In a Los Angeles Times editorial predictably hyping up the extreme danger to “national security” arising from the January 6 Capitol protests, the Times quotes Capitol police officer Harry Dunn as saying, “We represent the good side of America, the people who believe in decency.”
Really?
So tell us, Officer Dunn, what is decent about the following actions of the U.S. government:
1. The torture center and prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.
2. The indefinite detention of people at Guantanamo Bay without charges or trial.
3. The denial of trial by jury in terrorism trials at Guantanamo Bay.
4. The use of evidence acquired by torture at Guantanamo Bay.
5. The use of confessions acquired by torture at Guantanamo Bay.
6. The use of hearsay to secure convictions in terrorism “trials” at Guantanamo Bay.
7. The secret monitoring of communications between attorney and detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
8. The torture of people at the hands of U.S. officials in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other parts of the world.
9. The intentional destruction of videotapes depicting the torture of people at the hands of U.S. officials.
10. The invasion, occupation, and war of aggression against Iraq, a country that had never invaded or attacked the United States.
11. The invasion of Afghanistan and the resulting 20-year destruction of life and property.
12. The secret mass surveillance of the American people.
13. The secret illegal surveillance partnerships with American telecoms.
14. The sanctions against the people of Iraq, which contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.
15. U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright’s infamous statement that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions, while difficult, were “worth it.”
16. The decades-old embargo against Cuba, which has been a major factor in the suffering of the Cuban people.
17. The sanctions against Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, and other countries, with the aim of causing death and suffering among the citizenry to achieve regime change.
18. Trade wars against China and other nations.
19. MKULTRA.
20. The invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.
21. Coups and invasions for the purpose of regime change, including against democratically elected foreign presidents and prime ministers.
22. State-sponsored assassinations and executions, including of American citizens, along with cover-ups of such assassinations.
23. Official lies, including under oath.
24. The secret hiring of Nazis to secretly serve the U.S. government.
25. COINTELPRO.
26. The “war on terrorism.”
27. Secret illegal surveillance of American officials and American citizens for the purpose of blackmailing them.
28. The racist war on drugs, along with civil asset forfeiture, mandatory minimum sentences, and deadly no-knock raids.
29. The war on immigrants, which has brought untold death and suffering to countless people.
30. The immigration Berlin Wall along America’s southern border.
31. The immigration police state along America’s southern border, including domestic highway checkpoints, warrantless searches of farms and ranches, boarding of Greyhound buses to check people’s papers, and violent raids on American businesses.
32. The unexplained killing of Ashli Babbit during the January 6 Capitol protests.
33. Soaring federal spending and debt.
34. Waco and Ruby Ridge.
35. The undeclared Vietnam War.
36. The undeclared Korean War.
37. Inciting crises and new official enemies to justify ever-increasing budgets for the national-security establishment and its army of “defense” contractors.
38. The Federal Reserve and decades of monetary debauchery and debasement.
39. The IRS.
40. The persecution and prosecution of people who disclose the evil and sordid dark-side secrets of the U.S. government.
Pray tell, Officer Dunn: Is all this the official “decency” to which you refer?
July 28, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, United States |
5 Comments
The Syrian military has intercepted two missiles fired by Israeli fighter jets at Damascus suburb of Sayyidah Zaynab over the weekend, successfully thwarting the third such airstrike in a week, using Russian-made air defense systems.
The airstrike was carried out from outside the Syrian airspace, around 5:40am Sunday morning, when two Israeli F-16 jets fired two guided missiles, targeting unspecified facilities in the town of Set (Sayyidah) Zaynab some 10km south of Damascus.
Syrian air defense units – equipped with Russian-made Buk-M2E systems – successfully intercepted both of them, the head of the Russian Reconciliation Center for Syria, Rear Admiral Vadim Kulit, said in a daily briefing.
On Wednesday night, two Israeli F-16 jets fired four guided missiles from Lebanese airspace at Syria’s Homs province. All of them were shot down, also using Russian-made Buk-M2Es.
On Monday night, four Israeli jets penetrated Syrian airspace through the area of At-Tanf on the Jordanian border, controlled by the US military, and fired eight missiles into Aleppo province. Seven of them were reportedly shot down by Buk-M2 and Pantsir-S systems, but the remaining one struck a scientific research facility in the town of Safira.
While Israeli officials rarely acknowledge such raids, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) warplanes routinely rained down missiles on Syrian territory over the past years, under the pretext of self-defense against the “Iranian threat.”
Damascus has always protested the repeated attacks as blatant acts of aggression, while Russia, Turkey and Iran recently jointly condemned Israeli raids as violations of sovereignty and international humanitarian laws.
July 25, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Syria, United States, Zionism |
6 Comments
A newly released raft of government papers has revealed the British Broadcasting Corporation’s extensive involvement in spreading pro-London, pro-EU, and pro-NATO messaging across the Balkans.
In February, classified documents revealed that BBC Media Action (BBCMA), the ‘charitable arm’ of the British state broadcaster, was embroiled in a number of clandestine operations to “weaken the Russian state’s influence,” funded by the UK Foreign Office.
The exposure raised serious questions about the BBC’s international reputation as a ‘neutral’, ‘objective’ purveyor of news, and what implications its murky relationship with Whitehall has for its output more widely. A further tranche of leaked files, related to covert UK actions in the Balkans, amply reinforces that the organization serves as a cloak-and-dagger device for achieving London’s foreign policy goals.
The papers indicate that BBCMA has been operating across the region since 1996, conducting a wide variety of “media capacity-building, reform and change management” projects. Cited examples of its initiatives include “reforming [the] institutional structures” of Montenegro’s state broadcaster RTCG, working with Macedonian media to “effectively cover elections” and act as a “watchdog,” and supporting the development of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Public Broadcasting System.
The organization also targeted youth audiences in five separate Balkan countries with “an innovative multi-platform media project,” which aimed to “build young people’s capacity for civic participation.” The centrepiece was “social media-based educational web drama” #SamoKazem (Just Saying). Strikingly, viewers were directed to “offline activities to translate awareness into action for change,” strongly suggesting stirring teenagers to activism was the program’s ultimate objective.
Details of BBCMA’s extensive meddling in Serbia greatly reinforces the overtly political nature of its Balkan ventures. From 2007 to 2017 alone, it delivered “four large-scale projects” in the country, such as “a challenging undertaking” with Radio Television Serbia (RTS) over the course of two years “to assist in its transition from state to public service broadcaster,” and working to “professionalise” five local radio stations “to develop their capacity to hold local government to account.”
The organization also delivered a huge three-year project for the European Union, which “strengthened media capacities for improving objective public information about all aspects of EU integration” – in other words, it assisted in the production of pro-Brussels propaganda.Vital work indeed, considering Serbian citizens remain by far the most skeptical about bloc membership.
Under the program’s auspices, BBCMA distributed a two-million-euro grant to 25 Serbian media platforms, and helped produce a staggering 174 separate TV programs, including the 15-part RTS series ‘What’s in It for Me?’ – which averaged 500,000 viewers per episode and won a national award for best EU-related documentary – and human trafficking docudrama ‘Sisters’, which was shown at the United Nations and won “numerous” awards.
Other files explicitly confirm that there is little meaningful distinction between the BBC and its charitable arm. In service of a Foreign Office effort to counteract allegedly falling levels of independence in Macedonian and Serbian media, which ran from November 2016 to March 2019, BBCMA created “a pool of local media professionals with the skills, knowledge and willingness to ensure digital media plays an effective role in fostering debate and accountability.”
