When American President Ronald Reagan entered office, he set a goal of re-energizing the American empire that had lost momentum after its embarrassing defeat in Vietnam. Invading the tiny island nation of Grenada would be an easy military victory to display American imperial power. The CIA instigated violence in Grenada and blamed communists, while asserting the Soviets were building a military base on the island. A propaganda campaign began and American military exercises were held to prepare for this invasion.
“John Stockwell interview”; Alternative Views; PBS; • Video
“The Story Behind Some of History’s Greatest Military Blunders – Politics by Other Means”; Timeline World History Documentaries; Great Military Blunders S1 E3; April 22, 2017; • The Story Behind Some Of History’s Gr…
Public health tasted the power they gained during the pandemic and now they are hungry once more. Any excuse to make themselves relevant again and they will take it.
This time it happened in France’s capital, Paris. On Wednesday and Thursday, the city undertook its first ever large-scale mosquito control campaign after two people contracted dengue fever. It is also known as break-bone fever due to the joint pain that accompanies illness.
Although the individuals were infected with dengue whilst abroad, officials were concerned that the Asian tiger mosquito might bite them and spread the disease around the country.
That seems like a very small risk to me but apparently, nowadays, however small the risk, public health must intervene. So they closed roads and sent out stay at home alerts (mini local lockdowns), allowing insecticides to be sprayed around the city over a couple of days.
Naturally, the situation was blamed on climate change. Apparently, there have been hotter temperatures and increased flooding meaning the mosquitos are more likely to cause a problem.
Most people who get dengue don’t have any symptoms but it is estimated that around half a million people worldwide are hospitalised with the disease each year. Approximately 20,000 to 40,000 of these die, however with good healthcare, death is unlikely.
Dr Jolyon Medlock, head of medical entomology and zoonoses ecology at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) told the Telegraphnewspaper, that “in 10 to 15 years the UK will probably also have embedded populations of mosquitoes that pose a threat to health”.
At the bottom of the Telegraph article it says “Protect yourself and your family by learning more about Global Health Security”.
Lo and behold, who do we find funding the Telegraph’s Global Health Security? The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation of course. The Telegraph insists that the support comes without strings but it seems like it does come with some benefits as the paper brags that “we were among the first to warn of an approaching pandemic”. However did they know!?
And is the break-bone fever panic really being caused by climate change? In 2017, it was announced that France and the Netherlands backed the release of Oxitec’s genetically modified mosquitoes to fight dengue, chikungunya and zika.
These mosquitos are meant to use a biological method to suppress wild populations of dangerous mosquitos. The genetically modified males don’t bite or transmit disease and when released, search for a female mate. Their offspring inherit a self-limiting gene that causes them to die before reaching functional adulthood. Seems a bit Jurassic Parky to me and if there’s one thing I learnt from Jurassic Park, it’s that life always finds a way.
Oxitec is also the company that released genetically modified mosquitoes in Florida… which is now seeing a rise in malaria. Definitely not connected though. Their business is supported by $18 million of funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
But who is Oxitec? Founded in 2002 as a spinout from Oxford University, they were purchased by US based Intrexon and Third Security in early 2020.
Intrexon changed its name to Precigen in 2020, a year after creating the company as a subsidiary. Weirdly, if you try to go to Intrexon’s website you get taken to DNA.com which is just a landing page with a creepy logo.
Under its current name, Precigen, the company informs us that it “is a dedicated discovery and clinical stage biopharmaceutical company advancing the next generation of gene and cell therapies using precision technology to target the most urgent and intractable diseases in our core therapeutic areas of immuno-oncology, autoimmune disorders, and infectious diseases”.
I used to think this technology would bring great advancement to medicine but, since the pandemic, I think they are just playing with fire.
Britain sparked an international outcry earlier this year when officials revealed that the Challenger 2 tanks sent to Ukraine would be equipped with depleted uranium (DU) shells. The US is now expected to follow suit with DU rounds for Ukraine’s Abrams. A Russian military observer explains why the toxic arms won’t change the situation at the front.
A White House National Security Council spokesperson told Sputnik Sunday that they could not confirm reports indicating that Washington is preparing to send armor-piercing DU munitions to Ukraine as part of a new arms package to be announced this week.
The DU munitions are expected to accompany the Abrams main battle tanks the US first agreed to give Kiev back in January to coax its European allies into sending hundreds of their own tanks, with the first batch of Abrams expected to arrive by mid-September, well over three months into Ukraine’s stalled counteroffensive.
Previous reporting on the Ukrainian-bound Abrams indicated that the tanks wouldn’t be fitted with depleted uranium components in their composite armor. However, in June, it became clear that they would likely be armed with DU penetrator rounds, with anonymous officials saying at the time that they saw no ‘serious obstacles’ to deliveries, notwithstanding long-standing international concerns about DU shells’ impact on human health and the environment.
Tank, artillery and air-launched DU munitions have left a horrifying record of destruction and illness in their wake in the countries where they have been deployed, including Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War and 2003 invasion, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Syria. Russia and Ukraine, the US, the UK, India, Pakistan, France, China, and a number of Western allies in the Middle East and Asia, are known to possess the controversial weapons, but the US and Britain are the only two countries to date confirmed to have ever used them.
Using depleted uranium as a weapon constitutes a crude form of the ‘recycling’ of spent nuclear fuel, and first began to be experimented with by the United States in the 1970s to pierce increasingly advanced Warsaw Pact armor. DU shells have been touted as a ‘budget’ variant of tungsten ore-based penetrator projectiles, having a similar density, but costing less to produce and even more powerful.
The shells’ radioactive properties have a direct impact on their penetrative ability. When fired at enemy armor, DU-tipped rounds generate an immense amount of heat, literally sloughing off portions of the projectile as it rams into its target to keep the shell’s tip sharp and prevent mushrooming. This helps the rounds grind into and through armor almost like a hot knife through butter, penetrating enemy vehicles and killing any unfortunate souls who happen to be inside.
But their destructive impact doesn’t end there. Because they are radioactive, the weapons have a tendency to poison their surrounding environment, affecting everyone from the troops inside the tanks firing the shells, to enemy combatants, and local civilians.
Iraq and republics of the former Yugoslavia are the countries most heavily affected by DU contamination to date, with cancer rates in Iraq jumping from 40 cases per 100,000 people in 1991 to 800 per 100,000 in 1995, to a whopping 1,600 per 100,000 by 2025 after the US and Britain deployed up to 2,300 tons of DU in the country.
In Yugoslavia, at least 15 tons of DU were used during the bombings of Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro in the mid-late 1990s, with Serbia subsequently suffering from one of the highest cancer rates in Europe – two-and-a-half times the European average, plus an alarming rise in infertility, a variety of autoimmune diseases and mental disorders.
Last month, Serbian Health Minister Danica Grujicic appealed to Ukrainian decision makers and the population at large urging them not to allow DU shells to be used on their soil, saying her country’s experience should serve as ample warning of the weapons’ devastating long-term consequences. “Believe me, what’s happening in Ukraine will affect the health of all European countries,” Grujicic told Sputnik.
