University of California Press, 1979.
Brown, E. R. Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America. University of California Press, 1979, Chapters 5-7 for the international export of the Flexner model. See also Farley, J. To Cast Out Disease: A History of the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation (1913-1951). Oxford University Press, 2004; and Bu, L. Making the World Like Us: Education, Cultural Expansion, and the American Century. Praeger, 2003, for the China Medical Board and the Peking Union Medical College. The Carnegie Foundation commissioned Flexner’s European survey, published as Flexner, A. Medical Education in Europe. Carnegie Foundation Bulletin No. 6, 1912.
Bealle, M. A. The Drug Story: A Factological History of America’s $10,000,000,000 Drug Cartel. Columbia Publishing, 1949. Rockefeller’s use of homeopathic physicians is discussed throughout, drawing on the diaries and correspondence of the Rockefeller family physicians.
Campbell, E. G., et al. “Institutional academic-industry relationships.” Journal of the American Medical Association, 298(15): 1779–1786, 2007.
Adams, K. M., Kohlmeier, M., Zeisel, S. H. “Nutrition education in U.S. medical schools: latest update of a national survey.” Academic Medicine, 85(9): 1537–1542, 2010.
Begley, C. M., Gyte, G. M. L., Devane, D., McGuire, W., Weeks, A. “Active versus expectant management for women in the third stage of labour.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Issue 2, 2019.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Recommended Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule, current year, compared with 1983 schedule. Historical comparison compiled by the National Vaccine Information Center. Dose counts vary by counting methodology; the figures here reflect the NVIC compilation counting all recommended pediatric doses including boosters and annual influenza injections through age eighteen.
Gatti, A. M., Montanari, S. “New Quality-Control Investigations on Vaccines: Micro- and Nanocontamination.” International Journal of Vaccines and Vaccination, 4(1): 00072, 2017.
Deposition of Stanley A. Plotkin, M.D., taken in Doe v. Doe, Court of Common Pleas, Michigan, January 11, 2018. Transcript widely available; excerpts published by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense.
Humphries, S., Bystrianyk, R. Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History. CreateSpace, 2013. See also dissolvingillusions.com for the underlying mortality graphs drawn from U.S. Vital Statistics and UK historical mortality records.
National Cholesterol Education Program. Third Report of the Expert Panel on Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Cholesterol in Adults (ATP III). National Institutes of Health, 2001. Compared with the 1988 ATP I guidelines.
Genuth, S., et al. “Follow-up report on the diagnosis of diabetes mellitus.” Diabetes Care, 26(11): 3160–3167, 2003.
Whelton, P. K., et al. “2017 ACC/AHA/AAPA/ABC/ACPM/AGS/APhA/ASH/ASPC/NMA/PCNA Guideline for the Prevention, Detection, Evaluation, and Management of High Blood Pressure in Adults.” Hypertension, 71(6): e13–e115, 2018.
Bruckert, E., Hayem, G., Dejager, S., Yau, C., Bégaud, B. “Mild to moderate muscular symptoms with high-dosage statin therapy in hyperlipidemic patients — the PRIMO Study.” Cardiovascular Drugs and Therapy, 19: 403–414, 2005. Higher-end figure from patient-reported outcome studies including the STOMP trial and USAGE survey.
Unbekoming. “The 12 Screenings That Manufacture the Patients They Claim to Find: An Essay on Threshold Manipulation, Overdiagnosis, Cascades, and the Markers That Aren’t What They Claim.” Lies are Unbekoming, June 2026. The disease-specific vs all-cause mortality distinction, the autopsy reservoir data, and the survivor-as-advocate mechanism are developed across the essay’s four groups. Primary sources for the autopsy reservoir figures include Welch, H. G. Should I Be Tested for Cancer? Maybe Not and Here’s Why. University of California Press, 2004; and Welch, H. G., Schwartz, L., Woloshin, S. Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health. Beacon Press, 2011.
