Weapons of Mass Destruction: Chem Bio
Traditionally, Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) were Chemical, Biological, Radiologic and Nuclear (CBRN).
The people of the world don’t want them used on us—they are cheap ways to kill and maim lots of people at once. And so international treaties were created to try to prevent their development (sometimes) and use. First was the Geneva Protocol of 1925, banning the use of biological and chemical weapons in war. The US and many nations signed it, but it took 50 years for the US to ratify it, so we believed we were not bound by it.
The US used chemical weapons subsequently. The US probably used biological weapons in the Korean War, and perhaps in Vietnam, which experienced an odd outbreak of plague during the war. The use of napalm, white phosphorus, agent orange (with its dioxin excipient causing massive numbers of birth defects and other tragedies) and possibly other chemical weapons led to much pushback, especially since we had signed the Geneva Protocol and we were supposed to be a civilized nation.
In 1968, a young Seymour Hersh wrote a book about the US chemical and biological warfare program. In 1969 Congressman Richard D. McCarthy wrote the book “Ultimate Folly” about the US production and use of chemical and biological weapons. Prof. Matthew Meselson’s review of the book noted,
Our operation, “Flying Ranch Hand, ” has sprayed anti-plant chemi-
cals over an area almost the size of the state of Massachusetts, over
10 per cent of it cropland. “Ranch Hand” no longer has much to do with
the official justification of preventing ambush. Rather, it has become
a kind of environmental warfare, devastating vast tracts of forest in
order to facilitate our aerial reconnaisance. Our use of “super tear
gas” (it is also a powerful lung irritant) has escalated from the originally
announced purpose of saving lives in “riot control-like situations” to the
full-scale combat use of gas artillery shells, gas rockets and gas bombs
to enhance the killing power of conventional high explosive and flame
weapons. Fourteen million pounds have been used thus far, enough
to cover all of Vietnam with a field effective concentration. Many
nations, including some of our own allies have expressed the opinion
that this kind of gas warfare violates the Geneva Protocol, a view
shared by M cCarthy.
A Biological Weapons Convention
Amid great pushback over US conduct in Vietnam, in November 1969 President Nixon announced to the world we were going to end the US biowarfare program (but not the chemical program). In February 1970 Nixon announced we would also get rid of our toxin weapons (snake, snail, frog, fish, bacterial and fungal toxins that could be used for assassinations, etc.). Furthermore, Nixon said the US would initiate an international treaty to prevent the use of these weapons ever again. And we did: the 1972 Convention on the prohibition of the development, production and stockpiling of bacteriological (biological) and toxin weapons and on their destruction, or Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) for short, which entered into force in 1975.
The BWC established conferences to be held every 5 years to strengthen the Convention. The expectation was that these would add a method to call for ‘challenge inspections’ to prevent cheating and would add sanctions (punishments) if nations did not comply with the treaty. However, the US has consistently blocked the addition of protocols that would have an impact on cheating. By now, everyone knows that cheating occurs and is likely widespread.
A leak in an anthrax production facility in Sverdlovsk, USSR in 1979 caused the deaths of about 60 people. A clear BWC violation. US experiments with anthrax production during the Clinton administration, detailed by Judith Miller et al. in the 2001 book Germs were also thought by experts to have transgressed the BWC.
In 1997 a Chemical Weapons Convention came into force. It took over 20 years, but all official stocks of chemical weapons have been destroyed by the USA and by Russia and the other 193 member nation signatories.
Pandemics or Biological Warfare?
So here we are. It is 2023 and the WHO Director General has declared 2 pandemics (the current terminology is ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern’) over the past 3 and a half years: COVID-19 and monkeypox, which was renamed MPOX to “avoid stigma.” I am sure the monkeys were relieved by the name change.
I have previously (in my substack) described why I believe both SARS-CoV-2 and MPOX were bioengineered pathogens that came from labs. I do not know if they leaked or were deliberately released, but I am leaning toward deliberately released for both of them, based on where they appeared, how they spread, and in particular the official responses to each—neither of which was explained accurately to the public, and yet we never changed course, even when the lack of efficacy with masks, social distancing, EUA drugs and vaccines had become clear.
Vaccines: the Chicken or the Egg?
Both the monkeypox vaccines (there are two, Jynneos and ACAM2000) are known to cause myocarditis, as do the two COVID-19 mRNA vaccines and the Novavax vaccine. The Novavax vaccine was first associated with myocarditis during its clinical trial in Australia. I have written about all this previously on substack.
How frequently does myocarditis occur after these vaccines? If you use elevated cardiac enzymes as your marker, ACAM2000 caused this in one in thirty people receiving it for the first time. If you use other measures like abnormal cardiac MRI or echo, according to the CDC it occurs in one in 175 vaccinees. We do not know the number for Jynneos, but there was some degree of elevation of cardiac enzymes in 10% and 18% of recipients in two small prelicensure studies. My guess for the mRNA vaccines is that they are somewhere in this range. I don’t know about Novavax’ vaccine.
Why would our governments push 5 separate vaccines all known to cause myocarditis on young males who have been at extremely low risk from COVID, and who simply get a few pimples for 1-4 weeks from monkeypox unless they are immunocompromised? It’s an important question. It does not make medical sense. Especially when the vaccine probably does not work — Jynneos didn’t on the monkeys in whom it was tested. And CDC has clammed up about the 2,000 Congolese healthcare workers on whom CDC tested it for efficacy and safety in 2017. (I have detailed this too in earlier substacks.)
The health authorities could have just been ignorant—that could explain the first 8 months of the COVID vaccines’ rollout. But once they figured out, and even announced in August 2021 that the vaccines did not prevent catching COVID or transmitting it, why did they still push it on low risk populations who were clearly at greater risk from a vaccine side effect?
Once this is acknowledged, you realize that maybe the vaccines were not made for the pandemic, and instead the pandemic was made to roll out the vaccines. I’m not sure. But I’m suspicious. And the fact that multiple countries contracted for 10 doses per person makes me even more suspicious—for vaccines whose safety and efficacy had not been established. WHY would you want ten doses apiece? Three maybe. But ten?
Furthermore, you don’t need a vaccine passport aka digital ID aka justification to convert to all-electronic money unless you are giving out regular boosters. Were the vaccines conceived of as the pathway to getting our vaccinations, health records, official documents and financial transactions all online—as Ukraine has already done?
A Pandemic Treaty and Amendments: Brought to you by the same people who mismanaged the past 3 years, to save us from themselves?
The same US government and western governments that imposed draconian measures on their citizens to force us to be vaccinated and take dangerous, expensive, experimental drugs and withheld the good drugs, decided in 2021 we needed a pandemic treaty to prevent and ameliorate future pandemics or biological warfare events… so we would not suffer as we did with the COVID pandemic.
Except COVID was a disaster due to its mismanagement (or should I say dismanagement or malmanagement?) by our nations’ rulers, their bosses and the WHO. Hundreds of millions of our fellow human being were slammed into extreme poverty—by nations following guidelines issued by the WHO, whose main job it was to protect exactly those people. Tens of millions died from starvation as a result. Yet the WHO blathers on about equity, diversity and solidarity—having itself caused the worst (manmade) food crisis in our lifetimes. Have you heard any apology or explanation?
How can anyone with a brain believe the public health officials who messed up COVID so badly want to spare us from another medical and economic disaster, after they imposed the last one on us? And the fact that no governments or health officials will admit their mistakes — especially how they made it nearly impossible to obtain the cheap and safe drugs that effectively treat COVID — why would we let them plan anything, let alone an international treaty that will bind our governments to obey the WHO’s dictates? How thoughtful of these officials to want to spend a king’s ransom of our money to prevent the next government-caused disaster.
We are fed up with secret vaccine contracts, waivers of liability for junk medical products, and spikes in sudden deaths and chronic disabilities. No more secret negotiations. Please shove your pandemic planning where the sun…
The Gain of Function farce
Obviously, the best way to spare us from another pandemic is to immediately stop funding “Gain of Function”* research, and get rid of what has already been funded and created. Let all the nations make big bonfires and burn up their evil creations at the same time, while allowing other nations to inspect their biological facilities and records.
But the WHO in its Bureau Text of the draft Pandemic Treaty has a plan that is the exact opposite of this. In the WHO’s world, which almost all nations’ rulers have bought into, all the governments will share any and all viruses and bacteria they come up with that have “pandemic potential” — share them with all the other governments. They are supposed to sequence them and then put the sequence online. No kidding. Then the WHO and all the Faucis of the world would gain access to every Frankenstein virus, at once. Presumably a bunch of hackers would also gain access to the sequences. Does this make you feel more secure?
The WHO Treaty draft incentivizes Gain Of Function research
At least this plan makes clear whose side everyone is on. Fauci, Tedros and their ilk at the WHO, and those managing biodefense and biomedical research for nation states are on one side, the side that gains access to even more biological weapons, and the rest of us are on the other, at their mercy.
This crazy plan used to be called proliferation of weapons of mass destruction—and it is almost certainly illegal. But it is their plan. Governments will all share the weapons. And they are to put a lot more money into biolabs, and especially into genomic sequencing. Presumably so they can make even better weapons, and maybe they will even get around to cures or antidotes. But who will get the cures? It wasn’t us during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here is where you can read the current Treaty draft:
Pages 10 and 11:
What else is in the Treaty? Gain of Function research (designed to make pathogens more transmissible or more virulent) is explicitly incentivized. Administrative hurdles to it must be minimized, while unintended consequences (pandemics) should be prevented: (page 14)
Vaccines will be rolled out speedily under future testing protocols
Just in case you thought the COVID vaccines took too long to be rolled out, the WHO has plans to shorten testing. There will be new clinical trial platforms. Nations must increase clinical trial capacity. (Might that mean mandating people to be human subjects in out-of-the-way Africa, for example?). And there will be new “mechanisms to facilitate the rapid interpretation of data from clinical trials” as well as “strategies for managing liability risks.” (page 14)
Manufacturer and government liability will be “managed”
Nations are supposed to use existing models as a reference for compensation of injuries due to pandemic vaccines. Of course, most countries do not have vaccine injury compensation schemes, and when they do the benefits are usually minimal. The US government scheme for injuries due to COVID pandemic products (the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program or CICP) has compensated 4 (yes, FOUR) people as of July 1, 2023. All pandemic EUA drugs and vaccines fall into this program (monoclonal antibodies, early remdesivir, paxlovid, molnupiravir, some ventilators and all COVID vaccines). There have been nearly 12,000 claims made to the CICP related to a COVID product. Slightly over 1,000 have been adjudicated while 10,886 are pending review. Twenty claims were deemed eligible and are waiting to see whether they can collect. A total of 983 people, or 98% had their claims denied. About 90% of all claimants filed for a vaccine injury.