Ukrainians and Europeans first got a taste of what the Serbian health minister was talking about in the spring, when a massive arms depot outside the western Ukrainian city of Khmelnytskyi thought to include DU munitions for Ukraine’s Challenger 2s went up in smoke, resulting in a massive spike in levels of gamma radiation levels in neighboring Poland.
Russian officials have also warned of DU weapons’ dangers. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova noted late last month that the use of the weapons would turn portions of Ukraine into an “uninhabitable” wasteland, with “radioactive contamination of the soil… already happening” and being recorded.
Ukrainian and most Western media have been more upbeat, however, insisting that the DU would give the nation’s armed forces the shot in the arm they need to bolster its flagging counteroffensive –which to date has seen immense losses in manpower and equipment, but very little to show in terms of gained ground.
Questionable Tactical Benefits Accompanied by Horrendous Costs
“The main advantage of DU munitions is their higher penetration level,” Boris Rozhin, a military expert with the Center for Military-Political Journalism think tank, told Sputnik.
“The proponents of DU munitions’ use, in the case of deliveries to Ukraine… came to the conclusion that the Ukrainian military will be able to fight Russian armor more effectively – that is, to increase the chances of defeating Russian tanks using British and American tanks. This is positioned as the main advantage of these kinds of shells,” he said.
The obvious disadvantage, the observer added, relates to the threat of radioactively contaminating wide swathes of the surrounding environment. DU rounds “were used in wars on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, on the territory of Iraq. In those cases, there is proven harm to health after the use of such projectiles, with the number of people suffering from the use of these shells measured in the hundreds of thousands. They have suffered radiation-related damage to their tissues and organs, leading to a range of diseases and early mortality.”
Unfortunately, Rozhin said, the United States military does not formally recognize the validity of DU-related risks, positioning it as “relatively harmless” despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.
So far, the observer pointed out, the DU-equipped Challenger 2 tanks have not been spotted on the battlefield. Their successful use against the armor of Russian tanks like the T-72B3 or T-90 would require the tanks to approach quite close, to within 3,000 meters. This is something Ukrainian forces have found difficult to do amid Russia’s overwhelming air and artillery superiority, which has often enabled Russian forces to target Ukrainian armor at ranges of tens of kilometers away, long before it can approach close enough to return fire.
If they approach close enough, “then they could do a great deal of harm. But since there are very few such cases, it will not affect the current state of affairs or course of the special military operation,” Rozhin summed up.
Gene Bailey is the steady and faithful host of Flashpoint, a popular faith based show on The Victory Channel that truly cares about its audience. The producers treat everyone like family.
Gene had Dr. McCullough slow it down and explain the rationale why patients with multiple rounds of SARS-CoV-2 infections and or COVID-19 vaccines should consider Base Spike Protein Detoxification (BSD). Its called “base” because it is the base of therapy in clinical practice to which other drugs or supplements can be added. With this core for 3-12 months or more, patients have the best chance of avoiding damage or illness in the cardiovascular, neurological, hematological, and immunological systems. See video
Because both nattokinase and bromelain are blood thinners known to influence the prothrombin time, partial thromboplastin time, and d-dimer concentrations, patients should be aware of minor or major bleeding complications. These have been used in addition to aspirin, clopidogrel, and anticoagulants such as apixaban, however, careful physician observation and potential dose adjustment may be required. Additionally, allergies to nattokinase, bromelain, or curcumin (turmeric) are contraindications.
Feedback has been tremendously positive from patients and physicians who finally have a peer-reviewed, published approach to long-COVID and vaccine injury syndromes. All of the products are available without a prescription. BSD is likely to be community standard of care until large, prospective randomized trials, and agency or society based clinical practice guidelines are developed.
The false notion that the climate is collapsing due to human activity lies at the heart of the drive to collectivise human populations under a Net Zero global agenda. Everything about it is a lie. The science is not ‘settled’, it is an unproven hypothesis, and stating otherwise is giving credence to an obvious political construct. There is no way that scientists can calculate how much of the gentle rise in temperature seen over the last 200 years is caused by humans burning fossil fuel rather than natural influences. The idea that there is a 97% ‘consensus’ among scientists that humans cause the majority of warming is a whopper as big as they come, not least because holding that view is beyond current scientific knowledge.
This latter ubiquitous claim was recently revisited in a short essay published by the CO2 Coalition. It arose from a 2013 paper published by John Cook and asserted that 97% of 11,944 peer-reviewed science papers explicitly endorsed the opinion that humans had caused the majority of the warming of the last 150 years. Alas, 7,930 of those papers took no position on anthropogenic change and were excluded from the 97% claim. It was subsequently revealed that only about 0.5%, of the papers explicitly stated that recent warming was mostly human caused.
The authors of the CO2 Coalition essay quote Professor Richard Tol’s comment at the time:
Cook’s 97% nonsensus [sic] paper shows that the climate community still has a long way to go in weeding out bad research and bad behaviour. If you want to believe that climate researchers are incompetent, biased and secretive, Cook’s paper is an excellent case in point.
Science has three levels to judge the way the natural world operates – laws, theories and hypotheses. An apple falling from a tree hitting the ground demonstrates clearly the law of gravity. If it suddenly flew off into space, we would have to reconsider, but until then it is a given fact. A theory is an explanation that has been ruthlessly tested and is widely accepted as fact. Hypotheses covers the rest – mere suggestions that only gain credence with rigorous scientific testing and believable proof. Anthropogenic climate change is an unproven hypothesis, without a single credible peer-reviewed paper proving its proposition. And this is after at least 50 years of intense, money-no-object, scientific effort, all to no avail.
As the noted Australian geologist Dr. Ian Plimer is fond of pointing out: if there was such a paper, you would never hear the last of it. The common response to this is that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provides the proof, but, again, no paper exists within that body of work to prove the hypothesis to any reasonable extent. As Dr. Plimer goes on to observe, when proof is sought, there is just “obfuscation and deafening silence”. A silence, it could be noted, disturbed only by the deafening pseudoscientific roar of computer models pumping out constant clickbait forecasts of climate Armageddon.
Anthropogenic climate change fails on almost every count. In particular, it cannot explain a vast body of observations available in the historic, near-historic and 600-million-year paleological record. In all that time, rarely do temperatures rise following rising carbon dioxide levels. In the near-historic period, ice core records going back about 500,000 years suggest that rising temperature preceded, and likely caused, CO2 levels to follow suit as natural processes such as ocean degassing come into play. Across the paleological period, CO2 levels have been up to 20 times higher with no evidence of a climate fireball. Over the last 120 years, temperatures have risen (1910-40, 1980-98), fallen (1940-75) and paused (2000-14, 2016-23), all at a time when CO2 showed a continuous rise.
As often happens in the human condition, the bad drives out the good. Plausible alternative explanations surrounding the effect of rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have been more or less suppressed in the recent past. The hypothesis that CO2 ‘saturates’ after a certain level, and its warming properties fall away dramatically, has been around for many years. The gas absorbs heat only within narrow bands of the infrared spectrum. There is debate at what level the absorption work is mainly done, with some scientists suggesting from observations that ‘saturation’ sets in around 300 parts per million, 100 ppm lower than current levels. The big advantage of this hypothesis is that it provides a convincing explanation for much if not all the temperature and gas observations in the past.