Beneficiaries were said to have benefited from the British state broadcaster’s “wealth of experience and talent in creating quality journalism and compelling programmes,” with BBC journalists embedded in the organizations for which they worked in order to provide “mentoring/on-the job training, production support and co-production.” They were also granted access to the BBC Digital Lab, BBC studios, and BBC Blue Room.
The organization asserted in its Whitehall submissions that it considered the production of content to be a fantastic opportunity to “have [an] impact with Serbian and Macedonian audiences.” The consequences of its machinations aren’t certain, although it could be significant that one veteran BBC journalist assigned to the project was in charge of “masterminding” coverage of UK elections during their many years at the Beeb.
After all, the endeavor concluded not long before North Macedonia’s 2019 presidential vote, which pitted pro-EU, pro-NATO candidate Stevo Pendarovski against Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova, a more skeptical, pro-Russian figure. While the first round of the election produced a virtual tie, precipitating a runoff, Pendaraovski was comfortably elected in the second. What’s more, previously leaked files make abundantly clear that the Foreign Office sought to interfere directly in the process in other ways.
That the UK government is engaged in multiple cloak-and-dagger initiatives to influence politics and perceptions in the Balkans is sinister enough, without even considering the covert and overt role played by London in the blood-spattered breakup of Yugoslavia, the non-aligned, independent republic that once comprised most of the region. Given this history, BBCMA’s restructuring of RTS is rendered particularly disquieting.
On April 23, 1999, in the midst of the West’s protracted bombing campaign against Serbia, RTS’ headquarters in Belgrade, along with several radio and electrical installations throughout the country, were targeted for destruction by NATO missiles. In all, 16 journalists were killed in the strike and 16 more wounded, with many trapped in the rubble for days afterward.
In the face of significant international condemnation, high-ranking US and UK officials rushed to declare the bombing entirely justified. Then-Prime Minister Tony Blair defended it on the basis the station was part of “the apparatus of dictatorship and power” of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
“The responsibility for every single part of this action lies with the man who has engaged in this policy of ethnic cleansing and must be stopped,” he added.
Of course, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), a UN body established to prosecute crimes committed during the Yugoslav wars and their perpetrators, would eventually conclude Yugoslav troops had not in fact pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing, and Milosevic, who died in a UN prison in 2006, was posthumously exonerated of all charges.
The ICTY also considered whether the RTS bombing constituted a war crime, ultimately ruling that while its pro-government transmissions didn’t make the station a military target, as the action aimed to disrupt the state’s communications network, it was still legitimate.
Amnesty International branded the tribunal’s findings a miscarriage of justice, and contradictorily too, the judgment quoted NATO General Wesley Clark, who oversaw the overall campaign, as saying it was well-understood that the attack would only interrupt RTS broadcasts for a brief period, but “we thought it was a good move to strike it and the political leadership agreed with us.” In the event, it was off the air for a mere three hours.
Another motive for the hideous incident unexplored by the ICTY could well be that the station’s reporting on NATO’s almost-daily attacks on civilian and industrial infrastructure in Serbia was overly problematic for the military alliance, given its intervention was sold on humanitarian grounds. Nine days prior to the RTS bombing, as many as 85 innocent civilians were killed when NATO jets bombed a Kosovan refugee convoy.
While spokespeople initially claimed the tragedy was an “accident”, RTS subsequently broadcast a chilling recording of the pilot who delivered the deadly payload being repeatedly ordered to strike the convoy on the basis it was a “completely legitimate” target, despite them protesting that they couldn’t see any tanks or military hardware on the ground, just cars and tractors. If truth is the first casualty of war, purveyors of truth are surely the second.
n a perverse irony, though, the ICTY did record that NATO had warned Yugoslav authorities weeks prior that RTS may be caught in the crossfire, unless it acquiesced to broadcasting six hours of uncensored Western media reports per day to balance its coverage, thus making it an “acceptable instrument of public information.”
With the troublesome socialist federation of Yugoslavia now irrevocably smashed into pieces, Whitehall needn’t threaten the use of military force to compel Balkan media outlets to transmit pro-Western propaganda. It simply dispatches BBC staffers to their offices, under the bogus aegis of promoting media diversity, free expression, democracy, civic participation, and fostering debate, to ensure they remain “acceptable” instruments of public information.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
July 20, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | BBC, NATO, UK |
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It was 40 years ago that Israel conducted the first skyjacking of a civilian airliner. On Dec. 12, 1954, Israeli warplanes forced a Syrian Airways Dakota passenger craft carrying four passengers and five crewmen to land at Lydda airport inside Israel.1 The passengers were interrogated for two days before international protests, including strong complaints from Washington, finally convinced Israel to release the plane and its passengers.2
Moshe Sharett, who as Israel’s foreign minister had to explain the incident to the international community, was privately appalled by it. He recorded in his diary: “I have no reason to doubt the truth of the factual affirmation of the U.S. State Department that our action was without precedent in the history of international practice. What shocks and worries me is the narrow-mindedness and the short-sightedness of our military leaders. They seem to presume that the state of Israel may—or even must—behave in the realm of international relations according to the laws of the jungle.”3
The purpose of the unprecedented skyjacking, according to Sharett, was Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan’s ambition “to get hostages in order to obtain the release of our prisoners in Damascus.”4 The reference was to an incident that had occurred four days earlier. Five Israeli soldiers were captured retrieving tapping devices on Syrian telephone lines on the Golan Heights inside Syria. Israel expressed outrage at the imprisonment of the soldiers but Syria refused to release them. 5
Israeli passions were riled even further the next month when one of the Israeli soldiers, Uri Ilan, son of a former Mapam member of parliament, committed suicide in jail on Jan. 13, 1955. Although the Israeli press loudly charged Syria with torture, an examination by the United Nations showed “no signs of physical ill-treatment.”6
But still Syria refused to release the prisoners, pointing out that Israel was holding Syrian civilians prisoner. The impasse contributed to an even graver incident toward the end of the year. On Dec. 11, 1955, Israel sent two paratroop battalions backed by artillery and mortar batteries under the command of Ariel Sharon, later Israel’s defense minister, against Syrian military posts at Buteiha Farm and Koursi near the northeast shore of Lake Tiberias.
It was Israel’s largest military raid inside Syria up to that time and resulted in 56 Syrian deaths, including three women, and nine wounded. Significantly Israel also took 30 prisoners, whom it later used as hostages to exchange for the four Israelis held by Syria.7 The United States expressed its “shock” at the raid and supported a resolution by the United Nations Security Council that unanimously condemned Israel for its “flagrant violation” of the armistice agreement.8
French Ambassador to the U.N. Herv Alphand observed that the condemnation resolution of Israel was “the strongest ever passed by the council.”9 It was the fifth time the council had condemned, censured, called on and otherwise passed resolutions critical of Israel.