The treaty draft also demands weakening the regulation of medical drugs and vaccines during emergencies under the rubric of Regulatory Strengthening. As announced in the UK last week, where ‘trusted partner’ approvals will be used to speed licensure, this is moving toward a single regulatory agency approval or authorization, to be immediately adopted by other nations (p 25)
Why would any developed country sign up for this? Is this what we the people want?
The WHO did sweeten the pot, however. Remember how the need to respect “human rights, dignity, and freedom of persons” was removed in the WHO’s draft IHR Amendments that are being negotiated? Well, WHO apparently did not like us pointing that out—so the old human rights language that was removed from the International Health Regulations draft has been added to this newest version of the Treaty.
There is much more I could say about problems with this draft of the Treaty, but I will save them for another time.
Please share this brief analysis of the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty. We must EXIT the WHO.
*Gain of Function is a euphemism for biological warfare reserch or germ warfare research. It is so foolhardy that it was banned in the US for SARS coronaviruses and avian flu viruses from 2014-2017 due to public outcry by scientists. Then in 2017 Fauci and Collins lifted the moratorium, claimed they were putting safeguards in place, which were just a handwaving exercise, and off we were to the races: creating new bioweapons. Fauci and Collins had the nerve to publish their opinion that the risk was ‘worth it.’
August 6, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, WHO |
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America’s 9th/10th March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo was the single most destructive air raid in military history, with over 100,000 murdered and more than a million made homeless. Along with the Americans’ carpet bombing campaigns in North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, it remains one of the most egregious war crimes in human history, not least because Imperial Japan was already a beaten docket.
Even as the last of their kamikaze fighters prepared to repel the Americans from the Japanese mainland in those first days of August 1945, Japan’s government was frantically searching for a way out of the morass. Knowing that the Soviet Red Army would soon descend on Manchuria, they knew that time was of the essence if the Americans were to be stopped raping and slaughtering yet more defenceless Japanese women and children, like they had previously done in Guam, Saipan and Okinawa.
Though the Japanese were at a loss to understand why the Americans would not accept their surrender, that answer came shortly afterwards in the form of two mushroom clouds, one in Hiroshima and the other in Nagasaki, the centre of Catholicism in The Land of the Rising Sun. Those two war crimes were accompanied by the Red Army cutting a swathe through the remnants of Japan’s once-mighty but now much-depleted Kmantung Army.
With McArthur gloating on the USS Missouri that Japan was defeated, the Yanks colonised not only Japan and the Pacific Basin, but also South Korea, the Philippines and Taiwan before setting their sights on ridding South East Asia of the Dutch and especially the French. The Nagasaki and Hiroshima atomic bomb war crimes were done to tell the Soviets that all of Asia was now under the Yankee jackboot and that, in contravention to the Yalta and other treaties, only the Yanks would rule there.
America’s Pacific War was a racist war of annihilation both before and after Japan’s surrender. The American and British media — the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Reader’s Digest, Time, and Life being among the more prominent — painted their Japanese foes out as subhumans, as monkey men fit only for extermination. Buoyed by such propaganda, the United States Marine Corps (USMC) went on monkey hunts; in the main, they took no prisoners. Even Percival’s craven capitulation in Singapore was depicted as being the work of armed monkeys, not of a hopelessly outnumbered foe that deserved respect for the most pragmatic of self-survival reasons.
The Marines, America’s greatest generation mutilated, as a matter of course, Japanese war dead for souvenirs, they attacked and sank hospital ships, they shot, tortured and executed their prisoners. They harvested gold teeth from both the living and the dead, they urinated both on their prisoners and on the corpses of those they had killed. In their idle moments, they carved the bones of their Japanese prisoners into little forget-me-nots and sent them home to their loved ones. President Roosevelt got a letter opener made from the bones of a captured Japanese officer but returned it to the sender — if not the rightful owner — for his own reasons.
Rationality in the Pacific was so rare during WWII that, ironically, it required as a mouthpiece none other than prominent racist Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. to blow the whistle on the barbarities America’s greatest generation were routinely committing. Repelled by what he saw and heard of U.S. treatment of the Japanese in the Pacific theatre, the aviator spoke out. His sentiments are summed up in the following journal entry: “It was freely admitted that some of our soldiers tortured Jap prisoners and were as cruel and barbaric at times as the Japs themselves. Our men think nothing of shooting a Japanese prisoner or a soldier attempting to surrender. They treat the Jap with less respect than they would give to an animal, and these acts are condoned by almost everyone. We claim to be fighting for civilization, but the more I see of this war in the Pacific the less right I think we have to claim to be civilized.” When Lindbergh left the Pacific and arrived at customs in Hawaii, he was asked if he had any Japanese bones in his baggage. It was, by then, a routine question.
Eugene B. Sledge, author of With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa, wrote of his comrades harvesting gold teeth from the enemy dead. In Okinawa, Sledge witnessed a Marine officer, one of America’s greatest generation of Goodfellas, stand over a Japanese corpse and urinate into its mouth.
Perhaps Edgar L. Jones, a former war correspondent in the Pacific, put it best when he asked in the February 1946 Atlantic Monthly, “What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers.”
Churchill and MacArthur ordered their troops to summarily execute any Japanese combatants who tried to surrender. They spread rumours of the Kyoto ear mound, where the Japanese, cannibal fashion, supposedly stored 40,000 pickled ears and noses that they collected following the 1598 Japanese invasion of Korea. Kyoto, for some perverse humanitarian desire on behalf of America’s leaders to preserve Japan’s imperial culture, her mounds of Korean noses included, was spared the blanket bombing Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka suffered. Kyoto was, unlike the good, human people of Nagasaki and Tokyo, of cultural importance and both its architecture and its ear mound had therefore to be preservedi. Meanwhile, the marines made their own inhumane mound. They spliced off the ears and noses of their captives and engaged in wide scale scalping as well. In Okinawa, America’s Greatest Generation also proved themselves to be the world’s most accomplished serial rapists.
Although John Pilger’s excellent documentaries tell us how the 4th Psychological Operations Group and the 101st Airborne (Tiger Force) made their own ear necklaces in Vietnam where they routinely beheaded Vietnamese babies to teach the locals who ruled the roost, Pilger, for a good half century now, has been a bad man, as he doesn’t sing from the NATO hymn sheet.
Pilger looks for shades of grey. He incorporates into his analysis the psychological insights of sociopaths like Edward Bernays, who taught the Yanks how to sell their self-serving wars more effectively than Goebbels or his pale Japanese imitators ever could. As he also always makes sure to mention the collateral damage of Yankee war crimes in places like Falluja, Vietnam, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, not least because civilians now form far in excess of 90% of all American kills, and as he seldom goes easy on the media’s hypocrites he is, to repeat, a bad man.
To see how bad, just read this FBI inspired EU notice lambasting Russia Today and Sputnik because they “gravely distorted and manipulated facts and have repeatedly and consistently targeted European political parties, especially during election periods, as well as civil society, asylum seekers, Russian ethnic minorities, gender minorities, and the functioning of democratic institutions in the [European] Union and its Member States”. Because such outlets would be as harmful to us as would have been regarding the “Simian” Japanese or Vietnamese as humans when the USMC was exterminating them, our fragile minds must be protected by the Google search engines of today’s Edward Bernays, who are here to tell us that only unelected war-mongers like Ursula von der Leyen or her morally challenged minions can spout the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Because John Pilger is now in his 80s, he is given a pass, as long as he does not stray into the rump Zelensky Reich or into rebel-held Syria, where he would be quickly dispatched. But woe betide anyone younger like Gonzalo Lira, Julian Assange, Gary Webb or Alina Lipp who might try to divine the truth about the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, MI6 agent Zelensky, the Bidens, Obamas, Clintons or any of America’s other organised crime families for, in their regurgitating of Russian propaganda, they are playing Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Russian Roulette and that, as countless corpses attest, never ends well for NATO’ beleaguered truth tellers.
August 6, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Japan, United States |
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Oppenheimer is part of the cultural zeitgeist at the moment and is receiving a lot of attention from the establishment media hype machine. But what is being left out of Hollywood’s latest piece of historical revisionism? Joining James today is Patrick MacFarlane of VitalDissent.com, whose new documentary, The Truth About Oppenheimer, purports to answer that question.
Watch on Archive / BitChute / Odysee / Rokfin / Rumble / Substack / Download the mp4
SHOW NOTES:
VitalDissent.com
The Truth About Oppenheimer
Patrick MacFarlane on The Corbett Report
August 6, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Film Review, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes |
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Last week was the 70th anniversary of the armistice that ended the fighting between North and South Korea. In a low-key commemoration, the White House Press Office issued a statement from President Biden calling to “renew our commitment to the democratic values for which [American troops] served and sacrificed.” In reality, almost 40,000 American soldiers died pointlessly in that conflict to buttress the principle that presidents could deceive the nation and intervene wherever they damn well chose.
If politicians and policymakers were honest and prudent, the Korean War would have vaccinated America against the folly and evil of foreign intervention. Instead, the war was retroactively redefined. As Barack Obama declared in 2013, “That war was no tie. Korea was a victory.”
The war began with what Harry Truman claimed was a surprise invasion on June 25, 1950, by the North Korean army across the dividing line with South Korea that was devised after World War Two. But the U.S. government had ample warnings of the pending invasion. According to the late Justin Raimondo, founder of antiwar.com, the conflict actually started with a series of attacks by South Korean forces, aided by the U.S. military: “From 1945-1948, American forces aided [South Korean President Syngman] Rhee in a killing spree that claimed tens of thousands of victims: the counterinsurgency campaign took a high toll in Kwangju, and on the island of Cheju-do — where as many as 60,000 people were murdered by Rhee’s US-backed forces.”
The North Korean army quickly routed both South Korean and U.S. forces. A complete debacle was averted after Gen. Douglas MacArthur masterminded a landing of U.S. troops at Inchon. After he routed the North Korean forces, MacArthur was determined to continue pushing northward regardless of the danger of provoking a much broader war. By the time the U.S. forces drove the North Korean army back across the border between the two Koreas, roughly 5,000 American troops had been killed. The Pentagon had plenty of warning that the Chinese would intervene if the U.S. Army pushed too close to the Chinese border. But the euphoria that erupted after Inchon blew away all common sense and drowned out the military voices who warned of a catastrophe. One U.S. Army colonel responded to a briefing on the Korea situation in Tokyo in 1950 by storming out and declaring, “They’re living in a goddamn dream land.”