The CO2 Coalition provides a timely reminder that science, unlike religion, is not a belief system. Like everyone else, scientists will say things for social convenience, political expediency or financial profit. For reasons such as this, science is not founded on the beliefs – in other words hypotheses – of scientists. It is a disciplined method of inquiry by which scientists apply pre-existing theory to observation and measurement to arrive at “that which is, and that which is not”, as the authors put it.
The CO2 Coalition concludes:
The long and hard road to scientific truth cannot be followed by the trivial expedient of a mere head-count among those who make their livings from Government funding. Therefore, the mere fact that climate activists find themselves so often appealing to an imagined ‘consensus’ is a red flag. They are far less sure of the supposed scientific truths to which they cling than they would like us to believe. ‘Consensus’ here is a crutch for lame science.
Chris Morrison isthe Daily Sceptic’sEnvironment Editor.
On June 22, the American multinational conglomerate, 3M, agreed to pay $10.3 billion to at least 300 communities in multidistrict litigation to clean up “forever chemicals” in the water supplies.
PFAS are known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down easily in the environment and they bioaccumulate in people and wildlife. In the human body, PFAS have half-lives of two to five years.
These widely used chemicals have been added to industry and consumer products since the 1940s, but while PFOA and PFOS were phased out in the U.S. due to their toxic properties, other PFAS are still in use.
Manufacturers like the chemical properties of PFAS as they repel oil, dirt and water. The chemicals have been added to consumer products ranging from cookware and food packaging to carpets, cleaners and firefighting foam.
The ubiquitous use of more than 9,000 PFAS and wide exposure is likely responsible for the chemical being found in at least 97% of Americans in 2015.
Eight years later, and without controlling the release of PFAS in the environment and water supply, it is highly likely that the percentage of Americans with PFAS has not gone down.
These chemicals are linked to significant negative human health effects, including cancer, decreased immune system function, and hormone and metabolism dysregulation, which raises concerns that the chemicals are putting the health of future generations at risk.
The 3M lawsuit was over firefighting foam
WBUR reports that the agreement of $10.3 billion over 13 years must still be approved by the court.
According to an interview in NPR, the 3M lawsuit was over firefighting foam that the company produced and sold for decades.
3M was not the only company to manufacture and sell PFAS chemicals.
A similar agreement was reached with DuPont, Chemours and Corteva in which those companies agreed to pay $1.19 billion for PFAS remediation, a deal The New York Times called “the first wave of claims.”
Several communities in Massachusetts were involved in the lawsuit. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey spoke at a press conference just one year ago when the lawsuit was filed, saying:
“Their actions violate state and federal laws that are intended to protect our residents and place costly burdens on our communities that are now forced to clean up this mess. These are manufacturers who attempted to hide just how dangerous this foam was, who prevented their workers from discussing the dangers of their products.
“Despite the fact that PFAS was toxic, these makers continued to make and sell their products without disclosing the harm.”
The litigation was resolved relatively quickly. By comparison, the lawsuit settlement against Monsanto on June 24, 2020, took more than one year of negotiations and three consecutive trial losses.
The lawsuit was originally brought by the city of Stuart, Florida, and was consolidated in the U.S. District Court in South Carolina.
“Not surprisingly, the defendants decided to settle before the trial even started,” says Erik Olson, senior strategic director for health at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “They had several major motions that were decided against them, and once that happened, I think the handwriting was on the wall.”
Experts anticipate the $10.3 billion settlement will not cover the cost of cleanup. Rob Bilott, an attorney with Kentucky law firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister, spoke with a reporter from Time. His early PFAS work pursuing claims against chemical companies was the basis of two films.
He said:
“Cities all over the country are facing costs. [It’s] not just to get PFAS out of their water, [communities] are now realizing that natural resources — the fish, the soil, the groundwater — everything is contaminated.”
EPA proposed drinking water regs raise the cost of cleanup
It is important to note that the settlement is not an admission of liability for 3M. Wendy Hager Bernays is a toxicologist at Boston University School of Public Health.
“There are certainly communities in Massachusetts who have been poisoned … You’ll rarely hear me say that, but they have been.
“I would have loved to have seen the settlement include some money for medical monitoring, but that would have required acknowledgment of harm.”
On June 23, NPR spoke with Barbara Moran, WBUR environmental correspondent from Massachusetts. Moran notes that while the 3M settlement sounds like a lot of money:
“It’s nowhere near enough money to pay for all the cleanup. It’s like, you know, a drop in the bucket … that’s because the cleanup is really expensive, so it can cost a small town, like, $20-$30 million to install filters to clean up their drinking water, plus, you know, ongoing maintenance for years and years.”
Small towns in Massachusetts have already spent $30 million on filters to deal with PFAS. Jennifer Pederson, executive director of the Massachusetts Water Works Association, believes that Massachusetts alone will need billions for cleanup.
She went on to say:
“We’re looking at a good percentage of our Massachusetts public water systems that are likely going to have to treat for PFAS. Based on what we’re seeing, there’s still going to be a burden on the ratepayers to fund PFAS treatment.”
Scott Faber, senior vice president for government affairs at the EWG, commented on the announcement:
“Today’s announcement by the EPA is historic progress … More than 200 million Americans could have PFAS in their tap water. Americans have been drinking contaminated water for decades. This proposal is a critical step toward getting these toxic poisons out of our water.
“The EPA’s proposed limits also serve as a stark reminder of just how toxic these chemicals are to human health at very low levels.”
There are thousands of claims yet to settle
According to WBUR, Massachusetts has set aside $170 million to begin the PFAS cleanup.
The federal government also announced that the state will receive $38 million to help address the cleanup of emerging contaminants in the drinking water, including PFAS.
However, how the money from the 3M settlement will be distributed is still unclear.
According to Fortune magazine, the amount of the settlement is also unclear. Payments will be made out over the next 13 years, which Fortune reports could reach $12.5 billion. The amount depends on the number of public water systems that detect PFAS over the next three years.
There are an additional 3,000 claims that are still unsettled and Michael London of the New York law firm Douglas & London, representing plaintiffs in the Stuart, Florida case, told Time :
“There are also 5,000, perhaps 6,000 individuals who have brought personal injury cases [nationwide].”
It’s estimated that Dupont and 3M will not be the only defendants as companies that knowingly used PFAS in manufactured products could also be liable.
London implied that he believes, ultimately, each of these companies would settle rather than risk a court judgment, as he continued:
“There’s going to be probably twenty-plus defendants who have their fingerprints on [the] MDL [multidistrict litigation]. Some will settle early, some will settle in the middle, some will settle late.”
In the company’s press release, 3M chairman and CEO Mike Roman said, “This is an important step forward for 3M.”
