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EU’s New Anti-Russian Asset Grabbing Scheme is ‘Theft’, ‘Act of War’

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 30.06.2023

Hundreds of billions of dollars in Russian assets were trapped abroad in 2022 after the Ukrainian crisis escalated into a full-blown NATO-Russia proxy war. Earlier this year, reports in US business media indicated that the US and its allies were having trouble locating a substantial chunk of these funds.

Belgium plans to collect 3 billion euros a year in windfall profits from Russian assets frozen in the country’s coffers to give to Ukraine for “reconstruction” purposes, Prime Minister Alexander De Croo announced Friday.

“We are working on a windfall tax on profits,” De Croo told reporters after meeting with other EU leaders at the bloc’s summit in Brussels.

A day earlier, De Croo explained that Belgium was “very involved” in the issue because upwards of 90 percent of the Russian assets frozen in the EU’s jurisdiction are trapped in Belgian banks.

“The use of these funds for the military needs of Ukraine and its reconstruction makes sense from an economic point of view and from a moral point of view,” the Belgian leader assured.

The European Commission estimated in May that the bloc has frozen over 200 billion euros in assets belonging to Russia’s Central Bank, plus 24.1 billion owned by Russian companies, tycoons and other individuals.

US business media first reported on the possibility of collecting interest from Russian assets trapped abroad to fund Ukraine earlier this year, after concluding that there was no “reliable legal path” to allow for the funds to seized outright without undermining rule of law and international trust in European financial institutions.

‘Robbery’ in Broad Daylight

Asked to comment on Brussels’ plans, Christopher C Black, an international criminal and human rights lawyer with over 20 years’ experience under his belt, said that if realized, they would constitute “theft twice over” – first by seizing the money in the first place, and then preventing Russia from collecting its due interest.

“The crime of theft becomes compounded with insult by giving the money to Kiev to finance the war against Russia, and if the money is so transferred by EU government order, it will be [an] act of war – since a nation supplying financial support to another nation to carry on a war can be considered under international law as a party to the war,” Black explained.

Very Painful… for EU

Such theft would constitute a blatant violation of the United Nations Charter and the laws of war, and would undermine the rule of law in Europe, according to the legal expert, “because if they can do this to Russia they can do it to any citizens’ assets.”

The scheme would show that in effect, “no one is protected,” and that contracts between clients and banks in the EU’s jurisdiction effectively “mean nothing” because they can be broken at will and for any reason, Black said. This, in turn, threatens to undermine the credibility of EU banks among foreign depositors, he added.

The observer isn’t surprised by Belgium’s plans, pointing out that the EU and other Western countries have already systematically violated their own laws and international law, by seizing Venezuela’s gold and oil company assets, for example, or keeping Iranian assets frozen in Western banks for decades on end.

Russian Retaliation

Black expects Russia to “retaliate in kind if possible, that is if assets of the EU are located in Russia.”

Otherwise, Russia may also “have to think of other measures to force the return” of its assets, “either through diplomacy and the help of friendly nations (for example by getting them to agree to withdraw their deposits from EU banks unless the Russian assets are released)… or further reducing energy supplies to the EU,” the legal expert suggested.

“The BRICS process can help in the future as the BRICS Development Bank is further established, and a single currency can also help break Western financial domination of other countries,” Black added.

“But so long as nations continue to deposit their assets, gold or money, bonds, etc. in EU or other Western banks, they will face the real threat of having those assets seized whenever the West decides it is in their interests to do so,” the observer summed up.

Over $300 billion in Russian assets were reported frozen in Western banks’ coffers in 2022, most of them belonging to the Russian Central Bank. In late 2022, a senior financial expert with the Atlantic Council* estimated the actual amount of money seized was closer to $80-$100 billion, and that the US and the EU have had trouble finding the frozen funds. In February, US business media reported that only about $36.5 billion of the frozen assets had been found so far.

Last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin characterized the West’s asset seizure an “unseemly business,” and said “stealing other people’s assets has never brought anyone good.”

Before the escalation of the Ukrainian crisis, Putin repeatedly warned Russian businessmen to keep their money in Russia.

July 1, 2023 Posted by | Economics, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

There Was No Pandemic

By Denis G. Rancourt, PhD | June 22, 2023

This is radical.

The essay is based on my May 17, 2023 testimony for the National Citizens Inquiry (NCI) in Ottawa, Canada, my 894-page book of exhibits in support of that testimony, and our continued research.

I am an accomplished interdisciplinary scientist and physicist, and a former tenured Full Professor of physics and lead scientist, originally at the University of Ottawa.

I have written over 30 scientific reports relevant to COVID, starting April 18, 2020 for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association (ocla.ca/covid), and recently for a new non-profit corporation (correlation‑canada.org/research). Presently, all my work and interviews about COVID are documented on my website created to circumvent the barrage of censorship.

In addition to critical reviews of published science, the main data that my collaborators and I analyse is all‑cause mortality.

All-cause mortality by time (day, week, month, year, period), by jurisdiction (country, state, province, county), and by individual characteristics of the deceased (age, sex, race, living accomodations) is the most reliable data for detecting and epidemiologically characterizing events causing death, and for gauging the population-level impact of any surge or collapse in deaths from any cause.

Such data is not susceptible to reporting bias or to any bias in attributing causes of death. We have used it to detect and characterize seasonality, heat waves, earthquakes, economic collapses, wars, population aging, long-term societal development, and societal assaults such as those occurring in the COVID period, in many countries around the world, and over recent history, 1900-present.

Interestingly, none of the post-second-world-war Centers-for-Disease-Control-and-Prevention-promoted (CDC‑promoted) viral respiratory disease pandemics (1957-58, “H2N2”; 1968, “H3N2”; 2009, “H1N1 again”) can be detected in the all‑cause mortality of any country. Unlike all the other causes of death that are known to affect mortality, these so‑called pandemics did not cause any detectable increase in mortality, anywhere.