The Chinese military attack resulted in the longest retreat in the history of America’s armed forces — a debacle that was valorized in the 1986 Clint Eastwood movie, Heartbreak Ridge. By 1951, the Korean War had become intensely unpopular in the United States — more unpopular than the Vietnam War ever was. Truman insisted on mislabeling the war as a “police action,” but it destroyed his presidency regardless. When the ceasefire was signed in 1953, the borders were nearly the same as at the start of the war.
While the Friends of Leviathan paint Truman as the epitome of an honest politician, he was as demagogic on Korea as Lyndon Johnson was on Vietnam. When Republicans criticized the Korean war as useless, President Harry Truman condemned “reckless and irresponsible Republican extremists” and “the false version of history that has been copyrighted by the extremists in the Republican Party.”
Perhaps the biggest disaster of the Korean war was that intellectuals and foreign-policy experts succeeded in redefining the Korean conflict as an American victory. As Georgetown University professor Derek Leebaert noted in his book Magic and Mayhem, “What had been regarded as a bloody stalemate transformed itself in Washington’s eyes; ten years later it had become an example of a successful limited war. Already by the mid-1950s, elite opinion began to surmise that it had been a victory.” Leebaert explained, “Images of victory in Korea shaped the decision to escalate in 1964-65 helping to explain why America pursued a war of attrition.” Even worse, the notion that “‘America has never lost a war’ remained part of the national myth, and the notion of having ‘prevailed’ in Korea became a justification for going big in Vietnam.” But as Leebaert noted, “in Vietnam, [the U.S. Army] had forgotten everything it had learned about counterinsurgency in Korea as well.”
On last year’s armistice anniversary, President Biden proclaimed, “During the Korean War, nearly 1.8 million Americans answered the call to serve and defend the freedoms and universal values that the people of South Korea enjoy today.” The “call to serve” mostly came from summons from draft boards for military conscription. American media commemorations of the Korean War have almost entirely ignored perhaps the war’s most important lesson: the U.S. government has almost unlimited sway to hide its own war crimes.
During the war, Americans were deluged with official pronouncements that the U.S. military was taking all possible steps to protect innocent Korean civilians. Because the evils of communism were self-evident, few questions arose about how the United States was thwarting Red aggression. When a U.S. Senate subcommittee appointed in 1953 by Sen. Joseph McCarthy investigated Korean War atrocities, the committee explicitly declared that “war crimes were defined as those acts committed by enemy nations.” This same standard prevailed in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and practically any other place where the U.S. militarily intervened.
In 1999, forty-six years after the cease fire in Korea, the Associated Press exposed a 1950 massacre of Korean refugees at No Gun Ri. U.S. troops drove Koreans out of their village and forced them to remain on a railroad embankment. Beginning on July 25, 1950, the refugees were strafed by U.S. planes and machine guns over the following three days. Hundreds of people, mostly women and children, were killed. The 1999 AP story was widely denounced by American politicians and some media outlets as a slander on American troops.
The Pentagon promised an exhaustive investigation. In January 2001, the Pentagon released a 300-page report purporting to prove that the No Gun Ri killings were merely “an unfortunate tragedy” caused by trigger-happy soldiers frightened by approaching refugees.
President Bill Clinton announced his “regret that Korean civilians lost their lives at No Gun Ri.” In an interview, he was asked why he used “regret” instead of “apology.” He declared, “I believe that the people who looked into it could not conclude that there was a deliberate act, decided at a high-enough level in the military hierarchy, to acknowledge that, in effect, the Government had participated in something that was terrible.” Clinton specified that there was no evidence of “wrongdoing high-enough in the chain of command in the Army to say that, in effect, the Government was responsible.”
But the atrocities against civilians had been common knowledge among U.S. troops 50 years earlier. As Charles Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe, and Martha Mendoza noted in their 2001 book, The Bridge at No Gun Ri, the Pentagon in 1952 “withdrew official endorsement from RKO’s One Minute to Zero, a Korean War movie in which an Army colonel played by actor Robert Mitchum orders artillery fire on a column of refugees.” The Pentagon fretted that “this sequence could be utilized for anti-American propaganda” and banned the film from being shown on U.S. military bases.
In 2005, Sahr Conway-Lanz, a Harvard University doctoral student, discovered a letter in the National Archives from the U.S. ambassador to Korea, John Muccio, sent to Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk on the day the No Gun Ri massacre commenced. Muccio summarized a new policy from a meeting between U.S. military and South Korean officials: “If refugees do appear from north of U.S. lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will be shot.” The new policy was radioed to Army units around Korea on the morning the No Gun Ri massacre began. The U.S. military feared that North Korean troops might be hiding amidst the refugees. The Pentagon initially claimed that its investigators had never seen Muccio’s letter. Louis Caldera, who was Army secretary in 2001, declared, “Millions of pages of files were reviewed and it is certainly possible they may have simply missed it.” But Muccio’s letter was in the specific research file used for the official exoneration report.
Conway-Lanz’s 2006 book Collateral Damage: Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and Atrocity after World War II quoted an official U.S. Navy history of the first six months of the Korean War stating that the policy of strafing civilians was “wholly defensible.” An official Army history noted, “Eventually, it was decided to shoot anyone who moved at night.” A report for the aircraft carrier USS Valley Forge justified attacking civilians because the Army insisted that “groups of more than eight to ten people were to be considered troops, and were to be attacked.”
In 2007, the Army recited its original denial: “No policy purporting to authorize soldiers to shoot refugees was ever promulgated to soldiers in the field.” But the Associated Press exposed more dirt from the U.S. archives: “More than a dozen documents — in which high-ranking U.S. officers tell troops that refugees are ‘fair game,’ for example, and order them to ‘shoot all refugees coming across river’ — were found by the AP in the investigators’ own archived files after the 2001 inquiry. None of those documents was disclosed in the Army’s 300-page public report.” A former Air Force pilot told investigators that his plane and three others strafed refugees at the same time of the No Gun Ri massacre; the official report claimed that “all pilots interviewed … knew nothing about such orders.” Evidence also surfaced of massacres like No Gun Ri. On September 1, 1950, the destroyer USS DeHaven, at the Army’s insistence, “fired on a seaside refugee encampment at Pohang, South Korea. Survivors say 100 to 200 people were killed.”
Slaughtering civilians en masse became routine procedure after the Chinese army intervened in the Korean war in late 1950. MacArthur spoke of turning North Korean-held territory into a “desert.” The U.S. military eventually “expanded its definition of a military target to any structure that could shelter enemy troops or supplies.” Gen. Curtis LeMay summarized the achievements: “We burned down every town in North Korea … and some in South Korea, too.” Yet, despite the hit-anything-still-standing bombing policy, most Americans believed the U.S. military acted humanely in Korea. Historian Conway-Lanz noted: “The issue of intention, and not the question of whose weapons literally killed civilians or destroyed their homes, became the morally significant one for many Americans.”
A million civilians may have been killed during the war. A South Korean government Truth and Reconciliation Commission uncovered many previously unreported atrocities and concluded that “American troops killed groups of South Korean civilians on 138 separate occasions during the Korean War,” the New York Times reported.
Truth delayed is truth defused. The Pentagon strategy on Korean War atrocities succeeded because it left facts to the historians, not the policymakers. The truth about No Gun Ri finally slipped out — ten presidencies later. Even more damaging, the Rules of Engagement for killing Korean civilians were covered up for four more U.S. wars. If U.S. policy for slaying Korean refugees (or anyone who “moved at night”) had been exposed during that war, it might have curtailed similar killings in Vietnam (many of which were not revealed until decades after the war).
Former congressman and decorated Korean War veteran Pete McCloskey (R-Calif.) warned, “The government will always lie about embarrassing matters.” The same shenanigans permeate other U.S. wars. The secrecy and deceit surrounding U.S. warring has had catastrophic consequences in this century. The Bush administration exploited the 9/11 attacks to justify attacking Iraq in 2003, and it was not until 2016 that the U.S. government revealed documents exposing the Saudi government’s role in financing the 9/11 hijackers (15 of 19 whom were Saudi citizens). The Pentagon covered up the vast majority of U.S. killings of Iraqi civilians until Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks exposed them in 2010.
When politicians or generals appear itching to pull the United States into another foreign war, remember that truth is routinely the first casualty. Governments that recklessly slay masses of civilians won’t honestly investigate and announce their guilt to the world. Self-government is a mirage if Americans do not receive enough information to judge killings committed in their name.
August 4, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Korea, United States |
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Mythology about these mass civilian slaughters warps thinking about US militarism
The anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki present an opportunity to demolish a cornerstone myth of American history — that those twin acts of mass civilian slaughter were necessary to bring about Japan’s surrender, and spare a half-million US soldiers who’d have otherwise died in a military conquest of the empire’s home islands.
Those who attack this mythology are often reflexively dismissed as unpatriotic, ill-informed or both. However, the most compelling witnesses against the conventional wisdom were patriots with a unique grasp on the state of affairs in August 1945 — America’s senior military leaders of World War II.
Let’s first hear what they had to say, and then examine key facts that led them to their little-publicized convictions:
- General Dwight Eisenhower on learning of the planned bombings: “I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and voiced to [Secretary of War Stimson] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face’.”
- Admiral William Leahy, Truman’s Chief of Staff: “The use of this barbarous weapon…was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.”
- Major General Curtis LeMay, 21st Bomber Command: “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb… The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”
- General Hap Arnold, US Army Air Forces: “The Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell, because the Japanese had lost control of their own air.” “It always appeared to us that, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse.”
- Ralph Bird, Under Secretary of the Navy: “The Japanese were ready for peace, and they already had approached the Russians and the Swiss… In my opinion, the Japanese war was really won before we ever used the atom bomb.”
- Brigadier General Carter Clarke, military intelligence officer who prepared summaries of intercepted cables for Truman: “When we didn’t need to do it, and we knew we didn’t need to do it…we used [Hiroshima and Nagasaki] as an experiment for two atomic bombs. Many other high-level military officers concurred.”
- Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, Pacific Fleet commander: “The use of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”
Putting out feelers through third-party diplomatic channels, the Japanese were seeking to end the war weeks before the atomic bombings on August 6 and 9, 1945. Japan’s navy and air forces were decimated, and its homeland subjected to a sea blockade and allied bombing carried out against little resistance.
Full of midget submarines, a drydock in the port city of Kure, Japan lies in ruins
The Americans knew of Japan’s intent to surrender, having intercepted a July 12 cable from Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, informing Japanese ambassador to Russia Naotake Sato that “we are now secretly giving consideration to the termination of the war because of the pressing situation which confronts Japan both at home and abroad.”