Israel insisted the raid was simply in retaliation for Syrian troops firing at an Israeli patrol boat on Lake Tiberias the previous day, in which there had been no casualties. But the explanation was widely disbelieved. Canadian General E.L.M. Burns, the chief of staff of the United Nations Truce Supervisory Organization, bluntly wrote:
“No one with any knowledge of military affairs would believe that such an elaborate, coordinated attack had not been planned well before, and probably rehearsed. Certainly it was not improvised in a few hours…. The reasons given by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ statement were only an excuse, and not a very good one.”10
In fact, like most major actions in the Middle East, there was far more than just retaliation behind the raid. At the time, it was widely suspected that Israel’s main motive in launching the heavy attack was primarily to punish Syria for keeping the four Israeli soldiers prisoners. But it turned out that was just one of the reasons. Israeli historian Benny Morris reports that primarily the attack was meant as a provocation to goad Egypt into attacking Israel and thus start a war. “This,” wrote Morris, “was the thinking behind the strike.”11
The timing was dictated by two events during the previous three months: Egypt and Syria had signed a mutual defense pact on Oct. 20, 1955, and on Sept. 27 Egypt had announced its historic “Czech” arms deal, shocking Israel by the fact that Egypt was about to start receiving massive quantities of Soviet weapons. In the event, Egypt did not respond to the attack on the Golan and Israel had to wait nearly another year before taking on itself the burden of attacking Egypt to start a war.
ANOTHER MOTIVE
There was also another motive behind the attack. It had to do with Israel’s long- term policy to establish exclusive control over Lake Tiberias, the biblical Sea of Galilee, which lay within Israeli territory, and the three demilitarized zones (DMZs) that lay along the Israeli-Syrian frontier in the Jordan Valley.
Palestinians and Syrians insisted on fishing in the lake and were a constant source of friction, especially during mid-November to mid-April, which marked the official fishing season. Israel denied Arabs had any rights to fish there, citing the fact that the Mandate governments over Palestine and Syria had agreed in the 1920s that the frontier followed the east shore of the lake at a distance set back 10 meters parallel to the water.
However, the Arabs countered that under Anglo-French agreements of Feb. 3, 1922, June 23, 1923 and Feb. 2, 1926, Syrians were given “the same fishing and navigation rights on Lakes Huleh and Tiberias… as the inhabitants of Palestine” and also the right to “enjoy grazing, watering and cultivations rights” and to “cross the frontier freely.”12
Nonetheless, Israel insisted on keeping Arab fishermen away from the lake, by force if necessary. It further lacerated relations with Syria by chasing Palestinian farmers out of the DMZs near the lake in violation of the truce of 1949, which held the farmers should be allowed to remain. Israel’s forceful takeover of the DMZs left the Palestinian farmers and fishermen denied access to their fields or fishing grounds embittered and angry. A later UNTSO chief of staff, Norwegian General Odd Bull, who served during the 1960s, wrote:
“I imagine that a number of those evicted settled somewhere in the Golan Heights and that their children have watched the land that had been in their families for hundreds of years being cultivated by Israeli farmers. From time to time they opened fire on these farmers. That, of course, was a violation of the armistice agreement, though I could not help thinking that in similar circumstances Norwegian peasants would almost certainly have acted in the same way. In the course of time all the Arab villages [in the DMZs] disappeared.”13
So too did the Arab fishermen. In 1967 Israel conquered the whole area, including the Golan Heights, and chased out all of the Arabs. It is Israel’s continuing occupation of this land that today remains the major impediment to peace between Israel and Syria.
Recommended Reading:
Bull, Odd, War and Peace in the Middle East: The Experiences and Views of a U.N. Observer, London, Leo Cooper, 1976.
Burns, Lt. Gen. E. L. M., Between Arab and Israeli, New York, Ivan Obolensky, 1962.
Chomsky, Noam, The Fateful Triangle, Boston, South End Press, 1983.
*Chomsky, Noam, Pirates & Emperors: International Terrorism in the Real World, Brattleboro, VT, Amana Books, 1986.
Khouri, Fred J., The Arab-Israeli Dilemma, Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press, 1985.
Morris, Benny, The Birth of the Palestine Refugee Problem, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Morris, Benny, Israel’s Border Wars: 1949-1956, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993.
*Neff, Donald, Warriors at Suez: Eisenhower Takes America Into the Middle East, Brattleboro, VT, Amana Books, 1988.
Rokach, Livia, Israel’s Sacred Terrorism: A Study Based on Moshe Sharett’s Personal Diary and Other Documents, Belmont, MA, Association of Arab-American University Graduates, Inc., 1980.
Von Horn, Carl, Soldiering for Peace, New York, David McKay Company, Inc., 1967.
Notes:
1 New York Times, 12/13/54.
2 Associated Press, New York Times, 12/15/54.
3 Rokach, Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, pp. 20-21. For an analysis of Sharett’s lengthy diaries, see “Secrets of State: An Analysis of the Diaries of Moshe Sharett,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Autumn 1980, pp. 35-57.
4 Chomsky, Pirates and Emperors, p. 84.
5 Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, p. 366.
6 Burns, Between Arab and Israeli, p. 109.
7 Ibid., p. 108; Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, p. 366n.
8 Resolution 111. The text is in Tomeh, George J., United Nations Resolutions on Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: 1947-1974, Washington, DC, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1975, p. 137; the text of the U.S. statement is in Boudreault, Jody and Eric Fortin, U.S. Official Statements: The Golan Heights, Washington, DC, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1993, pp. 27-28.
9 Neff, Warriors for Jerusalem, 118.
10 Burns, Between Arab and Israeli , p. 108.
11 Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, p. 364.
12 Khouri, The Arab-Israeli Dilemma, p. 194.
13 Bull, War and Peace in the Middle East, pp. 50-51.
*Available through the AET Book Club
Donald Neff is author of the Warriors trilogy on U.S.-Middle East relations and of the unpublished Middle East Handbook, a chronological data bank of significant events affecting U.S. policy and the Middle East on which this article is based. His books are available through the AET Book Club.
July 19, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Egypt, Israel, Syria, Zionism |
1 Comment
The U.S. CDC released more data today in their Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a U.S. Government funded database, and now admit that they have received reports of nearly 12,000 deaths during a 7-month period since the COVID-19 shots were given emergency use authorization by the FDA last December.
This includes 997 deaths among unborn children, which is separate from the 10,991 deaths recorded where the “patient” (the one getting the shot) died.
There are now 551,172 adverse reactions recorded out of 463,457 cases, including 9,274 permanent disabilities, 59,403 emergency room visits, 30,781 hospitalizations, and 8,831 life threatening injuries.
You will not find a single corporate media outlet reporting these government statistics, as this has to be the MOST CENSORED information in the United States.
Not only will you NOT find this information reported in the corporate media, you will find “fact checking” articles trying to debunk these statistics, by stating that the presence of these reports does not “prove causation.”
To put this in perspective, however, these recorded deaths during the last 7 months are now almost twice as many deaths as have been recorded by the CDC following vaccinations since they started recording such statistics back in 1990.
The Medalerts.org interface for the VAERS government database allows one to search all the way back to 1901, and from January 1, 1901 through November 30, 2020, which is the last month before the COVID-19 shots were given emergency use authorization, there are a total of 6,255 deaths recorded following ALL vaccines.
And what is the U.S. Government’s position on these 12,000 deaths and half million injuries recorded from those who chose to receive one of these experimental injections during the last 7 months?
Go door-to-door and try to convince even more people to get them, as the pharmaceutical companies producing these shots now expand their trials to include young children and pregnant women.
If you are pregnant or have children, you do not need to wait for the results of these trials. There is plenty of data here to show how deadly these shots are.
Brushing off these statistics, which represent only a fraction of what is actually happening in the public since so few health professionals report these adverse reactions to VAERS in the first place, is most certainly a criminal act leading to genocide.
This is a non-partisan issue as not a single U.S. Governor from either a Blue or Red state has taken action to stop these injections in pregnant women or children. They are ALL accomplices to mass murder, and should be arrested and tried for these crimes.