The company elaborated that PFOA and PFOS had been eliminated more than 20 years ago but despite the lawsuit settlement and mountains of evidence to the contrary, the press release continues to insist that “PFAS can be safely made and used and are critical in the manufacture of many products …”
The company also indicated that if the court does not approve the agreement or if other terms are not fulfilled, 3M would defend itself in litigation and would continue to address other PFAS lawsuits by defending itself.
Rate hikes to pay for cleanup may help lower disease risk
In 2015, PFAS were measured in the serum of at least 97% of Americans. In May 2015, more than 200 scientists from 40 countries signed the Madrid Statement, in which they warned about the harms associated with PFAS and documented the following potential health effects of exposure:
Even at very low doses, drinking water contaminated with PFAS has been linked to immune system suppression and an increased risk of certain cancers. Reproductive and developmental problems are also linked to PFAS.
Food wrappers, biodegradable bowls and compostable bowls are all significant sources of PFAS. PFAS can also find its way into the food supply by recycling human waste.
The 2018 documentary, “Biosludged,” revealed the scientific fraud perpetuated by the EPA legalizing pollution of agricultural soils through contaminated industrial and human waste as fertilizer.
In 2019, The Intercept reported that 44 samples of sewage sludge tested by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection were all contaminated with at least one PFAS chemical and in all but two of the samples “the chemicals exceeded safety thresholds for sludge that Maine set early last year.”
The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry acknowledges research suggests that PFAS may be associated with changes in liver enzymes, increased cholesterol levels, increased risk of kidney or testicular cancer and an increased risk of high blood pressure or preeclampsia in pregnant women.
This acknowledgment only touches on the scientific data linking PFAS to a laundry list of health problems.
Waiting for the EPA to clean up the environment may be too late. It is up to you to take control of your health and limit your exposure by making safer lifestyle choices.
Consider the following ways to limit the amount of PFAS chemicals you contact daily.
Oral care — Limit your exposure by choosing dental floss and other interdental devices manufactured by a trusted company without toxic chemicals. Seek out products using vegan vegetable waxes that are smoother and glide between your teeth easily, as well as those without added fluoride, using nylon instead of chemically treated silk.
Drinking water — There are more than 9,000 different PFAS chemicals, and scientists are only beginning to unravel their disturbing effects. The full extent of contamination is unknown, but there is a good chance your water is affected. For this reason and others, I highly recommend filtering your water at the points of entry and use in your home.
Cookware — Get rid of all nonstick cookware in your home, including waffle irons and sandwich makers. Instead, seek out a healthy line of nonstick ceramic cookware made without dangerous PFAS chemicals, and without other heavy metals, such as iron, lead, aluminum or cadmium.
Food packaging — Limit eating out as PFAS are commonly found in packaging from fast food, pizza restaurants and packaging at your grocery store.
Personal care products — Certain cosmetics, particularly eye shadow, foundation, powder, bronzer and blush, have a higher risk of containing PFAS chemicals.
An EWG report found 13 PFAS chemicals in close to 200 products spanning 28 brands, including makeup, sunscreen, shampoo and shaving cream.
ROME – Former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato has alleged that France and its US allies were likely responsible for the mysterious passenger plane crash off Sicily in June 1980, and that the incident was the result of a plot to assassinate late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
“The most credible version is about the responsibility of the French Air Force with the complicity of the Americans and those who participated in the air war over our skies on the evening of June 27,” Amato said in an interview with Italian newspaper la Repubblica on Saturday, recounting the June 27, 1980 crash of Itavia Flight 870, in which all 81 passengers and crew onboard were killed.
“A plan had been launched to hit the plane on which Gaddafi was flying,” Amato said, referring to reports of a dogfight taking place in the area between French and Libyan jets on the day the Italian passenger plane went down, and rumors that Gaddafi was on board one of the Libyan Air Force MiG jets.
The plan was to “simulate NATO drills involving many aircraft” during which a missile would have been fired – passed off as an accident – at the plane carrying Gaddafi, Amato said. However, Gaddafi got a warning from then-Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, Amato’s former rival, and never boarded the jet, with the French missile allegedly intended for him ending up hitting the Itavia plane instead.
The Itavia McDonnell Douglas DC-9 passenger jet crashed into the Tyrrhenian Sea off the western Italian coast, between the islands of Ponza and Ustica en route from Bologna to Palermo.
In 2015, the Palermo Court of Appeal ruled that the crash was caused by a missile hitting the DC-9, and that the missile was fired by another aircraft that crossed the passenger plane’s route. The court ruled out previously claimed versions about a bomb being planted on board the civilian airliner.
In his interview on Saturday, Amato said the Elysee should admit its responsibility, so that it can “wash away the shame that weighs down on Paris.”
“After forty years, the innocent victims [of the crash] have not received justice. Why continue to hide the truth? The time has come to shed light on this terrible state secret. [French President Emmanuel] Macron could do it. And NATO could do it,” he said.
France and its US allies have long denied any involvement in Itavia Flight 870’s crash.
Commenting on Amato’s allegations, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni called on the politician to disclose any materials he may have related to the incident.
“Taking into account that the materials concerning the DC-9 tragedy are not classified, and that the judicial authorities and parliamentary commissions have done a lot of work over decades, I ask Amato to understand whether, in addition to his conclusions, he has other elements that allow him to review the decisions of the judiciary and the parliament, and possibly to make them available, so that the government can take all possible and consistent steps,” Meloni was quoted as saying in a statement released by her office.
Artificial intelligence can’t be trusted to auto-correct emails, much less make civilization-altering decisions about the use of lethal force, a peace activist told Sputnik on Wednesday. Putting autonomous weapons into high-risk situations only risks triggering a war nobody can back down from.
The US Department of Defense has unveiled a new AI drone program designed to close the gap with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Called “Replicator,” the program aims to introduce thousands of cheap and disposable – “atrittable” in Pentagon parlance – autonomous drones over the next two years.
“Replicator will galvanize progress in the too-slow shift of US military innovation to leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap and many,” US Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said on Tuesday at an industry event.
Noting that China’s core advantage is mass – “more ships, more missiles, more people” – Hicks said the US would “counter” the PLA’s mass “with mass of our own, but ours will be harder to plan for, harder to hit, and harder to beat.”
Michael Wong, the national vice president of Veterans for Peace, co-chair of the Veterans for Peace China Working Group, and co-founder of Pivot to Peace, a coalition of Chinese and peace communities, told Radio Sputnik that giving AI the power to both trigger and escalate military conflicts “poses a great danger to all of humanity.”
“We should be very concerned. Let me make three main points. First, China does not want an arms race. They’ve spoken at the UN about this and they’re very much against having such a race in the first place. And my second point is, if there is an arms race, if the United States is foolish enough to force it on China, China will win. And my third point is, these AI, sometimes called killer robots, are a danger to all of humanity because they interact with each other, they could conceivably interact with our nuclear systems, and it risks decisions being made by AI without the oversight of humans or controlled by humans that will escalate situations out of control,” he said.