Togo told Sato to “sound [Russian diplomat Vyacheslav Molotov] out on the extent to which it is possible to make use of Russia in ending the war.” Togo initially told Sato to obscure Japan’s interest in using Russia to end the war, but just hours later, he withdrew that instruction, saying it would be “suitable to make clear to the Russians our general attitude on ending the war”— to include Japan’s having “absolutely no idea of annexing or holding the territories which she occupied during the war.”
Japan’s central concern was the retention of its emperor, Hirohito, who was considered a demigod. Even knowing this — and with many US officials feeling the retention of the emperor could help Japanese society through its postwar transition —the Truman administration continued issuing demands for unconditional surrender, offering no assurance that the emperor would be spared humiliation or worse.
In a July 2 memorandum, Secretary of War Henry Stimson drafted a terms-of-surrender proclamation to be issued at the conclusion of that month’s Potsdam Conference. He advised Truman that, “if… we should add that we do not exclude a constitutional monarchy under her present dynasty, it would substantially add to the chances of acceptance.”
Truman and Secretary of State James Byrne, however, continued rejecting recommendations to give assurances about the emperor. The final Potsdam Declaration, issued July 26, omitted Stimson’s recommended language, sternly declaring, “Following are our terms. We will not deviate from them.”
One of those terms could reasonably be interpreted as jeopardizing the emperor: “There must be eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest.”
At the same time the United States was preparing to deploy its formidable new weapons, the Soviet Union was moving armies from the European front to northeast Asia.
In May, Stalin told the US ambassador that Soviet forces should be positioned to attack the Japanese in Manchuria by August 8. In July, Truman predicted the impact of the Soviets opening a new front. In a diary entry made during the Potsdam Conference, he wrote that Stalin assured him “he’ll be in the Jap War on August 15th. Fini Japs when that comes about.”
Right on Stalin’s original schedule, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan two days after the August 6 bombing of Hiroshima. That same day — August 8 — Emperor Hirohito told the country’s civilian leaders that he still wanted to pursue a negotiated surrender that would preserve his reign.
On August 9, Soviet attacks commenced on three fronts. News of Stalin’s invasion of Manchuria prompted Hirohito to call a new meeting to discuss surrender — at 10 am, one hour before the strike on Nagasaki. The final surrender decision came on August 10.
Three-year old Shinichi Tetsutani, burned as he was riding this tricycle when the atomic bomb hit Hiroshima, died a painful death that night (Hiroki Kobayashi/National Geographic)
The Soviet timeline makes the atomic bombings all the more troubling: One would think a US government that’s appropriately hesitant to incinerate and irradiate hundreds of thousands of civilians would want to first see how a Soviet declaration of war affected Japan’s calculus.
As it turns out, the Japanese surrender indeed appears to have been prompted by the Soviet entry into the war on Japan — not by the atomic bombs. “The Japanese leadership never had photo or video evidence of the atomic blast and considered the destruction of Hiroshima to be similar to the dozens of conventional strikes Japan had already suffered,” wrote Josiah Lippincott at The American Conservative.
Sadly, the evidence points to a US government determined to drop atomic bombs on Japanese cities as an end in itself, to such an extent that it not only ignored Japan’s interest in surrender, but worked to ensure that surrender was delayed until after upwards of 210,000 people — disproportionately women, children and elderly — were killed in the two cities.
Make no mistake: This was a deliberate targeting of civilian populations. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen because they were pristine, and could thus fully showcase the bombs’ power. Hiroshima was home to a small military headquarters, but the fact that both cities had gone untouched by a strategic bombing campaign that began 14 months earlier certifies their military and industrial insignificance.
“The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing,” Eisenhower would later say. “I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”
According to his pilot, General Douglas MacArthur, commander of US Army Forces Pacific, was “appalled and depressed by this Frankenstein monster.”
“When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb,” wrote journalist Norman Cousins, “I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted…He saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.”
What then, was the purpose of devastating Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs?
A key insight comes from Manhattan Project physicist Leo Szilard. In 1945, Szilard organized a petition, signed by 70 Manhattan Project scientists, urging Truman not to use atomic bombs against Japan without first giving the country a chance to surrender, on terms that were made public.
In May 1945, Szilard met with Secretary of State Byrnes to urge atomic restraint. Byrnes wasn’t receptive to the plea. Szilard — the scientist who’d drafted the pivotal 1939 letter from Albert Einstein urging FDR to develop an atomic bomb — recounted:
“[Byrnes] was concerned about Russia’s postwar behavior. Russian troops had moved into Hungary and Rumania, and Byrnes thought it would be very difficult to persuade Russia to withdraw her troops from these countries, that Russia might be more manageable if impressed by American military might, and that a demonstration of the bomb might impress Russia.“
Burned to impress Stalin: A victim of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima (AP /The Association of the Photographers of the Atomic Bomb Destruction of Hiroshima, Yotsugi Kawahara)
Whether the atomic bomb’s audience was in Tokyo or Moscow, some in the military establishment championed alternative ways to demonstrate its power.
Lewis Strauss, Special Assistant to the Navy Secretary, said he proposed “that the weapon should be demonstrated over… a large forest of cryptomeria trees not far from Tokyo. The cryptomeria tree is the Japanese version of our redwood… [It] would lay the trees out in windrows from the center of the explosion in all directions as though they were matchsticks, and, of course, set them afire in the center. It seemed to me that a demonstration of this sort would prove to the Japanese that we could destroy any of their cities at will.”
Strauss said Navy Secretary Forrestal “agreed wholeheartedly,” but Truman ultimately decided an optimal demonstration required burning hundreds of thousands of noncombatants and laying waste to their cities. The buck stops there.
The particular means of inflicting these mass murders — a solitary object dropped from a plane at 31,000 feet — helps warp Americans’ evaluation of its morality. Using an analogy, historian Robert Raico cultivates ethical clarity:
“Suppose that, when we invaded Germany in early 1945, our leaders had believed that executing all the inhabitants of Aachen, or Trier, or some other Rhineland city would finally break the will of the Germans and lead them to surrender. In this way, the war might have ended quickly, saving the lives of many Allied soldiers. Would that then have justified shooting tens of thousands of German civilians, including women and children?”
The claim that dropping the atomic bombs saved a half-million American lives is more than just empty: Truman’s stubborn refusal to provide advance assurances about the retention of Japan’s emperor arguably cost American lives.
That’s true not only of a war against Japan that lasted longer than it needed to, but also of a Korean War precipitated by the US-invited Soviet invasion of Japanese-held territory in northeast Asia. More than 36,000 US service members died in the Korean War — among a staggering 2.5 million total military and civilian dead on both sides of the 38th Parallel.
We like to think of our system as one in which the supremacy of civilian leaders acts as a rational, moderating force on military decisions. The needless atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — against the wishes of World War II’s most revered military leaders — tells us otherwise.
Sadly, the destructive effects of the Hiroshima myth aren’t confined to Americans’ understanding of events in August 1945. “There are hints and notes of the Hiroshima myth that persist all through modern times,” State Department whistleblower and author Peter Van Buren said on The Scott Horton Show.
The Hiroshima myth fosters a depraved indifference to civilian casualties associated with US actions abroad, whether it’s women and children slaughtered in a drone strike in Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands dead in an unwarranted invasion of Iraq, or a baby who dies for lack of imported medicine in US-sanctioned Iran.
Ultimately, to embrace the Hiroshima myth is to embrace a truly sinister principle: That, in the correct circumstances, it’s right for governments to intentionally harm innocent civilians. Whether the harm is inflicted by bombs or sanctions, it’s a philosophy that mirrors the morality of al Qaeda.
That’s not the only thread connecting 1945 to 2023, as Truman’s insistence on unconditional surrender is echoed by the Biden administration’s utter disinterest in pursuing a negotiated peace in Ukraine.
Today, confronting an adversary with 6,000 nuclear warheads — each a thousand times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Japan — Biden’s own stubborn perpetuation of war puts us all at risk of sharing the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s innocents.
August 2, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Japan, United States |
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Remdesivir may be the most despised drug in American history, earning the nickname Run Death Is Near for its lethal record during COVID. Experts claimed that it would stop COVID; instead, it stopped kidney function, then blasted the liver and other organs. Now this reviled destroyer of kidneys has been approved by the FDA for COVID treatment of kidney patients. Does anybody else feel as if the FDA is shoving its power in our faces and laughing at us?
I’ve been joining online support groups for people who lost loved ones to the Remdesivir Protocol — a nightmarish sequence in which a patient is isolated in the hospital, bullied into taking Remdesivir, ventilated, and then sedated to death. Thousands of Americans were killed this way, possibly hundreds of thousands.
These support groups are a deeply somber business. Grieving faces fill the screen of people who lost a parent, spouse, sibling, or child. Some speak with icy anger; some choke back sobs as they tell of the deadly abuse inflicted on their loved ones, shattering their families forever.
I asked them what they thought of the FDA’s decision to approve Remdesivir for people with severe renal impairment, including dialysis. “Morally, how can you do that?” Joyce Wilson said. “It’s a death sentence. They didn’t care if people had kidney issues or not. My husband went into the hospital in kidney distress. They exacerbated it with Remdesivir. Then they ventilated him, and he died.”
“This is absurd,” Tracy Bird told me. “The FDA can no longer be trusted with any drug under any circumstances. It’s all conflicts of interest. My husband Jeff had strong kidney function when he went in the hospital. They gave him Remdesivir, and three days later, he was in kidney failure.”
“My daughter’s story is no different than anyone else’s,” Denise Fritter said. “Jamie was 36 and looking forward to getting married. The hospital refused to consider any other modalities of treatment for her. They insisted on Remdesivir. Then they put her on a vent and murdered her. I think the FDA is using Remdesivir to fulfill their own agenda.”
Cheri Martin, who lost her husband Steven to the protocol, chimed in with thoughts on the agenda: “They’re going to use this decision as a way to clean house of renal patients and people on dialysis. It’s saving a ton of money for Medicare over the next twenty years.”
“I can’t believe the FDA would approve this,” MaryLou said. “My son was 37 years old. He went into the hospital with two blood clots, but his kidneys were functioning. They gave him Remdesivir, and in twelve hours, his kidneys stopped working, and his organs began to fail. We never saw him open his eyes again.”
Michelle Conway said, “I took my husband to the E.R., and the next day, they told me he was going on Remdesivir. I said absolutely not. I wanted him on other treatments, but they refused all of it. They isolated him and told him he had to have Remdesivir or he’d die, and he agreed. I got to watch his last rites over a video conference. I know he was murdered by Remdesivir.”