The large 1918 mortality event, which was recruited to be a textbook viral respiratory disease pandemic (“H1N1”), occurred prior to the inventions of antibiotics and the electron microscope, under horrific post-war public-sanitation and economic-stress conditions. The 1918 deaths have been proven by histopathology of preserved lung tissue to have been caused by bacterial pneumonia. This is shown in several independent and non-contested published studies.

My first report analysing all-cause mortality was published on June 2, 2020, at censorship-prone Research Gate, and was entitled “All-cause mortality during COVID-19 – No plague and a likely signature of mass homicide by government response”. It showed that hot spots of sudden surges in all‑cause mortality occurred only in specific locations in the Northern-hemisphere Western World, which were synchronous with the March 11, 2020 declaration of a pandemic. Such synchronicity is impossible within the presumed framework of a spreading viral respiratory disease, with or without airplanes, because the calculated time from seeding to mortality surge is highly dependent on local societal circumstances, by several months to years. I attributed the excess deaths to aggressive measures and hospital treatment protocols known to have been applied suddenly at that time in those localities.

The work was pursued in greater depth with collaborators for several years and continues. We have shown repeatedly that excess mortality most often refused to cross national borders and inter-state lines. The invisible virus targets the poor and disabled and carries a passport. It also never kills until governments impose socio-economic and care-structure transformations on vulnerable groups within the domestic population.

Here are my conclusions, from our detailed studies of all-cause mortality in the COVID period, in combination with socio-economic and vaccine-rollout data:

  1. If there had been no pandemic propaganda or coercion, and governments and the medical establishment had simply gone on with business as usual, then there would not have been any excess mortality
  2. There was no pandemic causing excess mortality
  3. Measures caused excess mortality
  4. COVID-19 vaccination caused excess mortality

Regarding the vaccines, we quantified many instances in which a rapid rollout of a dose in the imposed vaccine schedule was synchronous with an otherwise unexpected peak in all-cause mortality, at times in the seasonal cycle and of magnitudes that have not previously been seen in the historic record of mortality.

In this way, we showed that the vaccination campaign in India caused the deaths of 3.7 million fragile residents. In Western countries, we quantified the average all-ages rate of death to be 1 death for every 2000 injections, to increase exponentially with age (doubling every additional 5 years of age), and to be as large as 1 death for every 100 injections for those 80 years and older. We estimated that the vaccines had killed 13 million worldwide.

If one accepts my above-numbered conclusions, and the analyses that we have performed, then there are several implications about how one perceives reality regarding what actually did and did not occur.

First, whereas epidemics of fatal infections are very real in care homes, in hospitals, and with degenerate living conditions, the viral respiratory pandemic risk promoted by the USA‑led “pandemic response” industry is not a thing. It is most likely fabricated and maintained for ulterior motives, other than saving humanity.

Second, in addition to natural events (heat waves, earthquakes, extended large-scale droughts), significant events that negatively affect mortality are large assaults against domestic populations, affecting vulnerable residents, such as:

  • sudden devastating economic deterioration (the Great Depression, the dust bowl, the dissolution of the Soviet Union),
  • war (including social-class restructuring),
  • imperial or economic occupation and exploitation (including large-scale exploitative land use), and
  • the well-documented measures and destruction applied during the COVID period.

Otherwise, in a stable society, mortality is extremely robust and is not subject to large rapid changes. There is no empirical evidence that large changes in mortality can be induced by sudden appearances of new pathogens. In the contemporary era of the dominant human species, humanity is its worst enemy, not nature.

Third, coercive measures imposed to reduce the risk of transmission (such as distancing, direction arrows, lockdown, isolation, quarantine, Plexiglas barriers, face shields and face masks, elbow bumps, etc.) are palpably unscientific; and the underlying concern itself regarding “spread” was not ever warranted and is irrational, since there is no evidence in reliable mortality data that there ever was a particularly virulent pathogen.

In fact, the very notion of “spread” during the COVID period is rigorously disproved by the temporal and spatial variations of excess all-cause mortality, everywhere that it is sufficiently quantified, worldwide. For example, the presumed virus that killed 1.3 million poor and disabled residents of the USA did not cross the more-than-thousand-kilometer land border with Canada, despite continuous and intense economic exchanges. Likewise, the presumed virus that caused synchronous mortality hotspots in March-April-May 2020 (such as in New York, Madrid region, London, Stockholm, and northern Italy) did not spread beyond those hotspots.

Interestingly, in this regard, the historical seasonal variations (12 month period) in all-cause mortality, known for more than 100 years, are inverted in the northern and southern global hemispheres, and show no evidence of “spread” whatsoever. Instead, these patterns, in a given hemisphere, show synchronous increases and decreases of mortality across the entire hemisphere. Would the “spreading” causal agent(s) always take exactly 6 months to cross into the other hemisphere, where it again causes mortality changes that are synchronous across the hemisphere? Many epidemiologists have long-ago concluded that person-to-person “contact” spreading of respiratory diseases cannot explain and is disproved by the seasonal patterns of all-cause mortality. Why the CDC et al. are not systematically ridiculed in this regard is beyond this scientist’s comprehension.

Instead, outside of extremely poor living conditions, we should look to the body of work produced by Professor Sheldon Cohen and co‑authors (USA) who established that two dominant factors control whether intentionally challenged college students become infected and the severity of the respiratory illness when they are infected:

  • degree of experienced psychological stress
  • degree of social isolation

The negative impact of experienced psychological stress on the immune system is a large current and established area of scientific study, dutifully ignored by vaccine interests, and we now know that the said impact is dramatically larger in elderly individuals, where nutrition (gut biome ecology) is an important co-factor.

Of course, I do not mean that causal agents do not exist, such as bacteria, which can cause pneumonia; nor that there are not dangerous environmental concentrations of such causal agents in proximity to fragile individuals, such as in hospitals and on clinicians’ hands, notoriously.