July 17, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
1 Comment
The legal authorities have been rounding up suspects in the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. Criminal prosecutions will follow. If those accused are found guilty, they will be punished with long terms in jail.
Ironically, however, if the CIA or the Pentagon had been the ones that assassinated Moïse, the situation would be completely different. There would be no arrests or criminal prosecutions. That’s because the CIA and the Pentagon wield the authority to do what private individuals are not allowed to do — the authority to assassinate political leaders and, well, for that matter, anyone else in the world.
Recall the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani. He was in charge of Iran’s security and intelligence apparatus. The U.S. national-security establishment fired a missile at him, killing him instantly.
Unlike the recent assassination in Haiti, there were no arrests or prosecutions of any Pentagon or CIA official after Suleimani’s assassination. That’s because they wield the authority to snuff out people’s lives on grounds of national security.
Moreover, assassination is not some new power wielded by the CIA and the Pentagon. It actually stretches all the way back to the conversion of the U.S. government to a national-security state after World War II. As far back as 1953, the CIA was developing an assassination manual for its assassins. The manual trained the CIA’s assassins not only in the art of assassination but also in the art of covering up the CIA’s role in assassinations.
The following year — 1954 — the CIA instigated a regime-change operation in Guatemala in which it prepared a list of Guatemalan officials to be targeted for assassination. While the CIA still will not release that top-secret list — on grounds of “national security” of course — there is no doubt that the democratically elected president of the country, Jacobo Arbenz, was at the top of the assassination list. Fortunately for him, he was able to escape the country before they could kill him.
In 1961, just before President Kennedy was sworn into office, the CIA conspired to assassinate Congo leader Patrice Lumumba. They actually rushed the assassination because they knew that Kennedy would oppose it. Lumumba was assassinated on January 17. Kennedy was sworn into office on January 20.
In 1970, CIA officials conspired with other U.S. officials to kidnap and assassinate Gen. Rene Schneider, the overall commander of Chile’s armed forces. Although the CIA denied any role in the assassination at the time it was carried out, it later came out that the CIA had conspired to violently kidnap Schneider.
The CIA claimed that its conspiracy was limited to kidnapping, not assassinating, Schneider. However, that was clearly a lie because the CIA’s intent was to remove him from his position in the government because he opposed the U.S. plan for a coup in Chile. Thus, there was no way they ever would have returned him after kidnapping him. In any event, Schneider was shot dead on the streets of Santiago during the kidnapping attempt. The CIA was later caught paying hush money to the killers.
One of the things that has long fascinated me about all this assassination mayhem is how some Americans find it inconceivable that the CIA and Pentagon planned and carried out the assassination of President Kennedy. How can such an assassination be inconceivable when that’s what the Pentagon and the CIA do — they assassinate political leaders on grounds of protecting U.S. national security.
No one seems surprised when they learn about the Pentagon’s or CIA’s assassination of a foreign leader. In fact, most everyone seems pretty nonchalant about the matter. But when one brings up the Kennedy assassination, there is a segment in mainstream American society that goes absolutely ballistic. I don’t get it.
I suppose they would claim that the CIA and the Pentagon would never assassinate an American citizen. But that’s ridiculous. If the CIA or the Pentagon conclude that an American citizen poses a threat to national security, why would they hesitate to take him out? In fact, during the Chilean coup, they authorized Chilean officials to execute two American citizens, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi. More recently, they assassinated two American citizens — Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman.
That leaves the final inconceivable argument — that it is simply inconceivable that the Pentagon and the CIA would exercise their power of assassination against a U.S. president. But what if they conclude that the president poses a grave threat to national security and that that country will fall to the communists or the terrorists or to Russia owing to the president’s policies? Would the Pentagon and the CIA really just let the country go down, or would they take the necessary steps to save the country?
We know the answer to that question from the coup in Chile. Like the United States, the Chilean Constitution did not allow for an assassination or coup to save the country from a president whose policies were deemed to pose a grave threat to national security. That’s why Gen. Schneider opposed a coup. The position of the Pentagon and the CIA was that regardless of the Chilean constitution, the Chilean national-security establishment had a moral duty to save the country by forcibly removing its democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, from office. After Schneider was removed from the scene through assassination, the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s view prevailed. The U.S.-inspired coup occurred on September 11, 1973, and left Allende dead.
Thus, the real questions are: (1) Did the Pentagon and the CIA conclude that Kennedy posed a grave threat to national security owing to the radically different direction he was taking America? (2) Does the evidence establish that Kennedy’s assassination was a highly sophisticated regime-change operation on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment?
Those are the two questions that the inconceivable crowd declines to confront and address. They remain stuck within their inconceivable doctrine.
The answers to those two questions were provided in FFF’s recent online conference “The National Security State and the Kennedy Assassination.” I have no doubts that anyone who watches the presentations delivered in that conference from beginning to end will conclude beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty that the Pentagon and the CIA exercised their power of assassination on November 22, 1963, to protect the country from a president whose policies they concluded posed a grave threat to national security.
July 16, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CIA, Haiti, JFK Assassination, Latin America, United States |
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Yacoub Odeh is 81 years old but he can still remember his childhood in the Palestinian village of Lifta as if it were yesterday. Children playing together in the gardens, swimming in the pools and laying in the grass.
Today, Lifta remains as a frozen time capsule. While the residents were expelled during Israel’s 1948 ethnic cleansing campaign (Nakba), the ruins of their homes still stand. These ruins carved into the lush hillside are perceived as a symbol of the Palestinians’ right of return. This is the only town Israel did not demolish after the Nakba, but a government plan may soon change that.
In May, the Israel Lands Authority (ILA), the government agency in charge of managing public lands, issued a new tender for construction in Lifta. The development scheme, known as Plan 6036, seeks to build 259 housing units along with a commercial and business space and a luxury hotel on top of and around the existing houses. Daphna Golan-Agnon, a law professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and part of the Save Lifta Coalition’s board, explained that while the homes may not be demolished, “the village will disappear behind walls of concrete needed to hold new construction.”
The bid was supposed to be held on July 4, but significant public opposition delayed it to July 29.
The ruins in Lifta, a Palestinian village ethnically cleased in 1948. Liebe Blekh | MintPress News
Attempts to demolish Lifta have been ongoing for years. The ILA first published a tender for Plan 6036 in 2010 after the Israeli state approved the construction plan for Lifta in 2006. A 2012 Jerusalem District Court ruling found Plan 6036 insufficient and requested amending it in accordance with a conservation survey on Lifta from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA).
The IAA survey was completed in 2017 and found that Plan 6036 could not be executed without making significant adjustments in order to preserve the ancient village. Plan 270b was drawn up to fit the survey’s findings but in 2017 the Local Planning and Building Committee of Jerusalem temporarily halted the initiative for further examination.
The recent ILA announcement was met with hundreds of letters to Jerusalem’s mayor rejecting the sale. When reached for comment, the Municipality of Jerusalem told MintPress News that it “wasn’t informed about the publication of this tender and didn’t approve it. The mayor of Jerusalem asked all the relevant authorities to reconsider the construction plan.” The Israel Lands Council, which operates the ILA, did not respond to a request for comment.
‘In one hour, we became refugees’
Lifta’s strategic location at the edge of Jerusalem has made it a prime target for land grabs. Acting as a suburb of Jerusalem, Lifta’s placement next to the Jerusalem-Jaffa Highway makes for an easy trip to the Mediterranean while still being tied to the city of Jerusalem.