A woman I’ll call Maya joined the support group for the first time to share her story. She’s a survivor of the hospital protocol, and there aren’t many of those. “I refused Remdesivir, and I refused the ventilator. But they find other ways to take you out. The doctors were pissed at me. They called my husband to pressure him. They fear-monger you with all these lies. And they pull your loved ones away from you. I was all by myself trying to make decisions.”
The discussion often turned to the weird carelessness and indifference to standard medical procedures in the hospitals during COVID. “Multiple times in my husband’s record, it said he was not a candidate for Remdesivir,” Lisa said. “They gave it to him anyway, and he went into renal failure and died.”
“The Remdesivir fact sheet clearly states that it may cause kidney and liver failure. And that’s exactly what happened to my husband Richard,” Michelle Strassburg said. “They’re doubling down on this preposterous decision. I’m at a loss for words.”
“It’s so important that in their own literature of Remdesivir, they state that it’s supposed to be given early,” Catherine said. “Yet they kept stalling my husband. They sent him home and said to sign up for monoclonal antibodies. But when he showed up for it, they said they were too backed up. By the time he was hospitalized, he was really sick. They gave him Remdesivir, and he had a stroke.”
Everyone in the group knows about the financial incentives that drove the hospital’s insistence on Remdesivir. The federal government paid hospitals a staggering 20% bonus on the entire hospital bill of patients treated with Remdesivir. They also handed out lavish extra payments for ventilating patients. And, perhaps most tellingly, the feds rewarded hospitals with more money for patients who died of COVID instead of those who were healed.
Gregory Gandrud, the treasurer of the California Republican Party, understands financial incentives well. He explained the money behind his hospitalization. “They gave me $37,000’s worth of Remdesivir, but it obviously didn’t help because I wound up on a ventilator. My hospital bill was $920,000 for the 44 days I was there. Nobody offered me ivermectin, which is cheap, effective, has no side effects, and you can take at home.”
Many in the group expressed frustration at trying to get justice. The PREP Act indemnified medical institutions from any actions they took during the federally declared COVID emergency. Lawyers are reluctant to take cases because they don’t see how to break through the hospitals’ indemnity shield.
After the support group, I spoke with Jamie Scher, who told me that her legal team was ready to file a complaint against Gilead today. Gilead is the lucky maker of Remdesivir, enjoying fabulous profits from this previous loser of a drug, which turned into a billion-dollar winner during COVID.
Jamie said she has over 1,000 plaintiffs, and, unfortunately, the list is growing daily. She’s working hard to raise funds for the lawsuit; people interested in finding out more can visit her website at myerandscher.com.
Another way to circumvent the PREP Act may be to get malpractice insurance carriers to not insure hospitals and doctors for the use of this protocol and lethal drugs like Remdesivir. Jamie said prosecutors could then hold them accountable for intentionally killing people, knowing that these drugs do not help; they only harm.
I confess that after these support groups, I find it difficult to sleep. I keep reliving the anguish of these wonderful people. “They think we’re stupid,” I hear Erin say. Denise’s sobs echo in my head, as she cries, “Why did God take my daughter from me? I’ll never know.” But her voice strengthens as she adds, “I do know we’re all warriors in a spiritual battle.” And Catherine offers words of hope: “Despite it all, I believe we’re going to get justice.”
Follow Stella on Twitter at @StellaPaulNY. Email: StellaPaulNY@gmail.com.
August 1, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, FDA, United States |
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Kiev will use its newly received weapons to target residential areas, just as it has for the past nine years
The recent US decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine is immoral, unethical, and criminal. We’ve already seen the horrific results of the use of such weapons – civilians mutilated and murdered (often decades later) in Iraq and Southeast Asia, for example, and in Lebanon.
In addition to the ethical reasons not to send these weapons to Ukraine, there are pragmatic reasons why, from a military perspective. They are pointless for Ukraine, in spite of Western promises that they will “do more damage across a larger area than standard unitary artillery shells by releasing bomblets, or submunitions.”
In reality, while covering a wider area than a conventional high explosive munition, the cluster bomblets do not inflict more powerful damage, certainly not against Russian fortified positions. Their use is mainly for targeting troops in the open and lightly armoured vehicles. Not a game changer for Kiev.
According to former US Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter, “these are the worst weapon in the world for trench warfare. With trench warfare, you need a high explosive round that collapses bunkers, that collapses trenches.”
If the US knows that cluster munitions won’t change facts on the ground for Ukraine, why is it sending them? Because, as President Joe Biden himself has said, Ukraine is “running out of ammunition and we’re low on it.” So, the US might as well offload its old stock of cluster munitions. They will not, as Biden claimed, “stop those tanks from rolling.” Nor will they – as the Biden administration claims – “save civilian lives.” They will almost certainly be used to kill, maim, and terrorize more Donbass civilians immediately and for years to come.
US Colonel Douglas Macgregor has emphasized that the cluster munitions have a high dud rate. According to Ritter, close to 40% of them fail to explode. Macgregor also highlighted how children are “attracted to these bright shiny objects that look like baseballs,” so insidious is their design.
US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan assures us that Kiev will not misuse the clusters. He claims that “Ukraine is committed to post-conflict de-mining efforts to mitigate any potential harm to civilians,” and that “Ukraine has provided written assurances that it is going to use these in a very careful way that is aimed at minimizing any risk to civilians.”
The US never signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions – which prohibits all use, production, transfer, and stockpiling of cluster munitions – but didn’t mind virtue signalling its abhorrence of them when it lobbed accusations against Russia (also not a signatory of the convention) on February 28, 2022, with Biden’s then press secretary, Jen Psaki, calling the use of cluster munitions a potential “war crime.”
As usual, it’s a heinous war crime when a US enemy supposedly does it, but not when an ally – or the US itself – actually does. As for Ukraine’s feeble promises to not use the cluster munitions against civilians, it has already been doing so since 2014.
Ukraine’s history of cluster-bombing civilians
By way of a personally witnessed example, in late March 2022, I visited the site of a Ukrainian missile attack that earlier that month had killed 22 civilians and injured 33 more. Because the Ukrainian-fired Tochka-U missile was intercepted, not all of its 50 cassettes of cluster munitions inside exploded in the city streets. Otherwise, the bloodbath would have been much worse. Then, in April 2022, Ukrainian forces targeted a railway station in Kramatorsk, likewise firing a Tochka-U with a cluster munition, killing a reported 50 people. Western media predictably accused Russia of the war crime, although investigations showed the missile emanated from Ukrainian-held territory to the southwest.
But like most of Kiev’s war crimes against Donbass civilians, its use of cluster munitions didn’t start in 2022. Back in 2014, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported on Ukrainian government forces’ use of cluster munitions in populated areas in Donetsk city. An October 2 attack on the centre of Donetsk that included the use of cluster munition rockets killed an employee of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
The New York Times likewise reported that on several occasions in October 2014, “the Ukrainian Army appears to have fired cluster munitions into the heart of Donetsk, unleashing a weapon banned in much of the world into a rebel-held city with a peacetime population of more than one million.” Citing physical evidence and interviews with witnesses and victims, the newspaper wrote there were “clear signs that cluster munitions had been fired from the direction of army-held territory.”
Ukrainian ‘petal mines’ continue to maim
But these aren’t the only clusters Ukraine has fired on Donbass civilians. In fact, over the course of last year, I documented the aftermath of Ukraine firing rockets containing cassettes of internationally-banned PFM-1 “petal” mines, over 300 of the mines per rocket.
Due to their design, they generally glide to the ground without exploding, until someone or something steps on or otherwise disturbs them.
According to authorities in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), Ukraine began firing these tiny, indiscriminate mines on March 6, 2022, during the battles for Mariupol, and then from May 18, 2022, into DPR and Kharkov Region settlements.
Since first documenting the aftermath of Ukraine’s use of the mines in central Donetsk in late July, 2022, I’ve interviewed victims, and reported on the painstaking work of Russian sappers to locate and destroy the mines. As of July 25 this year, 124 civilians have been injured by the mines, including ten children. Three civilians died as a result of their injuries.
Western weapons used to kill Donbass civilians
It should be mentioned that over the course of its now nine-year war against Donbass, Ukraine has been using conventional NATO munitions to slaughter and maim civilians. The high explosive shells Ukraine fires throughout Donbass cities and towns, but also countless times in the very heart of Donetsk, tear people apart, leaving mangled bodies and remains on streets and sidewalks, and in marketplaces.
On July 22, Ukrainian forces allegedly shelled Russian journalists in Zaporozhye Region with cluster munitions, killing one and injuring three others.
These deliberate attacks on the media, on civilians’ homes, hospitals, infrastructure, and on civilians themselves should be condemned as loudly as Ukraine’s firing of petal mines and of cluster munitions in general. But the US announcement that it would send cluster munitions to Ukraine resulted in some mild tutting from other Western nations, but no seriously strong condemnation. Canada is one of the nations voicing at least some objection to sending cluster bombs, the leadership in Ottawa probably feeling it ought to mildly protest, given Canada’s convention.
The Canadian government recently stated that it is fully against the use of cluster munitions and is “committed to putting an end to the effects cluster munitions have on civilians – particularly children.” Yet aside from polite grumblings regarding the US clusters, I’ve seen no Canadian condemnation of Ukraine’s repeated use of cluster munitions on the civilians of Donbass.
But the real criminals here are the US government, which knows sending its cluster munitions won’t actually help Ukraine fight the Russian military in any tangible way, but that it is highly likely Ukraine will instead use them against Donbass civilians. Apparently, that’s just fine with the crocodile-tear-crying US hypocrites.
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).
August 1, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Ukraine, United States |
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Wildfires broke out on July 25 in Latakia province in northwest Syria and are still burning amid new fires being started. The fires spread quickly by a sudden unusual wind which whipped up. The whole country, and the adjacent Mediterranean region, is in a heat-wave which sets the stage for such a devastating fire burning crops, forests and homes. However, this was not a chance wildfire, but was an act of terrorism.
General Jalal Dawoud, Head of the Fire Department in Latakia, says the fire was man-made. This was determined because the origin of the fire was not in one place, but was started in scattered areas all at the same time in daylight hours.
After the security forces began their investigation, it was found that the fires were started by drones originating from Idlib, under the occupation of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, formerly Jibhat al-Nusra, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria.
Turkey is illegally occupying Idlib as they protect the terrorists under the command of Mohammed Jolani, formerly allied with Abu Baker Al Baghdadi, the head of ISIS who was killed in Idlib by President Trump.