Fourth, since our conclusion is that there is no evidence that there was any particularly virulent pathogen causing excess mortality, the debate about gain-of-function research and an escaped bioweapon is irrelevant.

I do not mean that the Department of Defence (DoD) does not fund gain-of-function and bioweapon research (abroad, in particular), I do not mean that there are not many US patents for genetically modified microbial organisms having potential military applications, and I do not mean that there have not previously been impactful escapes or releases of bioweapon vectors and pathogens. For example, the Lyme disease controversy in the USA may be an example of a bioweapon leak (see Kris Newby’s 2019 book “Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons”).

Generally, for obvious reasons, any pathogen that is extremely virulent will not also be extremely contagious. There are billions of years of cumulative evolutionary pressures against the existence of any such pathogen, and that result will be deeply encoded into all lifeforms.

Furthermore, it would be suicidal for any regime to vehemently seek to create such a pathogen. Bioweapons are intended to be delivered to specific target areas, except in the science fiction wherein immunity from a bioweapon that is both extremely virulent and extremely contagious can be reliably delivered to one’s own population and soldiers.

In my view, if anything COVID is close to being a bioweapon, it is the military capacity to massively, and repeatedly, rollout individual injections, which are physical vectors for whichever substances the regime wishes to selectively inject into chosen populations, while imposing complete compliance down to one’s own body, under the cover of protecting public health.

This is the same regime that practices wars of complete nation destruction and societal annihilation, under the cover of spreading democracy and women’s rights. And I do not mean China.

Fifth, again, since our conclusion is that there is no evidence that there was any particularly virulent pathogen causing excess mortality, there was no need for any special treatment protocols, beyond the usual thoughtful, case-by-case, diagnostics followed by the clinician’s chosen best approach.

Instead, vicious new protocols killed patients in hotspots that applied those protocols in the first months of the declared pandemic.

This was followed in many states by imposed coercive societal measures, which were contrary to individual health: fear, panic, paranoia, induced psychological stress, social isolation, self-victimization, loss of work and volunteer activity, loss of social status, loss of employment, business bankruptcy, loss of usefulness, loss of caretakers, loss of venues and mobility, suppression of freedom of expression, etc.

Only the professional class did better, comfortably working from home, close to family, while being catered to by an army of specialised home-delivery services.

Unfortunately, the medical establishment did not limit itself to assaulting and isolating vulnerable patients in hospitals and care facilities. It also systematically withdrew normal care, and attacked physicians who refused to do so.

In virtually the entire Western World, antibiotic prescriptions were cut and maintained low by approximately 50% of the pre-COVID rates. This would have had devastating effects in the USA, in particular, where:

  • the CDC’s own statistics, based on death certificates, has approximately 50% of the million or so deaths associated with COVID having bacterial pneumonia as a listed comorbidity (there was a massive epidemic of bacterial pneumonia in the USA, which no one talked about)
  • the Southern poor states historically have much higher antibiotic prescription rates (this implies high susceptibility to bacterial pneumonia)
  • excess mortality during the COVID period is very strongly correlated (r = +0.86) — in fact proportional to — state-wise poverty

Sixth, since our conclusion is that there is no evidence that there was any particularly virulent pathogen causing excess mortality, there was no public-health reason to develop and deploy vaccines; not even if one accepted the tenuous proposition that any vaccine has ever been effective against a presumed viral respiratory disease.

Add to this that all vaccines are intrinsically dangerous and our above-described vaccine-dose fatality rate quantifications, and we must recognize that the vaccines contributed significantly to excess mortality everywhere that they were imposed.

In conclusion, the excess mortality was not caused by any particularly virulent new pathogen. COVID so-called response in-effect was a massive multi-pronged state and iatrogenic attack against populations, and against societal support structures, which caused all the excess mortality, in every jurisdiction.

It is only natural now to ask “what drove this?”, “who benefited?” and “which groups sustained permanent structural disadvantages?”

In my view, the COVID assault can only be understood in the symbiotic contexts of geopolitics and large-scale social-class transformations. Dominance and exploitation are the drivers. The failing USA-centered global hegemony and its machinations create dangerous conditions for virtually everyone.

June 30, 2023 Posted by | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

US, Turkish-backed militias in Syria boost number of child soldiers in their ranks: UN

The Cradle | June 30, 2023

According to a UN report released on 28 June, the US and Turkish-backed armed groups in Syria have been increasingly recruiting minors into their ranks.

The report claims that the number of children recruited by militant groups in the country has risen from around 800 to over 1,200 since 2020.

It adds that among those recruiting children are the US-backed Kurdish militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which oversee control of Syrian oilfields in collaboration with Washington’s occupation forces.

The UN claims that more than 600 of child recruitment cases in Syria are attributed to the SDF and associated Kurdish groups in the country. This is despite the fact that the SDF signed an agreement with the UN in 2019 to end minors’ enlistment.

Over 600 child recruitment cases have also been attributed to the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) coalition of militant groups, which has incorporated fighters from several extremist groups, including ISIS, over the years.

Additionally, the UN says that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), formerly known as the Al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, has recruited over 380 minors into their ranks.

Twenty-five cases among Syrian government forces and allied militias have allegedly been recorded as well.

Bassam al-Ahmad, executive director of Syrians for Truth and Justice, said that in some cases, children are forcibly conscripted into the ranks of armed groups. He added that some join for religious or ideological beliefs, while others join for the salaries much needed by them or their families.

Ahmad claimed that some children are even sent out of the country to participate as mercenaries in foreign wars.

The enlistment of child soldiers has been an issue for much of the Syrian conflict.

During the recruitment efforts of the Nusra Front between 2013 and 2016, led mainly by Saudi cleric Abdullah al-Muhaysni, scores of teenagers were among the thousands enlisted to fight against the Syrian army. Many of these teenagers were sent on suicide missions.

In 2016, members of a US-backed armed group, the Nour al-Din al-Zinki Movement, were filmed beheading a 12-year-old boy named Abdullah Issa, who they claimed was a fighter in the pro-government Liwa al-Quds militia.