Lifta, often referred to as the entrance to Jerusalem, was a wealthy, agricultural community supported by olive presses and flour mills and situated atop the Wadi al-Shami spring. Homes made of limestone were cut into the hillside and Lifta’s roads wended through the valley.
Prior to the 1948 Nakba, Zionist militias like the Haganah saw seizing Lifta as necessary to cement Jewish control over all of Palestine. According to the Haganah Historical Archives, “[s]ecuring the western exit of the city [of Jerusalem] entailed the eviction of Arabs.” Israeli historian Benny Morris said the Haganah fired the first shots in 1947, setting off the mass expulsion of Lifta’s 2,960 residents.
In December 1947, the Haganah killed a Palestinian business owner in Lifta. Later that month, one of Lifta’s two coffeehouses was ambushed with gunfire and grenades. The attack killed six and wounded seven. Two months into 1948, the Jewish Agency chairman and future first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, boasted of the ethnic cleansing’s success, telling his political party members: “From your entry into Jerusalem through Lifta — Romema, through Mahane Yehuda, King George Street and Mea She’arim — there are no strangers. One hundred percent Jews.“
Odeh, head of the Lifta Cultural Heritage Protection Commission, was 8-years-old when Lifta came under siege by Zionist forces.
Yacoub Odeh, Nakba survivor and head of the Lifta Cultural Heritage Protection Commission. Liebe Blekh | MintPress News
“I remember one day my mother was preparing the fire to heat our room, and then [the Zionist miltiias] began to shoot. My brothers began to cry, ‘Mama, mama! They’re shooting us!’ My mom took us inside the room in the corner and under a table to protect us,” Odeh said, recalling two stories of Lifta — the town’s beauty and charm and then its tragic fall.
“There is the beautiful life and then began the miserable life because of the occupation.”
Toward the end of February 1948, Odeh’s father put him, his siblings and his mother into a truck heading to Ramallah to escape the violence in Lifta. Odeh’s father stayed behind to defend the village from the Zionist gangs.
“We were only wearing the clothing we had on because we are coming back tomorrow. We are coming back. Now we just want to be far from the shooting.” Odeh took a deep sigh and said, “In one hour, we became refugees.”
Today, 55 buildings out of approximately 450 remain in Lifta, including a club, mosque, cemetery and school, which now operates as a school for Israeli Jews. Liftawi refugees are estimated at around 30,000 and live in Jerusalem, the Occupied West Bank and the Diaspora. Most of the homes are empty, but a few are occupied by Israeli settlers. According to Zochrot, the Israeli nonprofit seeking to raise awareness of the Nakba, the “settlements of Mey Niftoach and Giv’at Sha’ul were built on village lands and now have become parts of the suburbs of Jerusalem.”
Saving Lifta
The Save Lifta Coalition orchestrated the campaign to the mayor and has been organizing since 2010 against Plan 6036. The organization spent five years working with scholars, activists, conservation specialists and higher education professionals to develop an alternative to 6036.
Their proposal aims to “expand the area of the national park and turn the village into a natural urban space for the adjacent neighborhoods,” while preserving Lifta’s cultural landscape.
The World Monuments Fund added Lifta to its list of endangered sites in 2018 and UNESCO added the village to its tentative list of world heritage sites.
‘Not something we can discuss now’
When asked about the plan’s responsibility regarding the right of return for Palestinians, Golan-Agnon said, “our plan is a plan to save Lifta as it is for the future generations to decide upon its fate.” She explained:
Many of us [in the coalition] do think there should be a right of return for Palestinians but we know it’s not something we can discuss now. So we say, it’s beautiful, keep it open, and then one day there can be a decision about what happens and who’s coming.
Dana Amawi’s grandmother grew up in Lifta and was expelled from the village in 1948. Now the family lives in Amman, Jordan. The 20-year-old said she was shaken to her core upon hearing the news of the sale. “Lifta symbolized a tiny, very small bit of hope that maybe we will be able to return to it,” Amawi told MintPress. “And now to think that other people might live in the house that I have the right to be in, it’s very sad.”
A Palestinian woman holds a partially eaten fig picked from a tree in Lifta. Liebe Blekh | MintPress News
Amawi said that her grandmother fell ill after learning of the auction. “She got sick. She had a fever and she was really, really sad because to her, this is where she grew up. This is where her earliest memories are and this is where she has the right to be,” Amawi said.
Stone houses like the one Odeh spent his early childhood in now crumble from neglect. The walls are sprayed with graffiti and piles of trash line the floors. On Shabbat (the Jewish sabbath), you’ll often find Israelis bathing in the spring’s waters.
Aseel AlBajeh, advocacy officer and legal researcher at the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq, visited Lifta in 2018. Her grandmother, who lives in Ramallah, is from Lifta. “It was a painful experience,” AlBajeh said of her time in Lifta. “I wasn’t sure if I wanted to come back to Lifta in this situation.”
‘You are here as a visitor’
During her visit, AlBajeh tried recalling her grandmother’s memories of a flourishing Lifta, but she said those stories were disrupted by the fact that she’s only in Lifta because of a permit she received from the Israeli government to enter 1948-occupied Palestine or modern-day Israel from the West Bank. “You are here as a visitor. It’s like it’s not a place where you belong, or this is what [the Israeli government] intends for refugees to feel like,” AlBajeh said. “Settlers were swimming in the spring of the village and they were blasting loud music, and it also disrupted my ability to even imagine Lifta as Palestinian.”
Israeli settlers in Lifta hold a middle finger to a group of Palestinian children. Blekh | MintPress News
To help her reclaim Lifta, AlBajeh took a small piece of the village’s remains during her visit. She collected a broken tile painted with traditional designs from one of the house’s floors, knowing this might be the last physical object she can have of Lifta.
“Lifta is a witness of what happened during the Nakba,” AlBajeh said, explaining:
We have this connection as Palestinians, and when we see the cactus plants, we connect this as evidence that displacement happened here. And if you go to Lifta, you’ll see the huge amount of cactus. So even if the houses remain and [Israel] tries to remove the cactus, it’s still painful… It’s not about the stones or about the trees. It’s about the whole identity of Lifta and the Palestinian history, which we still connect to. “
‘We were kings in our village’
Odeh’s memories paint Lifta as an idyllic place, an oasis carved into the steep slopes of Jerusalem where life was carefree and bountiful. “We were kings in our village,” Odeh said. “Everything we need, we had — a life so simple. We didn’t need cinema or computers, no, everything we needed came from our land.”
But the minute Odeh and his family became refugees, their resources became scarce. “At that time there were no charitable associations or agencies ready to help,” Odeh recalled. “You know what Nakba means? Nakba does not mean to destroy homes. No, Nakba means to destroy the life — economic life, social life, educational life, political life. They destroyed our life.”
Upon reminiscing about Lifta, Odeh said his dream is to go back home:
I miss my childhood. Palestinian children have lost their childhood life to play like children, to go to the theater, to concerts, to football. No, until now we have house demolitions, we have arrests, we have land confiscation and killings. Every day we have events like these — if not my family, my neighborhood.”
July 12, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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JORDAN VALLEY – Israeli forces today demolished a water pond near Bardala village in the northern Jordan Valley, according to sources.
Moataz Bsharat, an activist, told WAFA that the Israeli forces escorted a bulldozer to the village, where the heavy machinery tore down the 250-cubic-meter pond, which was used for agricultural purposes and belonged to Samer Sawaftah. The pool was a donation from the Ministry of Agriculture.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces seized a caravan, east of Yatta, south of Hebron.