The terrorists have been attacking the fire fighters and vehicles. Bassem Bakar, a water tanker driver, was killed when the terrorists targeted his vehicle near Deir Hanna and Rabiah. Two other men with him were injured.
Turkey is well known for the manufacture of drones, and has been selling drones to Ukraine recently.
On July 25, a fire department vehicle drove over a previously planted mine on Zgharo Mountain, near the town of Maskita, but without injuries. This area was occupied by the terrorists now in Idlib during the 2015 period before they were driven east to Idlib.
The Mayor of Latakia, Amer Hallal, said fire depratments from many areas came to fight the fires, and a Russian water tanker airplane came to battle the fires. Civilians were evacuated from homes and farms and taken to a safe area where they were given humanitarian aid.
The fire raged in Rabiah which sits on a road that connects directly to Idlib. Other areas burning are Ghamam, Sarsekiah, Ein Zarkha, Deir Hanna, Jib Alahmar, Sed Bradoon, and Jebal al Zahra.
A young soldier who volunteered to fight the fires, Mounif Sebry Hassoun, died while fighting the fire due to suffocation in Meshkita. He is from village of Wadi Khelah, in the suburb of Jeblah
The Syrian government, Syrian Red Crescent are coordinating efforts to put out the fires and assisting the humanitarian needs of the affected civilians. Local restaurants have been donating meals to the fire fighters. The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and the Syrian Red Crescent are putting out fires in Rabiah, which is the front line against the terrorists in Idlib.
The foreign policy of the US and EU have kept the status quo in Idlib. 3 million civilians there are kept as human shields by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Turkey prevents the SAA and the Russian military from freeing the civilians kept as hostages to an international game of chess played by America.
International aid organizations, such as the UN, Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children and others deliver all the humanitarian aid to the civilians, while Jolani and his terrorists receive all the aid and distribute it to their cronies first, and sell whatever they horde in a huge shopping mall Jolani and partners built.
Idlib is an agricultural province with farmers and terrorists selling olives and olive oil to Turkish businesses.
The US, EU and UN are enablers of Jolani and the terrorists under his command. Recently, Jolani hung people in Idlib that he perceived were enemies. He and his men oppress women by not allowing social programs directed at women’s issues. The terrorists rule under Islamic Law and in the case of a rape, a woman must present the court with three men who are witnesses to the rape in order to get a conviction. In this situation, rapes go unreported as there is no chance for justice.
Drones can be used for humanitarian purposes, for example: delivering medicines to a remote village. However, drones can also deliver a deadly payload in a war, or attack, and now in Syria they are being used to start wildfires in the heat of summer amid dry winds which spread the deadly fires.
The world responded to the massive 7.8 earthquake on February 6 in Syria and Turkey. Humanitarian aid poured in from Arab countries mainly, with the US boycotting all aid to Syria, with the sole exception of Idlib and the occupying terrorists there.
The earthquake aid has long ago stopped, and although many friends of Syria have asked the US and EU to lift the sanctions which prevent all rebuilding and recovery in Syria from years of war and the earthquake, still there has been no move to lift any sanctions.
Recently, a list of the world’s poorest nations was unveiled with Syria tying for the worse place along with Yemen and Afghanistan. 12 years of armed conflict, the COVID-19 pandemic, the 7.8 earthquake of the century, and now wildfires being delivered by terrorists supported by the US and NATO.
Jolani and his US supported terrorists have no red lines they cannot cross. They are heartless criminals holding the northwest of Syria in fear of their next move.
July 31, 2023
Posted by aletho |
War Crimes | Middle East, Syria, Turkey |
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On Friday the Mail website reported on the heart attack suffered by US basketball player Bronny James, aged 18, on court. According to two UK doctors cited by the Mail and described as ‘leading experts’, the suggestion that this might be the result of a vaccine injury is a conspiracy theory. The article concedes that deaths from heart disease are at record levels and that Covid vaccines cause heart damage, but stiffly maintains that connecting these two facts is an error. The BBC chimes in with an article claiming ‘there is no evidence to support the implication vaccines might be involved’.
The basis of these claims is the suggestion that vaccine-induced myocarditis is so rare that it could not possibly be causing the huge rate of excess deaths from heart disease which amounts, according to the British Heart Foundation, to a massive 30,000 extra UK deaths per year when compared to pre-pandemic levels.
At the same time as Bronny James was suffering a heart attack and its aftermath, Swiss scientists finalised a scientific paper for publication entitled Sex specific differences in myocardial injury incidence after COVID-19 mRNA-1273 booster vaccination. This is a landmark study because it is a gold standard prospective study with a rigorous schedule of tests rather than an incomplete retrospective assessment of past events.
A total of 777 health care workers with a median age of 37 were tested for myocardial damage three days after Moderna booster vaccination and compared with the same number of controls. Forty (1 in 20) had elevated troponin levels indicative of damage to cardiac cells. These subjects (65 per cent of them women) had follow-up tests and 22 (1 in 35) were judged to have vaccine-induced myocardial injury. This careful study proves that myocardial injury has been massively underreported. The Mail reports that the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) had previously estimated a rate of just one in 666. Wrong by a factor of 20.
By no stretch of the imagination can myocardial injury be judged to be ‘extremely rare’ as the Mail suggests. Nor according to this detailed discussion by Dr John Campbell is this level of risk something any of us would consider taking on unless we faced imminent death as an alternative, which we don’t. For another discussion see this informative substack article.
Fortunately the short-term effects among those in the Swiss study did not include severe outcomes, but another prospective study completed in 2022 in Thailand on 314 high school students did find such severe effects. It is well known that myocarditis has both short-term and long-term outcomes. The elevated rate of excess deaths from heart disease in the general population does point to the need to ask questions, and asking does not amount to a conspiracy. The dismissal of these claims suggests there is an attempt to cover up on the part of the same doctors who coerced us to take the jabs and told us they were effective and safe.
Other causal factors for the steep rise in excess deaths from heart disease suggested by the Mail include the rise in typical ambulance response times to cardiac incidents from 30 to 90 minutes. Another suggestion widely touted was a supposed failure to prescribe statins during the pandemic; this disappeared when it was shown that statin prescriptions have not decreased.
If you want to know just how convoluted denial of responsibility can become, read a translation of an article from Sweden where a 30-year-old man died after receiving a booster jab. The government paid his family financial compensation but listed the event as the result of a medicine given in error. A paper analysing post-mortem results following Covid vaccination underlines the intentional obfuscation of this kind of doublespeak.
Behind this posturing and denial of responsibility lies something much darker with more chilling implications for public health. It is not just heart attacks that are up to levels never seen before. Ditto cancers, kidney injury, neurological injury, strokes, miscarriages, menstrual irregularities, stillbirths, cognitive decline and, crucially, unexplained deaths.
These statistics point to the need for probing questions of a different type. Are the vaccines or indeed Covid infection, which the balance of evidence suggests came from a biotech lab, causing generalised immune instability? How long is this going to go on and how bad will it get?
Sometimes you have to face up to extreme challenges in your personal life. Our responses to these crises define who we are and what we can become. This can require admitting to ourselves and others that we got it all wrong. Apology and humility build character and support honesty.
Crises can also engulf the whole of society. The casual dismissal of questions about vaccine safety shows we have arrived at just such a societal crisis: a crisis of health and truth whose dimensions appear to dwarf anything civilisation has had to face in our lifetimes. The beginnings of this crisis are not yet certain, but the turning point came when decision-makers in the pharmaceutical industry at the start of the pandemic decided it would be safe to unleash biotechnology on the general public. We are just at the beginning of this era. The World Health Organization 2030 Agenda predicts that we will all be subject to hundreds of novel vaccines within the decade.
Before the pandemic, biotechnology medicine was well known to be unsafe and inherently mutagenic (having the ability to cause a permanent change in an organism’s genes). Crucially it wasn’t so much what we knew, but what we didn’t know that constituted the colossal error of judgement, hubris, cruelty and greed. A single cell, the origin of life, contains 100trillion atoms organised into 42million protein molecules and 20,000 genes. Scientists have only a vague picture of how cells work. They have no idea how cells produce consciousness or how they join together (37.2trillion of them) to form a single human identity with amazing autonomic functions and immunity. Scientists don’t understand how intra-cellular transport and selection is managed. They have only a hazy comprehension of the role of electric fields, molecular shape, vibrational modes, so-called dark areas of our genome and multi-gene cooperative functions. Their knowledge can be described as a crude notion put together from a few isolated facts derived from a countable number of experiments.
What we do know for certain is the immense precision involved and the vulnerability of cells to minute edits to their structure. Cells work very hard to protect this precision: each one completes over 70,000 self-repairs every day. With this in mind, it is perfectly plain that those working in the field of gene therapy knew from previous failures and disasters just how potentially dangerous Covid vaccines could be. Some did warn their superiors who not only ignored them but set about telling the general public that biotechnology was completely safe and near 100 per cent infallible. This was not only a big lie but the crime of the century.
The new generation of biotech medicines are squarely aimed at editing the internal operation of cells, the control system that keeps our physiology and our life flying safely. It shouldn’t be a surprise that handicapping the pilot might crash the plane. The only surprise is that millions of crashed planes worldwide are being ignored. We are living in a very different world from the one we thought we inhabited. I hope we are not so daft that we stop asking questions on the advice of those manifestly profiting from the pandemic.
After reporting earlier that there have been 100,000 extra UK deaths from heart disease alone, the Mail concludes by claiming without evidence that the number of vaccine-related deaths in Britain pales in comparison to the estimated 230,000 lives that Covid inoculation has supposedly saved, a figure widely disputed, impossible to prove and believed to be wildly inflated. Even so, 2/5 are not odds that I would accept if I had to put my life up as collateral – would you?
Once you have told one lie, it is very hard to avoid telling more lies which can eventually become a world of untruth that eats away at your conscience and peace. This has become the fate of society during the pandemic. No one is participating more enthusiastically than the Fourth Estate. Every day, the mainstream media are claiming that excess deaths, which are running into millions worldwide, are normal or non-existent and have nothing to do with the obvious culprit. Governments are looking the other way and piously washing their hands of the matter like Pontius Pilate, while medical authorities are busying themselves hiding the data and refusing to carry out tests and autopsies.
Articles like those I have cited in the Daily Mail and the BBC (and there are many of them published every day) are not just bad journalism: they are part of an insidious promotion of drugs that are known to harm people. The articles are intended to quiet the concern of people worldwide who are waking up to the vaccines’ terrible side effects and complete ineffectiveness. The purpose is the inflation of the profits of a trillion-dollar industry which has proved itself callous and criminal, unfit to dominate public health policy as it does through revolving doors between regulators and industry insiders and through obscene advertising expenditure and gifts to medical professionals.