Liwa al-Quds released a statement at the time categorically denying that the boy was a fighter, claiming that he had been residing in an area of Aleppo under the control of armed groups.

In 2019, the Nour al-Din al-Zinki Movement was absorbed by the SNA after being defeated by HTS.

June 30, 2023 Posted by | War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

By targeting Ukrainian war criminals, Moscow is protecting its civilians

By Lucas Leiroz | June 30, 2023

Recently, the whereabouts of Ukrainian officials such as the head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense, Kirill Budanov, and the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Valery Zaluzhny, have come to the attention of people around the world. Mainstream media omit information about both, while denying rumors that they died or were seriously injured during high-precision Russian strikes. These same media outlets often call Russian attacks on high-ranking Russian targets unjustified, ignoring that these Kiev public figures are openly involved in the murders of Russian civilians.

Since last year, Kiev has taken an openly terrorist stance in the conflict, focusing more on civilian targets in the undisputed zone of Russian territory than on military enemies on the battlefield. This terrorist nature of the neo-Nazi regime began to become clear when the murder of Daria Dugina, a prominent Russian journalist, daughter of the philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, took place. Daria was killed after a bomb was placed in her car in the suburbs of Moscow by an agent of the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian far-right organization.

Since then, terrorist attacks have increased more and more, many times being neutralized in advance by the Russian security forces. People notoriously known for their support of Moscow’s special military operation have been targeted, even if they have no military involvement. This happened, for example, with businessman Konstantin Malofeev, who also had a bomb planted in his car by exile Russian neo-Nazi activists.

However, security forces are not always able to act in time to avoid the worst-case scenario. A new shocking murder case very similar to the one of Daria occurred in April this year, when Maxim Fomin, also known by his alias “Vladlen Tatarsky”, was murdered in a bomb attack on a public cafe in St. Petersburg, committed by an anti-government dissident admittedly linked to Ukrainian intelligence.

In May, Russian writer Zakhar Prilepin was also targeted by neo-Nazi terrorists, having survived a bomb attack that resulted in the death of his driver. The person responsible for the attack, Alexander Permyakov, also admitted to be working for Kiev’s intelligence, making clear the involvement of the regime’s authorities in the case.

In addition, it is worthwhile to remember the cases involving non-personal targets, such as the terrorist incursions in the demilitarized cities of Belgorod, Kursk, Rostov and Bryansk, as well as the frequent bombings in residential areas of Donbass. All these cases lead to countless deaths of children, women, and the elderly, causing unnecessary damage to the population, with no military relevance in the attacks.

Furthermore, in May, Kiev violated a serious redline when it attempted to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin himself by launching drones into Kremlin facilities. The attack was thwarted, but the Ukrainian intent to kill the Russian head of state made it clear that urgent measures needed to be taken by Moscow to ensure its own security.

The main problem with these attacks is that Kiev does not hide its active involvement. Commenting on all these cases during an interview in May, Kirill Budanov admitted that Ukrainian forces had murdered Russian citizens and promised that they “will keep killing” – until Kiev “wins”. Previously, he had already admitted responsibility for the terrorist attack on the Crimean Bridge, which took place in October 2022.

In the same sense, Zaluzhny had also commented in December last year on the murder of Russians, stating: “And the most important experience we had and the one which we have practiced almost like a religion is that Russians and any other enemies must be killed, just killed, and most importantly, we should not be afraid to do it. And this is what we are doing”.

Russia responded quite strategically to these Ukrainian provocations, avoiding escalation in the conflict, and directing missiles only to the main targets, which are the command centers. Between late May and early June, high-precision Russian strikes took place, destroying the headquarters of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence in Kiev. There are several unconfirmed reports that Budanov was seriously injured during these strikes and was taken to Germany for medical treatment. German outlets deny the rumors, but the whereabouts of Budanov are still unknown, with even an important Ukrainian politician publicly stating that he is dead.

In the same sense, Zaluzhny is also missing, with several rumors about his health. There are unconfirmed reports circulating on the internet about a Russian attack on a Ukrainian command post in Kherson, where a meeting between Zaluzhny and other military leaders was taking place. He would have been hit at the time, possibly dying or experiencing serious injuries. Although there is no confirmation, his whereabouts remain unknown.

In fact, Moscow is avoiding commenting on these cases because it does not seem to be Russia’s intention to make war propaganda with the success of its attacks. The Russian objective is to neutralize possible threats to its citizens, which is why high-precision attacks on command centers are taking place. This is the most effective way to prevent further terrorist incursions that kill more Russians.

On the other hand, Kiev, which is militarily weakened and discredited by its allies, tries to hide its casualties as this would further affect the morale of the troops and of the Ukrainian state itself.

It is not possible to say for now if Budanov and Zaluzhny are alive or dead, but certainly they are being at least temporarily neutralized and will not return to their command posts soon. This is a relief for all Russian citizens as they have suffered public death threats from both officers.

Lucas Leiroz is a journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.

You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.

June 30, 2023 Posted by | War Crimes | Leave a comment

Italy’s forgotten concentration camps in Libya

By Dr Mustafa Fetouri | MEMO | June 29, 2023

On 30 August 2008, Italy and Libya signed their Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership, ending their awkward past of feuding and diplomatic tensions over Italy’s colonisation of Libya from 1911 to 1943. Libya was seeking compensation, recognition of suffering of its people and, above all, an apology. Rome, as is the case with all former colonial powers, tried for years to close the matter without offering anything. The treaty, a success for Libya, might have ended the political and diplomatic struggle over the colonial past, but it will not wipe it out from history and people’s memories.

The idea of invading Libya came during the colonial rush that saw major colonial powers like France, United Kingdom and others divide the dying Ottoman Empire possessions in North Africa, the Middle East and southern Europe itself. Libya was part of that empire, very close to Italy across the Mediterranean Sea and, above all, Libyans lacked effective means to fight back after the Ottoman military garrison left the country.