Coordinator of the Popular Anti-Wall and Settlement Committees, Rateb Al-Jabour, stated that the Israeli forces seized a caravan used to serve as a physical and mental health clinic in Zweidin area, east of Yatta.
The clinic used to provide medical support and treatment to more than 1,200 residents of the area.
Under international law, driving residents of an occupied territory from their homes is considered forcible transfer of protected persons, which constitutes a war crime. But residents of Palestinian communities in the Jordan Valley are no strangers to such disruptive Israeli policies.
The valley, which is a fertile strip of land running west along the Jordan River, is home to about 65,000 Palestinians and makes up approximately 30% of the West Bank.
Since 1967, when the Israeli army occupied the West Bank, Israel has transferred at least 11,000 of its Jewish citizens to the Jordan Valley. Some of the settlements in which they live were built almost entirely on private Palestinian land.
The Israel military has also designated about 46 percent of the Jordan Valley as a closed military zone since the beginning of the occupation in June 1967, and has been utilizing the pretext of military drills to forcefully displace Palestinian families living there as part of a policy of ethnic cleansing and stifling Palestinian development in the area.
Approximately 6,200 Palestinians live in 38 communities in places earmarked for military use and have had to obtain permission from the Israeli authorities to enter and live in their communities.
In violation of international law, the Israeli military not only temporarily displaces the communities on a regular basis, but also confiscates their farmlands, demolishes their homes and infrastructure from time to time.
Besides undergoing temporary displacement, the Palestinian families living there face a myriad restrictions on access to resources and services. Meanwhile, Israel exploits the resources of the area and generates profit by allocating generous tracts of land and water resources for the benefit of settlers.
Israeli politicians have made it clear on several occasions that the highly strategic Jordan Valley would remain under their control in any eventuality.
July 12, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, West Bank, Zionism |
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GENEVA – A high-level UN human rights expert has called for Jewish settlements to be classified as a war crime, urging the international community to hold Israel accountable for a practice it has long considered illegal.
Presenting his latest report to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Michael Lynk, the UN special rapporteur on the rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territories, said he examined whether the Israeli settlements were in violation of the absolute prohibition against “settler implantation” in the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and concluded that “the Israeli settlements do amount to a war crime.”
Talking about the human rights situation in Palestine recently, he said that in east Jerusalem, Jewish settler groups sought to evict Palestinian families from their homes, pointing out that under the Fourth Geneva Convention, forcible transfer of a protected population was prohibited, and the occupying power is forbidden from applying its own laws to the occupied territory.
“I submit to you that this finding compels the international community … to make it clear to Israel that its illegal occupation, and its defiance of international law and international opinion, can and will no longer be cost-free,” Lynk told the Geneva rights council.
Lynk said Israel’s demolition of Bedouin tent dwellings in a village in the West Bank on Wednesday left residents without food or water in the heat of the Jordan Valley, calling it “both unlawful and heartless”.
“Progressive seizure of Palestinian lands together with the protection of the settlements is a further consolidation of Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank,” he said.
There are nearly 300 settlements in east Jerusalem and the West Bank, with more than 680,000 Jewish settlers, Lynk noted.
The settlements have become “the engine of Israel’s 54-year-old occupation, the longest in the modern world”, he added.
He stressed the need for international action, not just words, in order to resolve the situation in Palestine.
“As long as the international community criticizes Israel without seeking consequences and accountability, it is magical thinking to believe that the 54-year-old occupation will end and the Palestinians will finally realize their right to self-determination,” he said.
A few days ago, the Israeli occupation army blocked the delivery of aid to Palestinians whose homes were demolished in the northern Jordan Valley and asked a UN aid team to leave the area, UN humanitarians said on Thursday.
The razing of 27 residential and animal structures and water tanks on Wednesday in the Palestinian herding community of Humsa al-Bqai’a was the first of its kind since February, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said.
The Israeli army’s civil administration and forces also confiscated, among other things, food, milk for children, clothes, hygiene materials and toys during the demolition campaign.
The action involved 11 homes for about 70 people, including 36 children, the office said. Animals had no fodder and water as well.
Representatives of OCHA and humanitarian partners visited the community Wednesday evening, but the army on Thursday asked them to leave.
The community rejected a proposal from the Israeli army to move it to a different location, OCHA said, adding that the army moved the residents’ belongings to the proposed site.
Humanitarians said 11 structures donated as humanitarian aid in February following similar demolitions were destroyed or seized by the army during Wednesday’s raid.
“The repeated destruction of their homes and property, including assistance provided by the humanitarian community is having a devastating economic, social and traumatic impact on the community, particularly children,” OCHA warned.
UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres voiced his deep concern over the demolition of property in the herding community, Stephane Dujarric, the chief spokesman for Guterres, stated.
“He reiterates his call on the Israeli authorities to cease demolitions and seizures of Palestinian property in the occupied West Bank,” Dujarric added in a regular briefing.
“Such actions are contrary to international law and could undermine the chances for the establishment of a viable, contiguous Palestinian state,” he read a statement issued by Guterres.
July 10, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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The U.S. CDC released more data today in their Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a U.S. Government funded database that tracks injuries and deaths caused by vaccines, and they added more than 2000 deaths following COVID-19 shots over what they reported last week.
Last week they were reporting 6,985 deaths, and this week that number jumped up to 9,048.
This is by far the largest increase of recorded deaths in one week since they started reporting deaths following COVID-19 shots.
Besides the 9,048 deaths, there are 7,463 permanent disabilities, 56,971 Emergency Room visits, 26,818 Hospitalizations, and 7,822 Life Threatening injuries following the COVID-19 injections.
And yet, none of this government data will be reported in any corporate media news broadcast, and those who try to post it on the Big Tech social media sites will be flagged for “fake news” by the “fact checkers.”
These are not even the true numbers, as the CDC selectively chooses what to release to the public each week, and of course many deaths and injuries go unreported because the public is conditioned to believe that none of these deaths and injuries have anything to do with the COVID-19 shots.
To put this into perspective, there are now 30% more deaths recorded in 7 months since the launch of the COVID-19 shots in December of 2020, than during the entire 31-year history of VAERS recording deaths following vaccines since it started in 1990.
1990 to November 2020: 6,145 deaths following ALL VACCINES. (Source.)
December 2020 to July 2, 2021: 9,048 deaths from COVID-19 shots only. (Source.)
Deaths of Unborn Babies Much Higher than Originally Thought
Last week we reported 622 deaths of unborn children when the pregnant mother received a COVID-19 injection. Using the same search parameters, that number increased to 803 cases this week. (Source.)
However, deaths recorded in the age group of 12-15 have not really increased yet according to the data that the CDC is releasing, so I began to look at the deaths in the “unknown” age group to see if there were some there. I did find a couple, but what I also found was that there were other “symptoms” that the VAERS data uses that do NOT include the term “abortion” when reporting deaths of unborn children in pregnant mothers who took the shots.
So I noted those symptoms, such as “Foetal death, Premature baby death, Stillbirth,” etc., and the deaths increased from 803 to 917. (Source.) And it is very possible I am still missing some, not to mention the ones that never get reported, or if they are reported, are not released by the CDC.
Of the 9,048 deaths the CDC recorded, 3,073 of those deaths are listed as age “unknown.” (Source.)
Trying a few different searches among this “unknown” age group, I did find a 13-year-old boy who died, and a curious entry of an 11-year-old girl who died and where the “family who got vaccinated died along with their dog due to have been being exposed to the members who got vaccinated.”