Ablin, R. J. “The Great Prostate Mistake.” The New York Times, Op-Ed, March 9, 2010. Extended in Ablin, R. J., Piana, R. The Great Prostate Hoax: How Big Medicine Hijacked the PSA Test and Caused a Public Health Disaster. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Gøtzsche, P. C., Jørgensen, K. J. “Screening for breast cancer with mammography.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Issue 6, 2013.
Bretthauer, M., Løberg, M., Wieszczy, P., et al. “Effect of colonoscopy screening on risks of colorectal cancer and related death.” New England Journal of Medicine, 387(17): 1547–1556, 2022.
Smith-Bindman, R., Chu, P. W., Azman Firdaus, H., et al. “Projected lifetime cancer risks from current computed tomography imaging.” JAMA Internal Medicine, published online April 2025.
Loeb, S., Vellekoop, A., Ahmed, H. U., et al. “Systematic review of complications of prostate biopsy.” European Urology, 64(6): 876–892, 2013. See also Unbekoming, “The 12 Screenings That Manufacture the Patients They Claim to Find,” Lies are Unbekoming, June 2026, for the fuller catalog including statin utilization (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), DCIS overdiagnosis figures (Bleyer & Welch, NEJM 2012), and the harm arithmetic across the major screening programs.
Gøtzsche, P. C. Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare. Radcliffe Publishing, 2013, for the ~200,000 US annual iatrogenic death estimate. Starfield, B. “Is US health really the best in the world?” Journal of the American Medical Association, 284(4): 483–485, 2000, for the 225,000 estimate covering combined iatrogenic causes including unnecessary surgery, medication errors, hospital-acquired infection, and adverse drug effects. US war death totals compiled from US Department of Defense casualty statistics and Congressional Research Service reports: American Revolution (~4,435), War of 1812 (~2,260), Mexican-American War (~13,283), Civil War (~620,000), Spanish-American War (~2,446), World War I (~116,516), World War II (~405,399), Korean War (~36,574), Vietnam War (~58,220), Persian Gulf War (~383), Iraq War (~4,431), Afghanistan War (~2,459). Total US war deaths across the country’s history: approximately 1.35 million.
Huggins, H. A. It’s All in Your Head: The Link Between Mercury Amalgams and Illness. Avery Publishing, 1993. The CSF protein band findings are discussed in Chapter 4.
Shelton, H. M. Human Life: Its Philosophy and Laws. Health Research, various editions from 1928. The acute-to-chronic progression mechanism is developed across Shelton’s collected works, particularly The Hygienic System series.
Bove, R., et al. “Financial Payments from the Pharmaceutical Industry to Neurologists Treating Multiple Sclerosis and Prescribing Patterns.” JAMA Network Open, 2025. Chronic Care Management billing figures from Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data compiled by AAFP practice analysis.
Fielding, J. W. L., Fagg, S. L., Jones, B., et al. “An interim report of a prospective, randomized, controlled study of adjuvant chemotherapy in operable gastric cancer: British Stomach Cancer Group.” World Journal of Surgery, 7(3): 390–399, 1983. See also Roytas, D. Can You Catch a Cold? Untold History and Human Experiments. Independently published, 2024, for the placebo/nocebo cancer-trial data compiled from this and related studies.
Petersen, G. L., Finnerup, N. B., Colloca, L., et al. “The magnitude of nocebo effects in pain: a meta-analysis.” Pain, 155(8): 1426–1434, 2014.
Meador, C. K. “Hex Death: Voodoo Magic or Persuasion?” Southern Medical Journal, 85(3): 244–247, 1992.