The rise to power of the Republican Fascist Party, led by Benito Mussolini in 1922, gave the occupation of Libya another nostalgic dimension as the fascists strongly believed in the deceptive idea that modern Italy was the rightful heir to the Roman Empire and, therefore, they were responsible for recovering the possessions of the bygone empire.  Another reason that made Libya more attractive to fascist Italy is the fact that Italy, united just 50 years earlier, became overcrowded and its farmers, particularly in the south, were eager to own land of which Libya has plenty. Mussolini used to call Libya the “fourth shore of Rome”.

Italians thought that the taking over of Libya would not be more than a few days’ sea trip and the entire country would be conquered. However, once the first amphibious forces tried to land on Tripoli shores in 1911, they were faced with stiff resistance from the locals, who rushed to defend their country with the little means they had.

As the invaders increased their numbers and widened their presence, the resistance shifted to new tactics, using the guerrilla tactics of hit-and-run. Outnumbered and out-gunned, the Libyans, mostly nomads and shepherds, figured out that direct confrontation with one of the most modern armies at the time was suicidal and destructive.

Instead of facing the Italian army directly, they waged rather small battles, mostly at night time. Benefitting from their detailed knowledge of the land and its geography, the Mujahidin, as they were called, managed to make life really difficult for the Italian army wherever it went. Facing a ghost enemy fighting on horseback, the Italian army started to use unheard of methods of war, scoring many firsts.

For instance, Italy was the first country to use air war and Libya became the first country to be bombed from the air. An Italian pilot named Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti, in a letter to his father, described how he threw the first bomb at an Arab [Libyan] camp in November 1911, just a month into the invasion. The young pilot wrote “today I have decided to try to throw bombs from the aeroplane”, before pointing out that it was “the first time that we [Italian army] will try this and if I succeed, I will be really pleased to be the first person to do it.”

Pilot Gavotti, indeed, succeeded in throwing the first ever bomb from an aeroplane, ushering in the age of air war for the first time in the history of mankind.  He wrote “and after a little while, I can see a small dark cloud in the middle of the encampment” in Ain Zara, today a town, but at the time just an oasis south-east of Tripoli. Ain Zara became the first place on earth to be bombed from the air. The Italian pilot did not realise what he had just done and had no idea what his bomb had done to people, mostly civilians, below. He returned to base, overwhelmed by his success in hitting “the target” and went straight to report to General Caneva that he just registered his name in history as the first person to bomb a target from the air. Carlo Caneva was the first Italian commander to announce that “Tripoli will be Italian”, as his forces launched the first attacks on Libya. He led the earlier brutal stages of the invasion before being replaced later by another, crueler General Rodolfo Graziani in 1930.

In the same year, the Italian army scored another world first when Benito Mussolini authorised, for the first time, the use of sulphur mustard to subdue Libyans. Bombing formations of fighters and civilian villages suspected of supporting the Mujahidin from the air but, this time, using poisonous gas, besides explosives.

In the 1920s, Libyan resistance intensified, particularly in eastern Libya with the rise of Omar Al-Mukhtar, a septuagenarian who suffered old age and chronic back pain, who became the national leader of the Mujahidin against fascist Italian occupation.

This forced General Graziani to revert to using collective punishment against entire civilian communities by forcing them into concentration camps across Eastern Libya. At one point, there were some 16 different camps in the Sirte desert and further east in which thousands of civilians including women, children, the elderly and young men were forced to live with their animals in desert plots surrounded by barbed wire and guarded, around the clock, by armed soldiers.

Despite this brutality, Al-Mukhtar and his colleagues fought for 20 years, until he was captured on 11 September 1931, after suffering an injury in a village called Slonta, south of Al-Bayda town in Libya’s eastern Green Mountain region.

After a quick trial, he was sentenced to death by hanging on 16 September. Hundreds of civilians, including women and children were forced to watch as Al-Mukhtar was hanged in Suluq concentration camp, one of the most infamous, south-west of Benghazi. By staging such a gruesome show, the Italian authorities wanted to terrify Libyans who might think of following in his footsteps and fight them.

Modern Libya, before the NATO invasion of 2011, used to commemorate 16 of September as a national day of mourning to remember Al-Mukhtar and remind younger generations of what happened in Libya, decades before. New Libya, however, has forgotten the mourning day, while fascist concentration camps are never really mentioned outside academic circles.

June 30, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

China: Guantanamo prison just tip of iceberg in US’ ‘deplorable’ record of rights violations

Press TV – June 29, 2023

China says the Guantanamo Bay detention camp is just the tip of the iceberg in human rights violations committed by the United States, weeks after the United Nations slammed Washington for inhumane treatment of prisoners at the notorious offshore military prison.

In February, UN Special Rapporteur Fionnuala Ni Aolain granted unprecedented access to the US-run detention center in Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay and released her report on her four-day visit to the infamous prison on Monday.

Ni Aolain, who became the first UN human rights investigator allowed to visit the camp, harshly criticized the White House in her scathing report for continuing to subject the 30 men held at the prison, commonly known as Gitmo, to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.”

On Thursday, China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning, when asked to comment on the 23-page report, said at a regular briefing that for the past two decades, the Gitmo has repeatedly been exposed for its abuses, but Washington persistently refused to shut it down despite making promises to do so.

“In the past two decades and more, it has been revealed many times that inmates were abused in the detention facility at the Guantanamo Bay, causing outrage in the international community. The US has promised time and again to close the detention center, yet till today dozens of individuals are still imprisoned in the facility at the Guantanamo Bay and only few of them have been indicted or convicted,” she said.

“Over the decades, the US has set up ‘black sites’ in at least 54 countries and regions in the name of the “war on terror” to secretly detain ‘suspected terrorists’, carry out arbitrary detention and use torture to extort confessions.