VAERS ID: 1440065 – Write-up: died three days after Covid vaccination; Autopsy showed enlarged heart and fluid surrounding the heart; Autopsy showed enlarged heart and fluid surrounding the heart; This is a spontaneous report from a contactable consumer or other non-health care professional in response to mail sent regarding the confirmation of below mentioned query. A 13-year-old male patient received second dose of bnt162b2 (PFIZER-BIONTECH COVID-19 mRNA VACCINE, Formulation: Solution for injection, Batch/Lot number and Expiration date not reported) via an unspecified route of administration in an unspecified anatomical location on an unspecified date as single dose for COVID-19 immunisation. The patient medical history and concomitant medications were not reported. The patient previously received first dose of bnt162b2 (PFIZER-BIONTECH COVID-19 mRNA VACCINE, Formulation: Solution for injection, Batch/Lot number and Expiration date not reported) via an unspecified route of administration in an unspecified anatomical location on an unspecified date as single dose for COVID-19 immunisation. On an unspecified date, the patient after receiving his second Covid vaccine from Pfizer died three days later. The patient underwent lab tests and procedures which included autopsy: enlarged heart and fluid surrounding the heart caused by the Covid vaccination. The outcome of the events was fatal. No follow-up attempts are possible; information about lot/batch number cannot be obtained.; Reported Cause(s) of Death: enlarged heart and fluid surrounding the heart.
VAERS ID: 1320319 – Write-up: Girl”s family who got vaccinated died along with their dog due to have been being exposed to the members who got vaccinated; 11 year old, pre-period, girls family who got vaccinated; This is a spontaneous report from a contactable consumer. A 11-years-old patient of an unspecified gender received BNT162B2 (PFIZER-BIONTECH COVID-19 VACCINE), via an unspecified route of administration on an unspecified date (Batch/Lot number was not reported) as single dose for covid-19 immunisation. The patient medical history and concomitant medications were not reported. The reporter reported that 11 year old, pre-period, girls family who got vaccinated died along with their dog due to have been being exposed to the members who got vaccinated. The patient died on an unspecified date. It was not reported if an autopsy was performed. The lot/batch number has been requested; Reported Cause(s) of Death: Girl”s family who got vaccinated died along with their dog due to have been being exposed to the members who got vaccinated.
18-year-old Camilla Canepa died in Italy following the AstraZeneca COVID-19 shot
Neurosurgeon Who Operated on 18-year-old Girl: “I had never seen a brain reduced in those conditions by a thrombosis so extensive and so serious”.
On June 15th this year we published the story of Camilla Canepa, the 18-year-old Italian woman who developed blood clots and was dead two weeks after experimental AstraZeneca shot. The full story was originally published on The COVID Blog.
Her death shocked the community where she lived so much, that a criminal investigation was started, and Italy changed its policy on the AstraZeneca COVID-19 shot limiting it to only people over the age of 60.
The neurosurgeon who operated on her brain has since spoken out, and English translations of what he stated have been circulating through the alternative media this week.
I found an original source from Italy that reported this, and here is the translation, courtesy of DeepL.
The death of Camilla Canepa has shocked the whole of Italy, so much so that after the death of the 18-year-old girl from Sestri Levante as a result of thrombosis emerged a few days after the administration of the vaccine AstraZeneca the Ministry of Health has decided to ban the product against Covid to those under 60 years.
Waiting for the autopsy on the body of the young woman that will be carried out on Tuesday, to speak to La Stampa is Gianluigi Zona, director of the neurosurgical and neurotraumatology clinic of the San Martino Hospital in Genoa: “I had never seen a brain reduced in those conditions by a thrombosis so extensive and so serious”.
“Reasoning in retrospect – explains the doctor on the controversy for the lack of immediate intervention on Camilla – it’s all easy and everyone is a world champion, the last doctor who comes to see a patient is always the smartest.
I can’t judge what could have been picked up already in the first CT scan, it never arrived at San Martino. Normally, if there are no clues that lead to assume something serious is going on, no doctor in the emergency room prescribes a CT scan with contrast or other tests.”
The situation was immediately serious once the operation began: “All the venous sinuses were blocked by thrombi, a scenario that I had never seen in many years of this profession. You have to imagine the venous sinus as the river in the middle of a valley in which several streams converge.
If you build a dam in the middle of the river, the river swells and at that point the tributaries cannot discharge, with the result that the upstream pressure rises. In front of the picture I saw in the head of that girl, it is clear that – concludes the head physician – we are facing something not normal”. (Source.)
July 10, 2021
Posted by aletho |
War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine |
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For decades now, under Israeli pressure Washington has been trying to play a “power game” with Tehran to bleed it dry, and prevent it from gaining the upper hand in its regional competition with Tel Aviv. Moreover, in this patently self-defeating confrontation, the United States is facing a mounting number of political defeats every day, and a loss of prestige before the world community.
Iranian leader Hassan Rouhani announced a successful victory in the “economic battle” at the end of the last US presidential elections in December, stressing that the Trump administration, which had previously confidently talked about the collapse of the Iranian economy, was leaving the corridors of power with nothing. He stated that there were many difficulties during the “war between economies”, but that the Iranian nation had successfully overcome them and won, and that the failure of the United States in the “economic war” was one of the reasons why Donald Trump lost the elections.
Iran has already proven to the world that it is a self-sufficient country. The uranium enrichment level of 63% recently announced by Tehran, despite numerous acts of sabotage on the part of Tel Aviv and Washington, has clearly thrown both Israel and the United States off balance, since this means that the country now has a virtually complete nuclear cycle. And since it is extremely difficult to stop Iran from going down this path solely through sanctions and provocations on the part of its intelligence services, Washington was forced to realize that it was necessary to negotiate a return to the nuclear agreement with Tehran.
The United States is experiencing nothing but defeats in its confrontation with Iran in the Middle East. The US “game” in Yemen, where Washington’s regional ally, Saudi Arabia, could not endure the onslaught of the Tehran-backed Houthis, is ending in an unvarnished loss. The US is failing in Jordan as well. Not to mention Syria, where the United States, with active support from the West and a number of Arab states, was never able to achieve dominance and resolve the situation in its favor because Iran and Russia started to coordinate their actions in this country.
In January 2020, the Iraqi parliament adopted a resolution that called for the withdrawal of foreign military forces and, above all else, US forces from the republic’s territory, and on April 7 this year Baghdad announced that it would form a technical committee to define the terms and conditions governing the withdrawal of international forces. And for this reason the almost $10 billion that was previously spent on building and fitting out the three military bases in this country that Washington had hoped to use to forever rule not only the Persian Gulf, but also the entire Middle East, can be added to the list of genuine losses for the US.
Among the 1.5 billion Muslims of the world, there are about 130 million Shiites. Most of them inhabit Iran (more than 75 million), Iraq (more than 20 million), and Azerbaijan (about 10 million), where Shiites dominate both numerically, culturally, and politically. There are sizeable Shiite minorities in a number of Arab countries, such as Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc. Shiites inhabit the central, mountainous area of Afghanistan (the Hazaras and others number about 4 million) and some parts of Pakistan. There are Shiite communities in India, even though there are many more Sunnis there. In the southern part of India, so-called “black Shiites” live among the Hinduists.
In recent decades in different countries (Iraq, Bahrain, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, etc.) Shiites have become more actively involved in the struggle for power, as well as in internal conflicts, turning to Tehran in particular for help. The Shiites, perceiving Iran as their own kind of Mecca, are monitoring the confrontation between Washington, Tel Aviv, and Tehran very closely, with each Iranian victory replenishing the ranks of US opponents and, accordingly, strengthening the position of those in the camp that supports Iran. The Shiite community of Muslim peoples is not a union of nations (ethnicities), but a spiritual and political community formed from confessional Shiite groups within the Islamic world. And it is emerging as an increasingly significant factor in cultural and political life.