Unbekoming. “The Top 10 Myths of Modern Psychiatry: An Essay.” Lies are Unbekoming, December 2025. Primary sources include Whitaker, R. Anatomy of an Epidemic. Broadway Books, 2010; Breggin, P. R. Toxic Psychiatry. St. Martin’s Press, 1991; Harrow, M., Jobe, T. H. “Factors involved in outcome and recovery in schizophrenia patients not on antipsychotic medications.” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 195: 406–414, 2007; the FDA 2004 meta-analysis of pediatric antidepressant trials; and Kendler, K. S. “Toward a Philosophical Structure for Psychiatry.” American Journal of Psychiatry, 162: 433–440, 2005.
Unbekoming. “12 Things Your Dentist Was Trained Not to Tell You: An Essay on the Profession Trained for Repair, Not Prevention.” Lies are Unbekoming, June 2026. Primary sources include Price, W. A. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, 1939; Meinig, G. E. Root Canal Cover-Up. Bion Publishing, 1998; Nara, R. O., Mariner, S. A. Money by the Mouthful. Oramedics International Press, 1979; Steinman, R. R., Leonora, J. “Relationship of fluid transport through the dentin to the incidence of dental caries.” Journal of Dental Research, 50, 1971.
Cross, S. H., Warraich, H. J. “Changes in the Place of Death in the United States.” New England Journal of Medicine, 381: 2369–2370, 2019. Institutional deaths (hospital plus nursing facility) accounted for approximately half of American deaths in 2017 (29.8% hospital, 20.8% nursing facility).
Lubitz, J. D., Riley, G. F. “Trends in Medicare payments in the last year of life.” New England Journal of Medicine, 328(15): 1092–1096, 1993, for the higher end of the range. French, E. B., et al. “End-of-life medical spending in last twelve months of life is lower than previously reported.” Health Affairs, 36(7): 1211–1217, 2017, for the lower end. The range reflects genuine methodological disagreement about how end-of-life spending is measured and attributed.
Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service. Determination on Dr Sarah Myhill, 2023. Full text available through the MPTS decision archive.
Paul, I. M., et al. “Effect of honey, dextromethorphan, and no treatment on nocturnal cough and sleep quality for coughing children and their parents.” Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 161(12): 1140–1146, 2007. Venekamp, R. P., et al. “Antibiotics for acute otitis media in children.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Issue 6, 2015. Rovers, M. M., et al. “Antibiotics for acute otitis media: a meta-analysis with individual patient data.” Lancet, 368(9545): 1429–1435, 2006.
This essay draws on the framework developed across the Unbekoming library, including The Unvaccinated (2026), Medicalized Motherhood (2026), The Screening Trap (2026), Chronic Conditions (2026), Heart Disease Reconsidered (2025), and The Architecture of Deception (2025). Readers who find the argument here compelling will find the evidence developed in greater depth in those volumes.
The United States has presented its new nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia as a gift: reactors, technology, investment, prestige, and the radiant promise of a peaceful atomic future. Washington is forever giving gifts of this kind. Curiously, they tend to arrive fitted with surveillance equipment, political conditions, and a discreetly concealed choke chain.
This is not merely a civil nuclear agreement. It is a disciplinary instrument aimed at Mohammed bin Salman — a strategic summons issued to a crown prince who has recently behaved less like an obedient client and more like the ruler of an indispensable state.
Its message is simple: Saudi Arabia may diversify its economy, its diplomatic partners, and even its wardrobe of alliances, but it may not diversify the source of its ultimate protection. That franchise still belongs to Washington.
The agreement therefore concerns nuclear energy only in the same sense that a prison contract concerns architecture. Its deeper purpose is to reconstruct American authority over a kingdom that has begun imagining life beyond the imperial security nursery.
Riyadh has committed three increasingly intolerable offenses.
First, it has moved too close to Pakistan. The Saudi–Pakistani relationship is hardly new: money, soldiers, intelligence cooperation, religious patronage, and strategic ambiguity have bound the two states for decades.
What has changed is the context. As confidence in American protection has weakened, Pakistan has ceased to look merely like a useful military subcontractor and begun to resemble a possible component of an alternative security architecture.