“The detention center at the Guantanamo Bay is just the tip of the iceberg. The ‘black sites’ are a typical example of the US trampling on the rule of law and infringing on human rights,” Mao further said.

She also stressed that Washington needed to “earnestly reflect upon its deplorable record on human rights, apologize and provide reparation to the victims and hold those who authorized and inflicted tortures on detainees accountable.”

During her visit to the Guantanamo prison, Ni Aolain, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and at Queens University in Belfast, met with a range of the 34 prisoners who were then detained. The number has now dropped to 30, including the five inmates accused of plotting the attacks on New York and Washington on 9/11.

“After two decades of custody, the suffering of those detained is profound, and it’s ongoing. Every single detainee I met with lives with the unrelenting harms that follow from systematic practices of rendition, torture and arbitrary detention,” she said at a press conference on Monday.

Ni Aolain, who visited the notorious prison as an independent UN monitor, did not, however, express harsh criticism for the fact that 19 of the 30 inmates had never been charged with any crime, some of whom have been held there for two decades, and only said their situation was a matter of “profound concern.”

The Gitmo opened in 2002 under the-then US president George W. Bush to held detainees captured during the so-called “war on terror” after al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, DC on September 11, 2001.

It became synonymous with prisoner abuse by the US in the early years of “war on terror”, gaining global notoriety for the widespread use of torture and other violations of human rights that took place in it.

Many detainees were reportedly subjected to psychological and physical abuse — including waterboarding, beating, exposure to deafening noise, and sleep and food deprivation — as part of their “enhanced interrogation,” the accounts of which were gradually leaked to the outside world by the few lawyers who visited the prison and the inmates who have since been released.

Washington’s promises of closing down the site go back to the first tenure of former President Barack Obama, between 2009 and 2013.

Obama had made the closing of Guantanamo one of his top priorities and issued an executive order to do so soon after taking office in 2009. However, he failed to achieve that goal by the end of his second term in the face of stiff opposition in Congress. His successor, Donald Trump, rescinded Obama’s order to close Guantanamo.

Officials of President Joe Biden say they aim to close the infamous prison but the detention facility remains in operation as the administration has transferred several detainees in recent years.

June 29, 2023 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Nicaragua takes complaint to UN over US refusal to pay compensation for backing death squad

Press TV – June 28, 2023

Nicaragua has lodged a complaint with the UN against the US for its refusal to comply with a ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordering it to compensate Managua for its support of a notorious death squad in the 1980s.

The announcement was made by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega at a ceremony in Managua commemorating the 37th anniversary of the ruling by the International Court of Justice, which condemned the US for carrying out military and paramilitary activities in and against Nicaragua.

“We will go to court to accuse the United States so that they repair the damage they have done to Nicaragua as much as possible,” said Ortega.

He said the decision was made despite friendly nations advising him that taking the matter to the UN will be an exercise in futility.

“When we talked about going to court to sue the United States, even brotherly nations, friendly nations, told us: that is a lost case, you will not even be able to make any progress there in court.”

“The Court has undoubtedly been a point of reference in the battle for independence, for the sovereignty of Nicaragua, in the face of the recourse of the powers, of the use of force, we have defended ourselves with the force of law.”

The Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry has written a letter to UN chief Antonio Guterres, calling on the body to make the US pay its long-overdue debt to Nicaragua.

The United States has long been accused of interfering in the internal affairs of Nicaragua, as well as many other Latin America nations.

President Ortega came to power in 1979 with the victory of the Sandinista Revolution that toppled US-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza.

Then-US President Ronald Reagan, citing the threat of an expansion of Cuban and Soviet influence in the region, signed off on US financing for a right-wing militia, called the Contras, to launch cross-border attacks against the Sandinistas.

The ICJ in 1986 held that the US had violated international law by supporting the Contras and by mining Nicaragua’s harbors.

The United States refused to participate in the proceedings, and following the judgment withdrew from the ICJ.

The US also blocked enforcement of the judgment by the UN Security Council and thereby prevented Nicaragua from receiving any compensation.

Ortega, who helped depose the Somoza dictatorship in the late 1970s, has been in power for 16 consecutive years. He served as president in the 1980s before losing power in 1990. He, however, staged a stunning comeback in 2007.

June 29, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Covering up crime – the real purpose of the Covid Inquiry

By Dr Mark Shaw | TCW Defending Freedom | June 27, 2023

Why is there so little discussion about why those responsible for deceiving the public in relation to Covid policy have not been subject to a criminal investigation? Are we really meant to believe that no crimes have been committed, that it was all ‘happenstance’? Have their positions of authority exempted them from action being taken? Or are there other reasons?

As the Covid Inquiry started, it is an irony that, almost simultaneously, Boris Johnson was found guilty of the ‘crime’ of misleading Parliament. He was aware of the potential punishment and decided to jump before he was pushed but, either way, the effect of the Parliamentary Standards Committee’s verdict on their inquiry was to end his political career. Yet if politicians or those in power mislead the public there seems to be no such ‘justice’.

What I want to demonstrate here, with evidence, is that the Covid Inquiry is as much a means of deceiving the public as the Covid policy instigators achieved. The inquiry’s alleged aims are to ‘help Government and society learn from the pandemic and better prepare for further epidemics’. Lady Hallett has also stated that ‘no one will be found guilty or innocent in the inquiry – the idea is to learn lessons’.

Such statements preclude any investigation into whether any crimes have been committed. What I am seeing in this inquiry is a platform to allow those (fully or partly) responsible to stage excuses and divert attention from that most paramount of issues: that we, the public, were painfully and utterly deceived. The matter of stalling is significant here because most of the national outrages which have come to light in recent years e.g. the sub-postmasters, Grenfell, blood transfusion and maternity scandals, all stem from ‘crimes’ committed long, long ago (ten to 30-plus years), ensuring that justice has all but been denied.