In the recent confrontation between the United States, Israel, and Iran, the sides involved regularly put out feelers to see how “tough” their opponents are, actively using the capabilities possessed by their intelligence services. Moreover, these services have been used most vigorously in recent years by Tel Aviv to set up multiple covert operations, up to and including economic sabotage and physically killing prominent Iranian figures. The result of this is that the world has witnessed a number of major operations, specifically including inciting separatist sentiments in Iran – both in provinces where Kurds live packed tightly together and in Sistan and Balochistan Province. Fearing the emergence of nuclear weapons in Iran, which, according to Tel Aviv, could pose an objective threat to the very existence of the Jewish state, Israeli operations in this area have long become a kind of fixation. After the Stuxnet computer virus caused more than one thousand centrifuges to malfunction at Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2010, cyber warfare between Iran and Israel has become increasingly earnest. “High-profile” special operations against Iranian nuclear scientists were thrown into this mix back in 2007, then followed a series of murders committed against Iranian physicists in 2010 and 2012. On November 27, 2020, a leading Iranian nuclear physicist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was killed in a Tehran suburb.
In January 2020, Israeli and US intelligence agencies assassinated General Qasem Soleimani, nicknamed “The Shadow” because he directed all covert operations outside the country, and since he was in charge of the Quds Force, the most secretive elite unit in the Iranian army.
Tehran was forced to accept the rules of the game imposed on it by the United States and Israel, through whose efforts terrorism, and the assassination of political and important public figures, are increasingly becoming the norm. During the night of January 8, 2020, Iran launched a missile attack on the American base Ayn al Asad in western Iraq, sending a warning that this was just a strong “slap in the face” of the United States for shedding the blood of Qasem Soleimani, Iranian national hero and the commander of IRGC Quds Force – and that the real vendetta lies in store.
On December 3, Fahmi Hinawi, one of the heads of the Mossad who was involved in killing Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was killed in his car near Tel Aviv. The scenario for his assassination followed the same pattern that the Israelis had used: Hinawi’s car had stopped at a red traffic light and was then riddled with bullets from automatic weapons.
In late January, a “strange” plane crash in Afghanistan killed a high-ranking American CIA officer, Michael D’Andrea, who was in charge of operations in the Middle East and was involved in setting up the assassination of the Qasem Soleimani, head of the IRGC Quds special forces.
And on June 26 at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, US Air Force officer and Red Horse Squadron commander James Willis was found dead. The Air Force Times reported that the death of the 55-year-old US Air Force lieutenant colonel was not related to any hostilities. Previously, Iranian intelligence services had affirmed that Willis was involved in murdering the IRGC Quds special forces commander Qasem Soleimani on the night of January 3.
July 9, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | Iran, Israel, Middle East, United States, Zionism |
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Documentation of Israeli crimes of war, against humanity, atrocities, and other forms of state-sponsored brutality since establishment of the Jewish state could fill countless blood-drenched volumes.
Below are a few examples, a snapshot of infinitely greater Jewish state viciousness.
On Sunday, the Middle East Eye reported the following:
Palestinian Mohammed Hassan, aged-21, is one of the latest victims of Israeli state-sponsored murder.
Hassan and Palestinian construction workers finished their daily “work… on Mohammed’s new family home… under construction for months… when suddenly they came under attack (by) (d)ozens of armed” settler extremists.
They threw rocks at Mohammed’s home and tried to break in violently.
Moments later IDF soldiers arrived on the scene.
According to Mohammed’s uncle Murad:
They “surrounded the house and completely blocked it off, not letting anyone in or out of the area as they watched the settlers continue the attack,” adding:
“Some of the workers managed to escape, but one of them was shot in the leg with a rubber bullet.”
After locking his house doors, Mohammed went to the rooftop.
In defense of his home, he threw rocks at settlers to drive them away.
According to Murad, “settlers were throwing stones at him from every direction, and when he tried to defend himself, the soldiers shot at him with live ammunition.”
“Three bullets (struck him in) the chest.”
“All we could see was him fall(ing) over, and we heard him yelling to us ‘I got shot, I got shot!’ ”
Remaining on the scene, soldiers prevented Mohammed from getting medical help when “doctors and nurses” arrived.
He was justifiably defending himself and his home from unprovoked settler violence when soldiers “killed him,” said Murad, adding:
While bleeding to death unattended, settlers broke into his home and “were hitting and kicking” him.
Israeli authorities seized his body refused to return him for burial.
They defied reality by accusing him of attacking settlers.
They turned truth on its head by “accusing him of a crime,” Murad explained.
According to UN data, 771 incidents of settler violence against Palestinians and destruction of their property were documented last year.
Ruthless Israeli regimes support what no just societies tolerate.
On June 30, B’Tselem explained a fatal incident that took the life of Husam ‘Asayrah weeks earlier, saying:
Around two dozen settlers (some masked and armed) and 10 soldiers invaded at ‘Asirah al-Qibiliyah village in Nablus District.
Village residents were attacked with stones.
In self-defense, they threw back at attackers.
Defending them, soldiers fired warning shots “and hurled tear gas canisters and stun grenades at residents to disperse them rather than (aggressive) settlers,” B’Tselem explained, adding:
Palestinian property was damaged. As residents continued to defend themselves, soldiers fired live ammunition.
Uninvolved in defensive stone-throwing, “Husam ‘Asayrah (aged-19) was hit in the chest while standing by the fence of a village home about 200 meters from the soldiers.”
Another resident (aged-25)) was hit in the thigh while running away from the soldiers.”
Both “men were driven away in private cars and detained at ‘Awarta Checkpoint for 10 minutes before being transferred to an ambulance that evacuated them to a hospital in Nablus.”
“Asayrah underwent surgery and resuscitation attempts, but was pronounced dead a short while later.”
A separate incident near ‘Asirah al-Qibliyah and neighboring Palestinian villages involved soldiers and settlers assaulting and killing one resident, wounding another.
B’Tselem stressed that incidents like the above happen regularly in Occupied Palestine “as part of Israeli… policy to drive Palestinians out and take over their land.”
On Sunday, the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) explained the following:
The previous evening, extremist settlers — protected by soldiers — “attacked Palestinian houses.”
Mohammed Farid Ali Hassan (aged-20) went to the rooftop of his home to defend it.
Using live ammunition, soldiers shot him in the chest.
Palestinians arriving on the scene were also fired on with live ammunition, rubber-coated steel bullets, stun grenades, and tear gas.
One Palestinian was seriously wounded. Hours later, Hassan was pronounced dead from his wounds.
The PCHR minced no words, “condemn(ing)” what happened.
Like many futile times before, it “call(ed) on the international community to move urgently to stop the Israeli occupation’s crimes…”
It “renew(ed) its call on the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention to uphold their commitments under common Article 1 to the four Geneva Conventions to respect and to ensure respect for the Convention in all circumstances,” adding:
“PCHR believes that the international community is involved in a conspiracy of silence that encourages Israel to continue its violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law.”
Countless thousands of incidents like the above against nonthreatening Palestinians reflect state-sponsored Israeli viciousness.
It’s how the scourge of Zionist tyranny operates — unaccountably because of US/Western support for and complicity with its high crimes against peace and the rule of law.
July 9, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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