“Zhang Jun, who is the China representative to the UN, spoke at the UN recently, and he urged the UN to lead in advocating for a peaceful use of AI, regulations and rules to control the development of AI and to direct AI for peaceful use, not for weapons. And he felt that standards need to be made to regulate and control AI. And UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres also said that interaction between AI, nuclear weapons, biotechnology, neurotechnology and robotics is deeply alarming,” Wong explained.
“And yes, if China were to have an arms race forced on them on AI, China’s actually slightly more advanced in some ways in AI than we are. They also are able to mass produce things in general much faster than we are. For example, here in California, we’ve been trying for over a decade to build high speed rail just from San Francisco to Los Angeles. We have not been able to do that. China has built thousands of miles of light rail all across the country, networking every major city in China in just about ten years. So in terms of mass producing anything, China will win if we engage in a race with China.”
Wong then pointed out a very practical example of why giving computers such authority is dangerous: they can’t even get things like spell-checking and auto-correcting text right.
“How much trouble do you have with your computer? Would you trust your computer to make life and death decisions for you?” he asked. “You know, I have trouble with my smartphone auto-correcting my email, making mistakes, and making them wrong. Yeah, you know. So do we want autonomous robots, killer robots out there deciding which humans to kill and when and why?”
“And also if two automated nationwide systems are fighting each other, they will be geared and programmed to win, which means that if they can’t win, they will escalate. And that means that escalation could easily spiral out of control. We could end up in a nuclear war. So this is very foolish. There is actually an organization I discovered called Stop Killer Robots dot org. If anybody wants to go to their website, they can get involved.”
For years, the US and its allies have engaged in so-called “freedom of navigation operations” (FONOPS) in which they deliberately flout the territorial claims of other nations that they consider to be “excessive” by sailing US warships through those waters. In the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait, such demonstrations have become commonplace, although China takes them seriously and has at times met FONOPS with a stern response, sending their warships and aircraft to within a few dozen feet of the violating US ship or plane.
Wong noted that the Pentagon’s “Replicator” program would increasingly put AI into such flashpoints.
“For Americans to understand how China feels, just imagine if China or Russia were doing freedom of navigation patrols up and down our coast. And when I say freedom of navigation patrols, I’m not even just talking about sending a cruiser or a destroyer through these waters every every few months, I’m talking about entire aircraft carrier battle groups, a whole armada of ships patrolling up and down China’s coast. And that’s very provocative. Just imagine if China or Russia were doing that to us. How would we feel? That would be a very obvious threat. The Americans, when they read the mainstream news, they hear China’s being aggressive, China’s being a threat. China is not on our borders, that China’s not running battle groups up and down our coast. We’re doing it to them,” he said.
“And we say, well, we’re defending our allies in the Pacific. Our allies are not under threat. China’s not threatening Japan. China is not threatening South Korea, China is not even threatening Taiwan.”
We keep saying China intends to invade Taiwan: China’s very clear they’ve been saying the same thing now that they’ve been saying for 50 years, which is ‘We want peaceful reunification with Taiwan eventually, no time frame named, and that we would only consider use of force if Taiwan were to declare independence.’ The United States keeps trying to push that red line. And if you look at polls in Taiwan, the polls always say a majority of people in Taiwan want to maintain the status quo. And the status quo is working for both sides just fine right now. You know, there’s been billions of dollars in trade that goes back and forth each year between the mainland and Taiwan, there’s thousands of tourists and businesspeople that go back and forth every year, the economies are thriving on both sides. The status quo is working just fine. So the United States is the one that keeps pushing the red line and trying to provoke a war just like we did in Ukraine,” Wong said.
“There’s no need for this. The United States basically is trying to stop China from its peaceful economic rise because they don’t want a large segment of the world not being under the thumb of US domination. It’s basically exploitation and imperialism of the Third World, of which China is still a part.”
“The US elite, especially right now, is composed of people who have a very arrogant and unrealistic view of America and the world. They keep introducing new weapons systems into Ukraine and thinking that that’s going to turn the tide of war. And each time they’re proven wrong, because whatever they do, the Russians will counter it,” he said. “And they’re applying that same logic to China, that they can come up with some new gimmick that can somehow defeat China.”
“This magical thinking is very, very dangerous. You know, there’s always been talk about pushing the edge of nuclear escalation in Ukraine, and they’re doing the same thing with China, they’re pushing the edge, constantly, of escalation. They’re introducing new systems, they’re getting more and more desperate and they’re engaging in more and more magical thinking, which is extremely dangerous. And once we have all these AI killer robots running around the planet – because not just China, but, you know, many countries can develop them – we’ll have something that we don’t have control over. It almost looks like the ‘Terminator’ series of movies that Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in.”
In the new era of biosecurity totalitarianism when authorities actively seek to silence even the most qualified dissenting voices, perhaps nothing could be more corrosive to public confidence than finding that a leading research institute participated in a deliberate fraud. The scientific misconduct in question is the intentional selection of an inappropriate animal model for a pre-clinical study and its subsequent concealment. Intentional scientific misconduct for financial gain is fraud.The organisation in question is the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest public funder of biomedical and behavioural research in the world, which describes itself as ‘the driving force behind decades of advances that improve health, revolutionize science, and serve society more broadly’. In this case, the interests served were the NIH’s own finances and those of a private company, Moderna.
The NIH was implicated by Stephane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, in an April 1, 2020 webcast hosted by MIT Sloan Business School Finance Professor Andrew Lo and co-hosted by the Laboratory for Financial Engineering. Bancel’s presentation, ‘Accelerating mRNA medicines to patients’, was about the company’s Covid-19 vaccine candidate mRNA-1273 developed jointly over the course of a pre-Davos January 2020 weekend with the NIH’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), led by Dr Anthony Fauci. Investor interest in the company and its vaccine was high. Moderna was leading the race for a Covid-19 vaccine with the NIH not long having announced that it had dosed the first human volunteer with mRNA-1273 in a Phase 1 clinical trial expected to run for six weeks.
An excited Bancel said, ‘What I want to share with you is just one set of data, but I think it is important. It is data that we published in our S-3 in February. This is the pre-clinical data on a related coronavirus MERS, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, that many of you will recall happened in the Middle East, in Saudi, a few years ago and a few years later again in South Korea. So what you see here is a rabbit model.’
Bancel showed his audience graphs of data from a pre-clinical study conducted on rabbits and concluded: ‘We are very excited to see this data that was realised with the NIH, with the team of Dr Tony Fauci.’
One of the graphs showed antibody levels over time in a placebo group injected with saline and in single and double dose vaccine groups. But the antibody levels induced by the vaccine doses should have been compared with the levels of antibodies produced by exposure to the MERS virus itself, as a vaccine response must be shown to be superior to antibody levels induced by natural infection to be beneficial. Alongside was a second graph showing viral loads in the nose, throat and lungs following a challenge test in which the animals were exposed to ‘much higher doses of virus’ than during a natural infection. A caption on the slide claimed ‘We observed an induction of neutralising antibodies (my italics) that reduced viral load in the nose, throat and lungs of vaccinated animals’.