That possibility is especially sensitive because Pakistan is nuclear-armed. No formal Saudi–Pakistani nuclear arrangement has been acknowledged, and neither capital needs one publicly declared. Strategic ambiguity is useful precisely because it performs deterrence without submitting an invoice to the International Atomic Energy Agency. A defense pact, carefully suggestive official language, and decades of intimate military cooperation can generate considerable anxiety without anyone having to unveil a warhead in Riyadh.
Washington’s nuclear offer is designed to interrupt that imagination. It tells the Saudis: there will be no Pakistani shortcut to strategic autonomy. If the kingdom wants reactors, fuel-cycle expertise, advanced technology, and the political symbolism of nuclear modernity, those ambitions must pass through American gates. The atomic future may be Saudi, but the key to the laboratory must remain in Washington.
Second, Mohammed bin Salman has shown insufficient enthusiasm for the campaign against Iran. Riyadh has no sentimental attachment to Tehran; states do not exchange friendship bracelets. But it has learned, after years of expensive confrontation, that permanent hostility to Iran is a ruinous American luxury financed by Gulf vulnerability. Saudi–Iranian accommodation is not ideological reconciliation. It is an insurance policy against being drafted into someone else’s war.
This is precisely what makes it objectionable to Washington and Israel. An autonomous Saudi Arabia might decline to become the logistics platform, financier, diplomatic choir, and eventual target of a regional war against Iran. It might decide that oil facilities, desalination plants, investment plans, and glittering megaprojects are poorly served by turning the Gulf into a missile exchange. Such ingratitude cannot be encouraged.
The nuclear deal places Washington back at the center of Saudi strategic planning. Technology creates dependency; dependency creates leverage; leverage restores obedience.
The reactor is not merely an energy source. It is a thirty-year listening device embedded in the kingdom’s national-security imagination.
Third, Riyadh has refused to normalize relations with Israel on Washington’s preferred terms. Saudi leaders continue to tie normalization to a credible pathway toward Palestinian statehood — an inconvenient demand in an imperial order that prefers Palestinians as humanitarian statistics rather than political subjects. Trump’s subsequent insistence that the nuclear arrangement depends on Saudi entry into the Abraham Accords merely stripped the agreement of its ceremonial clothing.
The bargain is now indecently clear: Washington will help construct Saudi Arabia’s nuclear future if Riyadh helps rehabilitate Israel’s regional standing. Nuclear cooperation becomes diplomatic blackmail. The kingdom is invited to purchase strategic reassurance with Palestine. This is less a treaty than a geopolitical obedience course: sit beside Israel, distrust Iran, step away from Pakistan, and receive your reactor.
China and Russia are the other uninvited guests at the signing ceremony. Saudi Arabia is not merely another energy producer; it is the central Arab power in OPEC, a financial heavyweight, and a pivotal actor in the emerging multipolar order. Its relations with Beijing and Moscow challenge Washington not because Riyadh has become anti-American, but because it has become insufficiently exclusive.
Empire does not require affection. It requires the absence of alternatives.
A Saudi nuclear program built with Chinese or Russian assistance would deepen technological, financial, and strategic relationships that Washington can no longer confidently control. American companies want the contracts, certainly, but the larger concern is architectural: whoever builds the reactors helps shape the dependencies surrounding them.
Nuclear cooperation produces decades of training, maintenance, fuel arrangements, regulatory influence, security coordination, and elite access. Washington is not selling machinery. It is purchasing strategic occupancy.
The irony is exquisite. The United States portrays the agreement as evidence of restored strength, yet its generosity reveals its weakness. A hegemon secure in its position does not need to offer extraordinary concessions to retain an old client. It does so when the client has discovered competing suppliers, alternative protectors, and the invigorating sensation of being courted.
Nor does the agreement simplify nuclear diplomacy with Iran. Washington has spent years treating Iranian enrichment as uniquely sinister while now constructing a far more permissive vocabulary for Saudi ambitions. The distinction will be explained through the usual theological machinery of empire: allies possess peaceful atoms; adversaries enrich malicious ones. Centrifuges, apparently, acquire moral character from the flag hanging above them.