July 30, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine |
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A major increase in spontaneous abortion among pregnant women was directly linked to the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine in Switzerland, according to a new analysis by statistician and Luzern University professor Dr. Konstantin Beck.
Beck, a former adviser to the German Minister of Health and the Swiss Parliament, analyzed publicly available Swiss and German data from scientific publications, health insurance companies and the Swiss Federal Office of Statistics (FOS).
He found that miscarriages and stillbirth rates in 2022 corresponded directly to COVID-19 vaccination among pregnant women in Switzerland nine months earlier.
And, he said, vaccine makers and public health officials either knew or could have known this information at the time, if they cared to look. Instead, they presented the information to the public in a way that obscured the risks.
Beck presented his groundbreaking research findings on Wednesday to Doctors for Covid Ethics.
Also, contrary to public statements by Swiss authorities that, “There is no relevant excess mortality among young people ” in Switzerland, Beck’s re-examination of the government’s own data reveals significant patterns of excess mortality among young people emerged in late 2021 and early 2022.
He said these findings show that during the COVID-19 pandemic, “We exposed the most vulnerable unnecessarily to new risks that outweigh by far the original pandemic risk.” And that “today, more and more heavy consequences of our Corona measures pop up in our official statistics, but only a few are interested to know [about them].”
“By analyzing the rollout of these vaccines, especially for pregnant women and their unborn, I found plain evidence from the very beginning that rethinking and postponing the vaccination strategy would have been imperative,” he said.
COVID shots led to ‘the baby gap’
Switzerland saw a historic drop in the rate of live births in 2022.
Every month that year, there were fewer births than there had been on average over the previous six years, for an overall reduction of 8.5% in the national birth rate, according to Beck’s analysis.
In some places, the drop was even more significant — Zurich had a 16.5 % drop in its birth rate.
The last comparable drop in births, 13%, Beck said, was during the 1914 mobilization of the Swiss Army at the start of World War I.
The 2022 plummet in birth rates came on the heels of a small “Corona baby boom” — a 3% spike in birth rates in 2021, that had followed the pandemic lockdown.
According to data compiled by analyst Raimund Hagemann, COVID-19 vaccination rates among Swiss women in 2021 and early 2022 corresponded very closely to the drop in birth rates nine months following vaccination.
Figure 1 (below), which adjusts the birth rate timeline by nine months to account for the time of pregnancy, shows this strong correlation between rates of vaccination and decline in the birth rate — the two numbers mirror one another.
Figure 1
Researchers have offered a few different hypotheses for this “baby gap,” which Beck evaluated.
Some proposed a behavioral explanation, hypothesizing that people changed their behavior out of fear associated with the pandemic itself or the associated economic uncertainty.
But Beck said this hypothesis did not match historical behavior patterns — the baby boom itself happened in the middle of World War II. And, it can’t account for the baby boom that followed the beginning of the pandemic, when public fear and unemployment were both at their height.
He also dismissed the hypothesis that COVID-19 infection reduced fertility. If that were the case, he said, there would not have been a 2021 spike in the birth rate following the first wave of infection in 2020, and there was no evidence of reduced fertility following the Omicron virus wave.
In fact, Beck said, there is no evidence of reduced fertility at all. On the contrary, the data show women were becoming pregnant at the same rates as before the pandemic.
Using German health insurance data — because Swiss data are not yet available — he showed the number of women seeking pregnancy tests and visiting doctors to be treated for pregnancy remained constant throughout 2021 and 2022.
There was even slight ongoing growth, and a spike related to the mini-baby boom of 2021.
That makes COVID-19 vaccine-induced spontaneous abortion the most plausible hypothesis for the drop in birth rates — because the same number of women were becoming pregnant, but fewer of them were carrying their pregnancies to term.
Supporting that claim, data from German health and Swiss insurers show that beginning in the fourth quarter of 2021, there are clear and significant increases in the number of pregnancy complications treated and in the length of hospital stays following birth — both of which had been trending downward for years.
German data also indicate that the number of stillbirths was up 20% in the fourth quarter of 2021.
Although data on stillbirths were not available for Switzerland, he said, there is no reason to believe that it would be substantively different.
‘Anyone who had read the leaflet, would have been informed’ of dangers
The vaccines’ impact on pregnancy was not simply a tragic and unanticipated outcome, because it was already evident in the vaccine manufacturers’ own data or lack thereof, Beck said.
Anyone who had “read a leaflet from the manufacturer,” he added, “would have been informed” that there were no pregnancy data, but that there were serious concerns about the possible effects of vaccines on infants.
The German version of the Moderna Spikevax warning said, essentially, “We have no clue what the risk is for pregnant women. There are no good controlled studies done. There is not enough data available,” Beck said.
The leaflet also recommended against vaccination for breastfeeding mothers, but strongly recommended it for pregnant women, Beck said.
“But isn’t pregnancy usually preceding breastfeeding?” he asked, “And what should you then do after giving birth to get rid of vaccination?”
On April 20, 2021, Pfizer sent its report regarding the mRNA vaccine and pregnancy to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), according to the Pfizer documents.
The following day, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published preliminary findings on COVID-19 vaccine safety in pregnant women based on an analysis of V-safe and the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
On April 23, in a White House press conference, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky recommended pregnant women get vaccinated based on the findings of that paper.
The paper explicitly stated that researchers found no safety signals with respect to pregnancy or neonatal outcomes in the third trimester, but that it could make no conclusions about the first or second trimesters.
Given that the first and second trimesters are the highest risk periods for pregnancy, Beck said, the NEJM paper concedes the researchers didn’t know what additional risks the vaccines might pose to pregnant women at their most vulnerable time.
The paper also included an irrelevant comparison of the most frequent symptoms post-vaccine between pregnant and non-pregnant women, and used live birth as the only measure of the potential health effects on the newborn.
And perhaps most importantly, it explicitly stated that “The most frequently reported pregnancy related adverse events were spontaneous abortion.”
The paper reported 46 spontaneous abortions related to vaccination out of 104 total reported. That, Beck said, is a 73.1% increase in spontaneous abortion.
Making calculations based on that NEJM data, Beck found that the reported vaccination rate of 75% of pregnant women in Switzerland, 1 in 10 pregnancies ends in a miscarriage or stillbirth.
He concluded that alternative existing hypotheses can’t account for this phenomenon, and the vaccine-induced miscarriage hypothesis corresponds to both the manufacturer’s data and the relevant findings reported as the basis of the CDC’s campaign to vaccinate pregnant women.
125% spike in pulmonary embolism, cardiac arrest and stroke, and cerebral infarction among children ages 0-14
The presentation also raised a series of concerns about the impacts of COVID-19 vaccination on young people and how statistical manipulation can obscure those potential effects.
Based on several examples of how the health and mortality of young people worsened over the course of the vaccination period, Beck posed the question, “Why did we vaccinate children? I mean, they were not the target group of this virus.”
An examination of data from major health insurers, for example, showed that during 2020-2021, people ages 19-39 had the highest growth in healthcare costs, while they typically have the lowest costs, indicating a change in the health of that demographic.
Data on the frequency of pulmonary embolism, cardiac arrest and stroke, and cerebral infarction among children ages 0-14 showed a 125% spike in events. While the numbers were still small, they went from an average of 20 events per year over the several preceding years to a total of 45 events in 2021.
A second look at data analysis by the FOS, which had reported that there was no excess mortality for young people in 2022, raised red flags, Beck said.
Excess mortality measures the difference in reported deaths versus expected deaths in a given period. Baseline projections of excess mortality are typically based on previous averages.
Re-analyzing the FOS mortality data, but keeping the expected number of deaths in line with previous averages — which the FOS had not done — Beck found a 12% increase in overall excess mortality.
When he analyzed the excess mortality by age groups, Beck found that for young adults ages 20-39, there was a spike in excess mortality beyond normal expectations in late 2021 and in 2022. And for children ages 0-19, he identified a similar trend.
Excess mortality data, he said, can be easily hidden by widening confidence intervals for predictions, combining demographic groups with different health profiles or changing the baseline expected number of deaths to hide variation, which made it possible for Swiss officials to announce there was no excess mortality for young people.
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
July 30, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine |
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Because if officials did, they might have to ‘confirm’ something that blows up all their bogus narratives.
In Part 1 of this article, I presented my iron-clad Covid maxim: “Officials never investigate that which they don’t want to confirm.”
One of the first Reader Comments this article generated was from the always-astute Substacker SimulationCommander:
“This goes for much more than Covid, too. Like the Nordstream bombings or cocaine in the White House. Then you can have the press parrot, “No evidence exists…”
And how, SC. This maxim does apply to every “taboo” subject that could/might detonate any false or bogus narrative. Alas, if I was going to list examples of every taboo topic that can’t be investigated (because inconvenient truths might be “confirmed”), I’d be writing until midnight.
This caveat stipulated, what follows are a few more Covid examples I think “confirm” my maxim that non-authorized conclusions cannot be “confirmed” … because they simply won’t be investigated. Or, if they are “investigated,” said investigation will itself be a scam, designed to protect the authorized conclusion.
Don’t perform autopsies.
Don’t investigate or follow-up on all the people listed on the VAERS data base.
Make sure medical personnel don’t go overboard inputting VAERS reports. (Make sure the VAERS system is capturing only a tiny percentage of the possible vaccine-injured).
Make sure the MSM doesn’t interview or investigate the claims of family members who possibly died or had vaccine injuries.
Don’t perform any statistical comparisons from previous years.
Don’t interview any doctors, nurses or hospital administrators who believe the “Covid protocols” were actually killing patients.
Don’t report it or investigate it.
Don’t question any life insurance companies or their actuary experts.
Don’t question any funeral home directors or coroners about any possible spike in deaths.
Don’t question any clergy that perform funeral services.
Don’t survey ambulance companies to see if they were/are responding to more emergency calls.
Don’t question florists to see if they were/are preparing more floral arrangements for funerals.
If some journalist or official must mention a spike in all-cause deaths, attribute these deaths to “long Covid” or “Covid that won’t go away” (even though the “vaccines” were supposed to prevent death in at least 95 percent of cases.)
Don’t seek to tally these incidents or compare them to previous years.
Censor the YouTube videos of hundreds of athletes collapsing while in competition.
Or: make sure said videos do NOT “go viral.”
Censor or “de-boost” the many thousands of headlines and stories that report on these incidents.