The rabbit study was not intended to fool drug regulators, who require an explanation of the relevance of the chosen animal model to the human disease the vaccine is meant to be protecting against. Customarily, before drug regulators permit clinical trials to begin with human volunteers, the efficacy of the candidate vaccine in preventing symptomatic clinical disease and/or pathologies associated with the disease must be demonstrated in a suitable animal model. The induction of antibodies is evidence of immunogenicity but in and of itself is not evidence of efficacy. Antibodies can be either neutralising or non-neutralising, the latter meaning that they fail to prevent reinfection following exposure to the targeted virus.
The choice of animal model for pre-clinical trials is an important one and consequently animal models must be validated. The scientific evidence that rabbits are an unsuitable model for testing the efficacy of a MERS vaccine had been in the public domain for years. In July 2019, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) hosted a workshop and subsequently commissioned IAVI (International Aids Vaccine Initiative) to prepare a report, ‘MERS-CoV standards, assays and animal models vaccine development landscape analysis’, which was funded by the NIAID, NIH, and the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). So far as rabbits are concerned it concluded: ‘Despite the fact that rabbits shed MERS-CoV from their URT [upper respiratory tract], it appears that the New Zealand white rabbit model is neither suitable to study MERS-CoV transmission, nor is the model appropriate for studying clinical disease progression, given that rabbits remained asymptomatic after MERS-CoV inoculation.’
The CEPI report states: ‘Since concerns over SARS-related pathology led to a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clinical hold on vaccine studies, investigation of MERS-CoV vaccine candidates to induce virus-enhancing antibodies and harmful immune response in animal models could be informative before human clinical trials are initiated.’
The FDA ‘hold’ followed the October 2014 gain of function research moratorium on SARs, MERS and influenza ordered by the US government. However some research on MERS continued. As some people were believed to have asymptomatic MERS infections and rabbits were known to be asymptomatic when infected with it, researchers from the NIAID studied the phenomenon in rabbits. The NIH declared the experiments ‘were determined by the NIH to be urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security and as such, were exempted from the US Government Research Funding Pause on Selected Gain-of-Function Research Involving Influenza, MERS, and SARS viruses.’
The results of this asymptomatic study were published in 2017. The findings were not positive: ‘The rabbits developed antibodies against viral proteins that lacked neutralizing activity and the animals were not protected from reinfection (my emphasis).’ Further, the study found that even without an increase in viral RNA titers, reinfection resulted in increased inflammation of the lungs. The researchers warned: ‘Our data from the rabbit model suggests that people exposed to MERS-CoV who fail to develop a neutralizing antibody response, or persons whose neutralizing antibody titers have waned, may be at risk for severe lung disease on re-exposure to MERS-CoV.’
Bancel told the webinar audience that mRNA mimics natural infection without introducing the actual virus. But if exposure to the virus itself does not produce antibodies that protect against reinfection, there is no mechanism by which artificially stimulated antibodies can, thus rendering the company’s specific claim that the MERS vaccine induced ‘neutralizing antibodies’ untrue. The company repeated the claim in the S-3 referred to by Bancel, which was a $500 million supplementary stock offer made in February 2020, where investors were told: ‘We have demonstrated the ability to induce neutralizing antibodies that confer protection against viral challenge with a related coronavirus, MERS.’
Bancel said that Fauci’s team at NIAID helped Moderna realise the data, raising the question of why NIAID would accept the use of a model their own researchers who conducted the 2017 study knew to be unsuitable?
The week before the Phase 1 human clinical trial started in March 2020, STAT News reported on Moderna’s pre-clinical animal studies. None of the interviewees mentioned the MERS rabbit study that Moderna presented to investors and the US Patent Office the previous month. STAT News reported that they had been told by NIAID by email that ‘Virologists at NIAID tried the new vaccine [mRNA-1273] on run-of-the-mill lab mice, on the same day that the [phase 1] trial began enrolling participants’. They quoted Dr Barney Graham, the now retired Director of the NIAID Vaccine Research Centre, as saying that those mice showed the same sort of immune response generated by a similar mRNA vaccine against MERS, another coronavirus. ‘That level of immune response was sufficient to protect mice from MERS CoV infection,’ he wrote. Graham also said that mice susceptible to SARS-CoV2 ‘are being bred so that the colony can be enlarged’ adding that they ‘will be available for experiments within the next few weeks’.
Humanised mice are a validated study model for MERS, whereas rabbits are not, so if data from a mouse study of the mRNA-MERS vaccine was available, as Graham claimed, why wasn’t it used in Moderna’s February prospectus and the patent application?
Under the Research Collaboration Agreement between Moderna and NIAID, which has an effective date of July 19, 2019, NIAID was to conduct immunogenicity studies on Moderna’s mRNA-MERS vaccine in animals. During 2020, Dr Kizzmekia Corbett, the NIAID researcher assigned to run these studies for Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine mRNA-1273, wrote two papers: a June 11, 2020 preprint article entitled ‘SARS-CoV2 mRNA vaccine development enabled by prototype pathogen approach’ and a second peer reviewed paper published in the journal Nature on August 5, 2020 entitled ‘SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccine Development Enabled by Prototype Pathogen Preparedness’. In addition to mice studies on mRNA-1273, both papers cite the mRNA-MERS mouse study that Graham told STAT News about. Neither mentions an mRNA-MERS rabbit study. Oddly, neither is the mRNA-MERS vaccine’s alpha-numeric identifier given.
Heavily redacted copies of Moderna’s contracts with NIAID were released following a freedom of information application by AXIOS News. On December 17, 2019, Moderna signed a material transfer agreement (MTA) transferring ‘mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidates developed and jointly owned by NIAID and Moderna’ to Dr Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), directing him to perform animal challenge studies. The research programme is redacted. More suspiciously, so is the animal model stipulated in paragraph 3. Dr Baric did not respond when he was asked by me if he was commissioned to run the mRNA-MERS rabbit study.
Dr Baric is widely regarded as the world’s leading coronavirus researcher. He was a member of the World Health Organization working group on animal models to accelerate the development of Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics. So too was Dr Graham who signed the MTA on behalf of NIAID. Given their expertise, the selection of a suitable animal model should have been a straightforward matter rather than a contentious one requiring concealment. One possible explanation for why experts would choose an inappropriate model is that they were in a hurry and suitable mice were not available. As per a 2015 paper in Virology, the first transgenic mice for MERS research were bred by Dr Agarwal at the University of Texas. Laboratory mice specially bred such as those developed by Dr Baric for his research into the original SARS are not susceptible to MERS. Baric certainly has the expertise to breed his own, given sufficient time. In 2020, he filed an invention report with UNC-CH (UNC ref 18752) for a mouse adapted model to test SARS-CoV-2 countermeasures.
On December 16, 2019, the day before Moderna signed the Baric MTA for the jointly owned Moderna/NIAID mRNA coronavirus vaccines, the company signed an amendment to the July 2019 NIAID research collaboration agreement. This amendment was countersigned by Vincent Feliccia, the branch chief of NIAID Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property Office, on January 13, 2020, the day the design of Moderna’s SARS-CoV-2 vaccine was finalised.