The result is a nonproliferation doctrine so intellectually elastic that it can be folded into a campaign brochure.
Mohammed bin Salman may believe Saudi Arabia has accumulated enough leverage to escape the old hierarchy. Washington’s answer is this agreement: not quite a reward, not quite a threat, but an elegant combination of both. America will protect the kingdom — from Iran, from uncertainty, and above all from the dangerous temptation to protect itself through arrangements Washington cannot supervise.
The reactor, then, is the bait. Israel is the condition. Pakistan is the warning. China and Russia are the targets.
And the leash, freshly polished and marketed as partnership, remains unmistakably American.
R. James “Jim” Woolsey, a major Iraq and GWOT promoter and neoconservative Democrat, passed away Tuesday at 84.
Woolsey served briefly as CIA director but rose to much greater prominence as a consistent promoter on television and in the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed pages of both the Iraq War and the broader Global War on Terror, which he sometimes referred to as “World War IV.”
Indeed, immediately after the 9/11 attacks, Woolsey was ubiquitous in arguing that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein not only was linked to al-Qaeda but may very well have approved or helped plan the plot himself.
After being forced out of his CIA director role by President Bill Clinton in 1994, Woolsey moved increasingly to the right, as noted in a generally respectful obituary published by the New York Times Wednesday, joining with the Washington-based Likudist neoconservatives led by the “Dark Prince” himself, Richard Perle of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
Woolsey, an engaging if rather glib speaker who never seemed to run out of words, became a key part of what George Mason University anthropologist Janine Wedel identified as the “Neocon Core” in the years running up to and following the Iraq War and the GWOT. That included the promotion of confrontation with Syria and Iran as well as other states deemed hostile to Israel, and, hence, in their view, to the United States, as well.
That 11-member core, according to Wedel, included men who would hold key posts under President George W. Bush, among them Bush’s future deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz; his undersecretary of defense, Douglas Feith; his director for Near East policy on the National Security Council, Elliott Abrams; and Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff and national security adviser, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
All of these men served on a variety of overlapping boards of major Washington-based organizations and think tanks that aligned themselves with Israel’s right-wing Likud Party. Together, these groups acted as a remarkably effective media echo chamber after 9/11 and in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, particularly in spreading mis- or disinformation about Saddam’s alleged development of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction programs and ties to al-Qaeda.
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Woolsey was involved in nearly all of the veritable galaxy of neoconservative front groups created to advocate for policies like invading Iraq. He held positions on the advisory and other boards of CSP, WINEP, and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. He also served as the chair of the Leadership Council of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), which, for most of the past 20 years, effectively replaced AEI as the most prominent pro-Israel Washington think tank promoting war with Iran. Woolsey was also a co-founder of United Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI), an advocacy group closely tied to Israeli intelligence that has promoted comprehensive economic sanctions against Tehran since its founding in 2008.
Although Woolsey was not a signatory of PNAC’s 1997 charter, which was signed by a number of top Bush Jr. policymakers, including Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he did sign on to nine of the group’s open letters, including an April 2002 statement that called for the administration “to accelerate plans for removing Saddam Hussein from power” and asserted that “Israel’s fight against terrorism is our fight.”
Woolsey also served as a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, a civilian advisory body during the Bush administration initially chaired and organized by Perle. Just days after 9/11, Perle convened the Board and invited Ahmed Chalabi, head of the previously CIA-backed opposition Iraqi National Congress (INC) and a long-time Perle collaborator, to participate in its deliberations about Iraq as a possible target for U.S. military action and regime change. As a result of that meeting, Wolfowitz dispatched Woolsey — who, like Perle, had already declared on network television news that Hussein was likely to have been behind the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon — to gather evidence about Saddam’s alleged (but non-existent) ties to al-Qaeda and a previous 1993 bombing in the parking garage of the World Trade Center.