Typical of the smokescreens, irrelevance and delaying tactics of the inquiry was the appearance last week of England’s chief medical officer Chris Whitty. His platitudes – the ‘big weakness’ was a lack of ‘radicalism’ in thinking before the crisis took hold, ‘the terrible truth’, the ‘tragedy’ that ‘pandemics feed off inequality and drive inequality’ and while ‘we did pick up on it, [the knowledge] needs to be embedded right from day one’ – seemed directly aimed at quelling further questions, putting responsibility beyond him and even warning of future pandemic threats such as sexually transmitted diseases.

With his self-pitying talk, the perpetrator became the victim, not the public on whom his policies were imposed, thus deflecting any possibility that he and others may be (criminally) responsible.

On what basis are we to decide whether crimes were committed by those co-ordinating Covid policy? According to Oxford Reference, the definition of a crime is as follows: ‘A crime is held to be an offence that goes beyond the personal and into the public sphere, breaking prohibitory rules or laws, to which legitimate punishments or sanctions are attached, and that requires the intervention of a public authority (the state or a local body).’

With regards to the elements of a crime: ‘It is generally agreed that the essential ingredients of any crime are (1) a voluntary act or omission (‘actus rea’), accompanied by (2) a certain state of mind (‘mens rea’ or’mental state’) – whereby guilt is attributed to a person who acts ‘purposely’, ‘knowingly’, ‘recklessly’ or, more rarely, ‘negligently’.

A large class of ‘public welfare offences’ involving such things as economic regulations or laws concerning public health and safety also exist where the mens rea requirement does not apply in order to allow the prosecution to establish the defendant’s intent, or even negligence.

The principle of legality is recognised in almost all legal systems throughout the world as the keystone of criminal law. It is employed so that there can be no crime without a rule of law; thus, immoral or antisocial conduct not forbidden and punished by law is not criminal.

Is there a chance that the actions taken by those co-ordinating Covid policy were not covered by a particular rule of law and so could not be broken? I don’t believe so. What I do believe is that we can demonstrate that there was a failure of duty of care and that harmful and potentially injurious acts were wilfully committed against the UK population as follows:

● No cost/benefit or weighing of harmful v beneficial effects. The public were not given fair warning that these considerations had not been carried out and that, in effect, the public health was being risked with the potential to cause more harm than good socially, healthwise and economically.

● Clear evidence that the public were deliberately frightened and misled over the true threat of the virus to make them comply with orders.

● The public were denied fair scrutiny of Covid 19 policy via emergency legislation that bypassed a democratic process of rigorous Parliamentary debate.

● Experts and opinion formers who held contrarian views were prevented from airing these views in parliament and were actively censored throughout the MSM. A secret surveillance unit in Whitehall was set up to monitor and spy on dissenting voices and censor dissenting platforms. 

● Number 10 press briefings displayed unbalanced representation through slides, datasets and transcripts. 

● Failure to warn the public of the limitations of modelling to forecast the nature and course of a pandemic, especially when carried out by a single or very limited number of establishments.

● Failure to scrutinise the warp speed emergency authorisation of novel gene therapies as vaccines, exposing the public to inadequately tested products with minimum quality control.

● Constant and insistent claims that these ‘vaccines’ were safe and effective’; prevented transmission; provided better protection than natural immunity.

● The promulgation that it was a public duty to be vaccinated.

● Failure to properly scrutinise the MHRA adverse event reports linked to Covid vaccines.

● Failure to investigate the marked and statistically significant increase in excess deaths.

There are possibly more examples but the focus here is on those for which we have the most clear and damning evidence.

The Covid Inquiry is ignoring what might allow us, in Lady Hallett’s own words, ‘to learn lessons’ about the abuse of power. By holding an inquiry prior to investigating to what extent the public were deceived (legally or illegally), there is little chance that ‘society will learn from the pandemic and better prepare for further epidemics’.

June 28, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Pandemic Leaders Were Biodefense Puppets and Profiteers

By Debbie Lerman | Brownstone Institute | June 26, 2023

Scandalous incompetence. Profound stupidity. Astounding errors. This is how many analysts – including Dr. Vinay Prasad, Dr. Scott Atlas, and popular Substack commentator eugyppius – explain how leading public health experts could prescribe so many terrible pandemic response policies.

And it’s true: the so-called experts certainly have made themselves look foolish over the last three years: Public health leaders like Rochelle Walensky and Anthony Fauci make false claims, or contradict themselves repeatedly, on subjects related to the pandemic response, while leading scientists, like Peter Hotez in the US and Christian Drosten in Germany, are equally susceptible to such flip-flops and lies. Then there are the internationally renowned medical researchers, like Eric Topol, who repeatedly commit obvious errors in interpreting Covid-related research studies. [ref]

All of these figures publicly and aggressively promoted anti-public health policies, including universal masking, social distancing, mass testing and quarantining of healthy people, lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

It seems like an open-and-shut case: Dumb policies, dumb people in charge of those policies.

This might be true in a few individual cases of public health or medical leaders who really are incapable of understanding even high school level science. However, if we look at leading pandemic public health and medical experts as a group – a group consisting of the most powerful, widely published, and well-paid researchers and scientists in the world – that simple explanation sounds much less convincing.

Even if you believe that most medical researchers are shills for pharmaceutical companies and that scientists rarely break new ground anymore, I think you’d be hard-pressed to claim that they lack basic analytical skills or a solid educational background in the areas they’ve studied. Most doctors and scientists with advanced degrees know how to analyze simple scientific documents and understand basic data.

Additionally, those doctors and public health professionals who were deemed experts during the pandemic were also clever enough to have climbed the academic, scientific, and/or government ladders to the highest levels.

They might be unscrupulous, sycophantic, greedy, or power-mongering. You might think they make bad moral or ethical decisions. But it defies logic to say that every single one of them understands simple scientific data less than, say, someone like me or you. In fact, I find that to be a facile, superficial judgment that does not get to the root cause of their seemingly stupid, incompetent behavior.