Intentional scientific misconduct for financial gain is fraud. In addition to publishing the mRNA-MERS rabbit data in its supplementary stock offer, Moderna used it to apply for a patent for an mRNA-betacoronavirus vaccine on February 28, 2020. The same patent covers Spikevax, its Covid-19 vaccine. The US Patent Office is notoriously poor at detecting scientific fraud in patent applications even when it is in the public domain. In 2014 it astonishingly issued a patent to Dr Hwang Woo-suk for a technique to clone human embryos although the associated journal paper had been retracted in 2005 due to the data having been faked. Unlike drug regulators, the Patent Office apparently does not require the use of validated animal models, or a justification for the selection of a given model.
As was widely reported in 2021, Moderna and NIAID became embroiled in a dispute over the NIAID’s ownership interest in mRNA-1273. The company omitted to include Dr Kizzmekia Corbett, Dr Barney Graham and his boss, Dr John Mascola, when it filed for its patent. An NIH spokesperson told CBS news: ‘Omitting NIH inventors from the principal patent application deprives NIH of a co-ownership interest in that application and the patent that will eventually issue from it.’
As of the end of February 2023, Moderna is reported to have earned $36billion from Spikevax. Despite the ongoing patent dispute with NIAID, following negotiations in December 2022 the company gave NIH a $400 million ‘catch-up royalty payment’.
Under the provisions of the Bayh-Dole Act, US government researchers are also entitled to receive up to $150,000 in royalties annually if their inventions are commercialised. Meanwhile, despite Bancel’s initial enthusiasm for sharing the mRNA-MERS rabbit data, it soon disappeared. Perhaps that’s because it’s hard to see how their indemnity shield under the US Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act stretches that far.
The Vietnam War tormented and tore the societies who saw fit to participate in it. It defined a generation culturally and politically in terms creative and fractious. And it showed up the rulers to be ignorant rather than bright; blundering fools rather than sages secure in their preaching. Five decades on, the political classes in the United States and Australia are still seeking to find reasons for intervening in a country they scant understood, with a fanatic’s persuasion, and ideologue’s conviction, a moralist’s certainty. Old errors die hard.
Leaders are left the legacy of having to re-scent the candle, hoping that no one notices the malodorous stench left by history. Errors can be ignored in the aromatic haze. Broadcasters and producers of celluloid scutter about to provide softening programs explaining why soldiers who had no valid reason fighting a conflict, could find themselves in it. The ABC in Australia, for instance, released their series called Our Vietnam War, narrated by Kate Mulvany, whose bridge to the war was via her father. The very title is personal, exclusive, and seemingly excludes the Vietnamese who found themselves pawns, rebels, collaborators and insurgents.
The production also received the approval of the Australian Department of Veterans’ Affairs. “The series provides a unique opportunity for viewers to gain insights into the personal stories of veterans and the broader impact of conflict on Australia’s history and identity.”
The Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, has made 2023 a calendar year for reminding Australians about the Vietnam experience, albeit in a most slanted way. On March 29, he acknowledged veterans visiting Canberra in an address to parliament. The words “courage”, “sacrifice” and “bonds of camaraderie forged under fire, and cruel realities of loss”, were noted. Adversaries are not mentioned, nor was, curiously enough, opposition to the war that was expressed at the time from a number of brave Labor Party stalwarts, Arthur Calwell being foremost among them.
The speech continued in a more plangent tone.
“Let us stand in this place, in this Parliament, and speak – loudly and clearly – about those who were sent to war in our name, who did their duty in our name, but whose names we did not hold up as proudly as we should have.”
On Vietnam Veterans’ Day (August 18), Albanese gave another speech, this time in Ipswich, Queensland, where he again apologised to the veterans. “We should have acknowledged you better as a nation then. But the truth is, as a nation we didn’t.” The platitudes are piled up, and merely serve to blunt the nature of Australia’s involvement in a brutal, rapacious conflict. “You upheld Australia’s name. You showed the Australian character at its finest.”
This distraction serves to cover the tracks of those who erred and bungled, not merely in committing the troops, but in ignoring the consequences of that deployment. The mistreatment dished out to the returnees was as much a product of civilian protest as it was a conscious effort on the part of veterans from previous conflicts to ignore it. It was a war never formally declared, conducted in conditions of gross deception.
A half-century on, it is striking to see the apologetics gather at the podium. The New South Wales branch of the Returned and Services League of Australia (RSL), for instance, went out of its way to issue one for the way thousands of defence personnel were treated in the aftermath of the conflict. “RSL NSW acknowledges a generation of veterans who are still healing and we publicly recognise our charity’s past mistakes this Vietnam Veterans Day,” came the statement the organisation’s president Ray James.
In the making of war, those behind the policies for waging it tend to escape culpability. The Australians in this affair were, to put it politely, compliant, featherbrained creatures upset by the Yellow Peril north of Papua New Guinea and easily won over through invocations of the “Red Under the Bed”.
Canberra went out of its way to send material and aid to South Vietnam not merely to fight Asiatic atheists of a red hue, but to impress their increasingly bogged-down US allies. To aid the enterprise, the Menzies government introduced national service conscription in November 1964, a policy that became the source of much parliamentary acrimony, notably from the Labor Party.
In July 1966, on an official visit to Washington, Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt emetically appropriated the Democratic Party’s own campaign slogan by declaring that Australia was “All the way with LBJ”. At the National Press Gallery that same month, Holt declared that, “When it comes to American participation and resolution to see the war in south Vietnam through, Australia is undoubtedly all the way”. Spinelessness and crawling in a military alliance became political virtues, or what Albanese might like to call “values”.
Australia’s commitment was marred by problems of strategic worth, something which officials were well aware of as early as April 1967. As a government paper titled “Australia’s military commitment to Vietnam” documents, requests for a larger Australian commitment by US military sources in Saigon and Washington were made despite the open-ended nature of the conflict. The planners lacked certitude on basic objectives, not least on the issue of victory itself. The views of US Defence Secretary Robert S. McNamara, as expressed in meetings with his Australian counterparts, are expressly mentioned in all their obliqueness. The secretary “had no doubt that America could no longer lose the war, but they still had the problem of winning and that could be long and hard and there was no easy way which could point directly to victory.”
Add to this the fantastic delusion that the Vietnamese communist movement was a Peking-directed affair rather than an indigenous movement keen to remove foreign influence, and we have a conflict not merely futile on the part of Canberra and Washington, but wasteful and criminal. Fifty years later, and officials from both countries have the chance to make another round of potentially graver, more calamitous decisions.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
In the first 2024 Republican presidential debate last week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis touted his time in Iraq. “I learned in the military, I was assigned with U.S. Navy SEALs in Iraq, that you focus on the mission above all else, you can’t get distracted,” he declared. Later in the debate he stated, “I’m somebody that volunteered to serve, inspired by September 11 and I deployed to Iraq alongside U.S. Navy SEALs in places like Fallujah, Ramadi…”
Some viewers had the impression that DeSantis was a Seal, but he was actually a Harvard Law School graduate who was a Judge Advocate General Corps (JAG) alongside the Seals. DeSantis was deployed to Iraq in 2007 and 2008, during President George W. Bush’s “surge” (intended to postpone the obvious failure of the war until after Bush’s second term ended).