His mission — about which neither the State Department nor the CIA (which had several years before severed ties with Chalabi due to their assessment that he was completely unreliable) were informed — ended without acquiring the desired intelligence. Still, Woolsey, backed by the administration and the neoconservative network and echo chamber of which he had become an important part, continued to claim that Saddam and al-Qaeda worked together.
Chalabi’s INC nonetheless became the key source of disinformation about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction that was seized upon and promoted to the mass media by the Pentagon, the White House, and the neoconservative echo chamber, including Woolsey himself.
Jim Lobe is a Contributing Editor of Responsible Statecraft. He formerly served as chief of the Washington bureau of Inter Press Service from 1980 to 1985 and again from 1989 to 2015.
The U.K. government recommended a risky drug combination for COVID-19 patients in 2020, just 16 days after warning doctors to use the medications together only as a last resort, medical commentator John Campbell, Ph.D., said this week.
For years, Campbell has criticized the widespread use of midazolam and morphine and other palliative drugs to treat COVID-19 patients, questioning why so many patients appeared to receive drugs commonly associated with end-of-life care — even though they didn’t necessarily have a terminal illness.
But in his latest video, he said he had overlooked a key piece of the puzzle: The U.K. government itself had backed guidance recommending the combined use of opioids and benzodiazepines for certain COVID-19 patients — just days after warning that the drug combination could cause fatal respiratory depression.
Campbell, who said a former member of the British Parliament brought the issue to his attention, called the apparent reversal “a national scandal which is being ignored.” … Full article
Tales of the American Empire produces short historical videos about the American empire, like “The Sordid History of the CIA” series that are linked in the description. Most viewers are interested in the American CIA, so this is another episode about videos detailing the evils of the CIA. Some CIA officers work with murderous dictators and criminal organizations involved in the drug trade, arms dealing, and government contract fraud. These evil deeds are sometimes uncovered by the media but receive little attention.
There are great documentaries that provide insight into covert CIA operations. This is far too much material to condense into a short video. Here is a quick review of more great stories about the sordid CIA with a link to them in the description. If the link no longer works, the content has been removed. Two videos from the first part of this series have since disappeared from YouTube. They may be found on smaller hosting websites like Rumble, Bitchute, or Odyssey.
By portraying Chinese characters as perpetrators of ruthless violence while casting Japanese Self-Defense Forces (SDF) intelligence operatives as defenders, the season 2 of the Japanese drama Vivant has recently drawn criticism from Chinese netizens, who argue that its depiction turns historical reality on its head while ignoring Japan’s wartime atrocities.
The TBS drama series – a spy suspense story in which an alleged unofficial intelligence unit of the SDF operates across the globe — has attracted a passionate fanbase. Its currently airing season 2 opened with a household rating of 18.8 percent, the highest for a TV drama this year, according toa commentary article by Japanese media Toyo Keizai.
What draws attention is the portrayal of the enemies in the series, the article noted. Scenes in which the Chinese organization subjects kidnapped members of the SDF unit to brutal torture are repeated with unrelenting intensity.
It is rare for Japanese TV dramas to explicitly portray a real-life country as the enemy, the article noted.
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi also made a reference to the drama, saying that she has been recording Vivant and hopes to binge-watch it over the year-end and New Year holidays, according to Japanese media outlets.
China’s CCTV News report on Sunday revealed that the drama features scenes in which Chinese personnel cut off the fingers of and stab Japanese intelligence operatives in the abdomen. Such acts bear striking similarities to the torture inflicted on Chinese nationals by invading Japanese troops during the World War II.
The drama distorts the truth by attributing these atrocities to modern Chinese characters. Beneath the surface, it subtly glorifies Japan’s cross-border overseas operations, blurs the functional boundaries of the SDF and implicitly promotes an expansionist narrative, per CCTV News. … continue
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