To reduce the length of this article, I refer readers to this article (“27 ways officials concealed evidence of early spread.”)
One mechanism that might suppress evidence of early virus spread would be to NOT perform any antibody studies of all naval personnel who were on a ship between November 2019 through March 2020.
(See end of this article for my latest “eureka!” observation/theory. This possibility is a stunner even to me.)
Don’t give research money to any college or “scientific” research organization that might perform studies on taboo topics that could de-bunk the authorized narratives.
If some awkward or embarrassing studies are performed, censor them … or produce a “counter-study” designed to discredit the previous inconvenient study/anecdotes.
Steer studies to researchers who will produce results that match the authorized narratives.
Note: This is the “carrot” approach: “We’ll pay you if you produce a good study for us!”
More yummy carrots: Pay news organizations (via advertising spends and “Excellence-in- Journalism” grants) that run stories that support the narrative.
The stick: Boycott, censor, de-platform the few media organizations that persist in challenging the authorized narratives. Try to shut these sites down or get their key dissenting journalists fired (Tucker Carlson, James O’Keefe, etc).
Or: Put dissidents or “dangerous extremists/traitors” in jail for the rest of their lives (Julian Assange).
Or: Force them to flee to Russia (Edward Snowden).
Use non-stop propaganda to encourage other vaccines: “Don’t forget to get your flu shot. It’s not too late to get your flu shot. Flu shots prevent the flu.”
More carrots: “$10 gift card at Publix for everyone who gets their flu shot … or Covid shot.”
More sticks: “We’ll fire you if you don’t get your shot.”
Carrot and stick at the same time: “You can now go to a Broadway play … If you’ve gotten your shots and can prove it to us.”
As I’ll soon report, the CDC and Navy actually tested 382 crew members (out of 4,800 crew members) of the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier for antibodies. Blood for these antibody tests was collected from a “voluntary … convenience sample” on April 20-24, 2020.
The results showed that 60 to 62* percent of the Roosevelt crew members who got an antibody assay tested positive for antibodies (which provide antigen evidence of “prior infection.”)
*Note: Some sentences in this study say “62 percent” of crew members tested positive for antibodies, other sentences say “60 percent.”
Previously-reported PCR test results had suggested only 20 percent of Roosevelt crew members had been infected by the time this ship made it to port in Guam in late March, 2020.
In researching the “Roosevelt outbreak,” I learned there’d also been Covid outbreaks on a French aircraft carrier (the Charles de Gaulle) in the approximate same time period as the Roosevelt outbreak; there was also an outbreak on the USS Kidd missile destroyer.
The French aircraft carrier had about 1,800 crew members and 90 percent of these crew members were later tested for antibodies (for some odd reason, only 7.9 percent of Roosevelt crew members were tested for antibodies).
The de Gaulle antibody results were almost identical to the percentage of the Roosevelt study, showing that 60 to 65 percent of these sailors had been previously infected.
On the USS Kidd, which had 333 crew members, at least 41 percent of its crew members had been previously infected based on PCR and antibody results.
I believe the antibody results on the Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle and Kidd are trying to tell us something about the real R-naught number of the novel coronavirus.
The R-naught number tries to quantify how contagious a particular virus is. It seeks to tell researchers how many people one infected person might later – directly or indirectly – infect.
An R-naught number over 2 means “virus” spread” is going to be significant. If this number is 3 or 4 (or more), Katie bar the door!
True, naval vessels constitute the worst possible “spread” environments, but, if nothing else, these antibody results tell us that the majority of people in any “congregate” and extended virus-spread environment will at some point contract this virus.
NOTE: If any person has relevant information about a potential “early outbreak” on the Roosevelt or any naval ship (and a possible cover-up of same), please email me at: wjricejunior@gmail.com
Another key take-away from my non-authorized research project is that only one of approximately 7,000 sailors on these three ships died from Covid (and this lone Covid victim was 41.)
In other words, the antibody studies show that of at least 4,000 or so sailors infected with this virus, only one infected person died (and details of this one fatality are sketchy and include odd elements).
This means the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) for sailors under the age of 41 on these three ships was 0.0000 percent.
I argue this finding – if widely publicized – would have slain the false narrative that Covid was a threat to young adults.
Upon deeper contemplation, I find it very interesting that no antibody studies were done of crew members of other ships that were at sea between December 2019 and March 2020.
Question: What if later antibody studies had been done of all naval crew members who had been at sea in these “pre-official Covid” months?
If this pro-active prevalence investigation (or “active surveillance” as Alex Berenson highlighted in a recent study about vaccine-caused heart issues) had been performed, I think researchers and the public might have found that 40 to 60 percent of crew members who served on every ship in any nation’s Navy might have also tested positive for Covid antibodies.
The reason more antibody studies weren’t performed is probably that no other “outbreaks” were publicly identified on any other ships.
However, the reason no or few possible early “cases” were identified on other ships is that no PCR tests were available on these others ships and no sailors were being tested with PCR tests before mid-March 2020.
So we got only “passive surveillance.” This, I argue, is why more early cases throughout the population weren’t identified. There were simply no PCR tests being given to people who may have been infected.
In my opinion, if these tests had been available and had been administered, PCR positive results would have started coming back “positive” just like they did on the other ships that did get these (then) scarce tests and started testing crew members.
Maybe more “PCR evidence” of early infections on more naval vessels would have prompted more later antibody studies of all the crew members of those ships (just like what happened on the Roosevelt, Kidd and de Gaulle).
With the exception of the outbreaks on these three ships, PCR and antibody testing didn’t happen. I suspect that wide-spread antibody testing of all naval vessels didn’t happen … for a reason.
Again: Don’t test for (or genuinely “investigate”) that which you don’t want to “confirm.” This strategy works every time!
July 30, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19 |
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Pensions etc. can’t be paid in future. More fear porn to push 7 very important narratives.
The NY Times ran a major story today to get in front of the depopulation narrative, it seems. Countries don’t actually need to depopulate to stop the world population from increasing. Depopulation is already here, happening organically. [By that I mean families are having fewer children in response to the strip mining of the middle classes everywhere.] I described the lack of a growing world population last February, here.
No doubt both depopulation and the aging of all our nations has sped up as a result of COVID vaccinations being forced on 2/3 of the world’s population.
Yes, forced. Illegally forced. By spewing lies at everyone about the vaccines’ benefits and harms, which governments, regulators and manufacturers knew were lies, by scaring the Bejesus out of people by lying about the severity of COVID, by threatening and sanctioning refusers, by exhorting the world to shun refusers, by demanding vaccine passports to participate in normal activities like shopping… the list goes on and on. The people who wrote, spread and repeated these lies are culpable of crimes against humanity.
But the COVID lies and the vaccine lies were only the beginning. Governments also lied about borders, about immigration, about unaccompanied children crossing borders, and most importantly about WHY all these bizarre policies were being hoisted on most of the developed and developing world. The NY Times has been front and center in carrying the dirty water—and amplifying it—for each of these criminal lies and the policies they buttressed.
Now the NYT is at it again.
I see many narratives that the NY Times may be trying to push with this piece:
ONE: Lack of intent. We did not create the COVID virus nor the vaccines with the intent to depopulate, because we actually need more young people as workers. Therefore, such claims make no sense, and must be dismissed in their entirety.
TWO: In fact, we knew the population was decreasing. It has been obvious for years. Why would we shoot our economies in the foot by depopulating? Don’t blame us. [Ignores the fact that by crashing our economies, the assets can be purchased on the cheap, while putting people and nations into a debt trap that will close in on them later as interest rates rise, or money gets tight, or using other schemes.]
THREE: The NYT provides the justification why pensions cannot be paid in full, and why retirement ages must increase.
FOUR: If we were in fact trying to depopulate, we would have aimed for the elderly. The fact that so many young people have myocarditis, sudden deaths, and that there are 40% more deaths in working age groups should be additional evidence that vaccine depopulation was accidental, not intentional.
FIVE: To justify crazy ‘immigration’ policies [the border is open, just wade across] the NYT reveals that with a younger group of workers entering the country, maybe we can pay your pension after all. Fingers crossed. So shut up about immigration if you want to retire.
SIX: All those unaccompanied minors crossing the border? Shut up, they will become our young workers in a few years, the ones that pay for your pensions. Stop asking what happened to them.
SEVEN: We could so easily fix this if it wasn’t for those right-wing populist movements nipping at the heels of our totalitarian one world governance project.
Excerpts follow.
The world’s demographics have already been transformed. Europe is shrinking. China is shrinking, with India, a much younger country, overtaking it this year as the world’s most populous nation.
But what we’ve seen so far is just the beginning.
The projections are reliable, and stark: By 2050, people age 65 and older will make up nearly 40 percent of the population in some parts of East Asia and Europe. That’s almost twice the share of older adults in Florida, America’s retirement capital. Extraordinary numbers of retirees will be dependent on a shrinking number of working-age people to support them.
In all of recorded history, no country has ever been as old as these nations are expected to get.
As a result, experts predict, things many wealthier countries take for granted — like pensions, retirement ages and strict immigration policies — will need overhauls to be sustainable. And today’s wealthier countries will almost inevitably make up a smaller share of global G.D.P., economists say….
As in many young countries, birth rates in Kenya have declined drastically in recent years. Women had an average of eight children 50 years ago, but only just over three last year. Demographically, Kenya looks something like South Korea in the mid-1970s, as its economy was beginning a historic rise, although its birth rate is declining somewhat more slowly. Much of South Asia and Africa have similar age structures…
there is evidence that sub-Saharan African countries’ fertility rates are dropping even faster than the U.N. projects… [Uh oh, what else have we done to them?]
The transformation of rich countries has only just begun. If these countries fail to prepare for a shrinking number of workers, they will face a gradual decline in well-being and economic power….
To cope, experts say, aging rich countries will need to rethink pensions, immigration policies and what life in old age looks like. [Do they mean what life in old age looks like, or do they mean enforced death in old age?]
Change will not come easy. More than a million people have taken to the streets in France to protest raising the retirement age to 64 from 62, highlighting the difficult politics of adjusting. Immigration fears have fueled support for right-wing candidates across aging countries in the West and East Asia.
“Much of the challenges at the global level are questions of distribution,” Dr. Myrskylä said. “So some places have too many old people. Some places have too many young people. It would of course make enormous sense to open the borders much more. And at the same time we see that’s incredibly difficult with the increasing right-wing populist movements.”…
“You can say with some kind of degree of confidence what the demographics will look like,” Mr. O’Keefe said. “What the society will look like depends enormously on policy choices and behavioral change.”
July 30, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, New York Times, United States |
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