The American troops that Bush sent to Iraq were injected into a conflict where it was often nearly impossible to distinguish friend from foe—what author Robert Jay Lifton labeled “atrocity-producing situations.” Invoking his time in Fallujah, DeSantis may be confident that few Americans recall the carnage that preceded his time there.
Fallujah was hammered by two U.S. assaults in 2004. The first attack was launched in April 2004 in retaliation for the killings of four contractors for Blackwater, a company that became renowned for killing innocent Iraqis.After their corpses were dragged through the street, the Bush administration demanded vengeance.
President Bush reportedly gave the order: “I want heads to roll.” He raved at Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez during a video conference,“If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell!…Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out!”
U.S. forces quickly placed the entire city under siege. The British Guardian reported;
“The U.S. soldiers were going around telling people to leave by dusk or they would be killed, but then when people fled with whatever they could carry, they were stopped at the U.S. military checkpoint on the edge of town and not let out, trapped, watching the sun go down.”
The city was blasted by artillery barrages, F–16 jets, and AC–130 Spectre planes which pumped 4,000 rounds a minute into selected targets. Adam Kokesh, who fought in Fallujah as a Marine Corps sergeant, later commented: “During the siege of Fallujah, we changed rules of engagement more often than we changed our underwear. At one point, we imposed a curfew on the city, and were told to fire at anything that moved in the dark.”
The Bush administration decided to crush the city—but not until after Bush was safely reelected. In the weeks after Election Day, U.S. Army soldiers and Marines smashed the city of Fallujah, Iraq, killing an unknown number of civilians and leaving the city a burnt-out ruin. Marine Col. Gary Brandl explained the U.S. holy mission: “The enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan. He’s in Fallujah and we’re going to destroy him.”
Up to 50,000 civilians remained in Fallujah at the time of the second U.S. assault. At a November 8, 2004 press conference, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared that “Innocent civilians in that city have all the guidance they need as to how they can avoid getting into trouble.” Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard B. Myers said three days later that Fallujah “looks like a ghost town [because] the Iraqi government gave instructions to the citizens of Fallujah to stay indoors.”
Supposedly, Iraqi civilians would be safe even if when American troops went house to house “clearing” insurgents out. However, three years later, during the trials for killings elsewhere in Iraq, Marines continually invoked the Fallujah Rules of Engagement to justify their actions. Marine Corporal Justin Sharratt, who was indicted for murdering three civilians in Haditha (the charges were later dropped), explained in a 2007 interview with PBS:
“For the push of Fallujah, there [were no civilians]. We were told before we went in that if it moved, it dies… About a month before we went into the city of Fallujah, we sent out flyers… We let the population know that we were coming in on this date, and if you were left in the city, you were going to die.”
The interviewer asked, “Was the procedure for clearing a house in Fallujah different from other house clearing in Iraq?” Sharratt replied, “Yes. The difference between clearing houses in Fallujah was that the entire city was deemed hostile. So every house we went into, we prepped with frags and we went in shooting.” Thus, the Marines were preemptively justified in killing everyone inside—no questions asked. Former Congressman Duncan Hunter admitted in 2019, “I was an artillery officer, and we fired hundreds of rounds into Fallujah, killed probably hundreds of civilians…probably killed women and children.”
The U.S. attack left much of Fallujah looking like a lunar landscape, with near-total destruction as far as the eye could see. Yet, regardless of how many rows of houses the United States flattened in the city, accusations that the United States killed noncombatants were false by definition. Because the U.S. government refused to count civilian casualties, they did not exist. And anyone who claimed to count them was slandering the United States and aiding the terrorists.
The carnage the U.S. forces inflicted on Fallujah was supposedly not massive retaliation but the well-disguised triumph of hope and freedom. Bush announced on December 1, “In Fallujah and elsewhere, our coalition and Iraqi forces are on the offensive, and we are delivering a message: Freedom, not oppression, is the future of Iraq… A long night of terror and tyranny in that region is ending, and a new day of freedom and hope and self-government is on the way.” But it is tricky for corpses to be hopeful.
During DeSantis’ first campaign to become Florida’s governor in 2018, his first words in his first televised advertisement were, “Ron DeSantis, Iraq War veteran.” TheSt. Augustine Record noted in 2018, “DeSantis was responsible for helping ensure that the missions of Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets in that wide swath of the Western Euphrates River Valley were planned according to the rule of law and that captured detainees were humanely treated.”
Most of the details of DeSantis’ time in Iraq have not been disclosed. But he was deployed into an area where stunning detainee abuses by the U.S. Army had previously been reported. In September 2005, Americans learned that three 82nd Airborne Division soldiers complained about Army cooks and other off-duty troops, for amusement and sport, routinely physically beating Iraqi detainees being held near Fallujah. One sergeant explained, “We would give [detainees] blows to the head, chest, legs and stomach, and pull them down, kick dirt on them. This happened every day.” The sergeant said that there were no problems as long as no detainees “came up dead… We kept it to broken arms and legs.” Captain Ian Fishback of the 82nd Airborne repeatedly sought to get guidance from superiors on the standards for lawful and humane treatment of detainees. He, like other officers, never received clear guidelines. Fishback publicly complained, “I am certain that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment.”
It would be most helpful to American voters to learn more about what exactly Ron DeSantis did during his time in Iraq. Prior to his time in Iraq, he volunteered to be a legal advisor at Guantanamo Bay detention camp. In a 2018 interview for CBS Miami, he stated that one of his tasks was to clarify “the rules for force feeding detainees.” He also stated, “What I learned from [Gitmo] and I took to Iraq—they are using things like [false charges of] detainee abuse offensively against us—it was a tactic, technique, and procedure.”A Vice documentary that covered DeSantis’ role at Gitmo was scheduled for broadcast on Showtime but the May 28 air date was canceled on the day after DeSantis announced his presidential campaign.
The Pentagon’s records on DeSantis’ years as a JAG could help voters judge his candidacy for the presidency. But Americans would be damn fools to expect transparency from the feds or from most political candidates.
Previously I argued whether Saudi Arabia’s repeated involvements in U.S. interventions and wars stem from free national will or in response to a specific condition. For starters, in Saudi Arabia there is no national will. In Saudi Arabia, the national will is the will of the Al Saud clan. Still, when a major Arab state allies itself with a superpower that committed unspeakable crimes against humanity in almost every Arab country, then something is wrong. This fact alone should compel us to examine the U.S.-Saudi relation for one exceptional reason. As a result of the U.S.-Saudi wars, hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia have lost their lives. Millions became displaced in their own homelands. And millions more rendered refugees.
Attributing the Saudi policies to the bonds of “partnership” with the U.S. is frivolous. There are no bonds between these two thugs except those of business, military deals, secret plots, and wars. Proving this point, bonds such as these have no space for the American and Saudi peoples to share significant cultural or societal exchanges. If partnership is not the reason for the Saudi contribution to the U.S. strategy of empire and imperialism, then another reason must exist.
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• The CIA in Angola 
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