Returning to some specific examples, I would argue that it is irrational to conclude, as Dr. Prasad did, that someone like Dr. Topol, Founder and Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, who has published over 1,300 peer-reviewed articles and is one of the top 10 most cited researchers in medicine [ref] cannot read research papers “at a high level.” And it is equally unlikely that Anthony Fauci, who managed to ascend and remain atop the highest scientific perch in the federal government for many decades, controlling billions of dollars in research grants [ref], was too dumb to know that masks don’t stop viruses.

There must, therefore, be a different reason why all the top pro-lockdown scientists and public health experts – in perfect lockstep – suddenly started (and continue to this day) to misread studies and advocate policies that they had claimed in the past were unnecessary, making themselves look like fools.

Public health experts were messengers for the biodefense response

The most crucial single fact to know and remember when trying to understand the craziness of Covid times is this:

The public health experts were not responsible for pandemic response policy. The military-intelligence-biodefense leadership was in charge.

In previous articles, I examined in great detail the government documents that show how standard tenets of public health pandemic management were abruptly and secretly thrown out during Covid. The most startling switch was the replacement of the public health agencies by the National Security Council and Department of Homeland Security at the helm of pandemic policy and planning.

As part of the secret switch, all communications – defined in every previous pandemic planning document as the responsibility of the CDC – were taken over by the National Security Council under the auspices of the White House Task Force. The CDC was not even allowed to hold its own press conferences!

As a Senate report from December 2022 notes:

From March through June 2020, CDC was not permitted to conduct public briefings, despite multiple requests by the agency and CDC media requests were “rarely cleared.” HHS stated that by early April 2020, “after several attempts to get approvals,” its Office of Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs “stopped asking” the White House “for a while.” (p. 8)

When public health and medical experts blanketed the airwaves and Internet with “recommendations” urging universal masking, mass testing and quarantining of asymptomatic people, vaccine mandates, and other anti-public health policies – or when they promoted obviously flawed studies that supported the quarantine-until-vaccine biodefense agenda – they were not doing so because they were dumb, incompetent, or misguided.

They were performing the role that the leaders of the national security/biodefense response gave them: to be the trusted public face that made people believe quarantine-until-vaccine was a legitimate public health response.

Why did public health leaders go along with the biodefense agenda?

We have to imagine ourselves in the position of public health and medical experts at top government positions when the intelligence-military-biodefense network took over the pandemic response.

What would you do if you were a government employee, or a scientist dependent on government grants, and you were told that the quarantine-until-vaccine policy was actually the only way to deal with this particular engineered potential bioweapon?

How would you behave if an unprecedented event in human history happened on your watch: an engineered virus designed as a potential bioweapon was spreading around the world, and the people who designed it told you that terrifying the entire population into locking down and waiting for a vaccine was the only way to stop it from killing many millions?

More mundanely, if your position and power depended on going along with whatever the powers-that-be in the NSC and DHS told you to do – if your job and livelihood were on the line – would you go against the narrative and risk losing it all?

And, finally, in a more venal vane: what if you stood to gain a lot more money and/or power by advocating for policies that might not be the gold standard of public health, but that you told yourself could bring about major innovations (vaccines/countermeasures) that would save humanity from future pandemics?

We know how the most prominent Covid “experts” answered those questions. Not because they were dumb, but because they had a lot to lose and/or a lot to gain by going along with the biodefense narrative – and they were told millions would die if they failed to do so.

Why understanding the motives of public health leaders during Covid is so important

Paradoxically, deeming public health experts stupid and incompetent actually reinforces the consensus narrative: that lockdowns and vaccines were part of a public health plan. In this reading, the response may have been terrible, or it may have gone awry, but it was still just a stupid public health plan designed by incompetent public health leaders.

Such a conclusion leads to calls for misguided and necessarily ineffectual solutions: Even if we replaced every single HHS employee or defunded the HHS or even the WHO altogether, we would not solve the problem and would be poised to repeat the entire pandemic fiasco all over again.

The only way to avoid such repetition is to recognize the Covid catastrophe for what it was: an international counterterrorism effort focused myopically on lockdowns and vaccines, to the exclusion of all traditional and time-tested public health protocols.

We need to wake up to the fact that, since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (if not earlier), we have ceded control of the agencies that are supposed to be in charge of public health to an international military-intelligence-pharmaceutical cartel.

This “public-private partnership” of bioterrorism experts and vaccine developers is not interested in public health at all, except as a cover for their very secret and very lucrative biowarfare research and countermeasure development.

Public health was shunted aside during the Covid pandemic, and the public health leaders were used as trusted “experts” to convey biowarfare edicts to the population. Their cooperation does not reflect stupidity or incompetence. Making such claims contributes to the coverup of the much more sinister and dangerous transfer of power that their seemingly foolish behavior was meant to hide.

June 27, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

UN expert: US treatment of Guantanamo prison inmates inhuman and degrading, Washington must apologize

Press TV – June 26, 2023

A United Nations expert has slammed the treatment of inmates at Guantanamo Bay prison by the United States government as inhuman and degrading, calling on Washington to apologize and provide reparations.

UN Special Rapporteur Fionnuala Ni Aolain made the remarks in a report released on Monday after her visit to the US military prison, which is situated on Cuban soil.

“I observed that after two decades of custody, the suffering of those detained is profound, and it’s ongoing,” Ni Aolain said, adding that mistreatment of inmates at Guantanamo prison amounted to violation of detainees’ fundamental rights and freedoms.

According to Ni Aolain, the detainees, who have been there for close to two decades after being seized as suspects following September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, have endured a litany of abuse, including forced cell extractions as well as poor medical and mental health care.

Ni Aolain, who is the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, added that the detainees have also had inadequate access to family either by in-person visits or calls.

“The totality of all of these practices and omissions … amounts in my assessment to ongoing cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under international law,” she said.

The UN special rapporteur added that Washington has so far done nothing to address the rights violations related to the detainees, including their secret seizure and transfer or rendition to Guantanamo in the early 2000s and the extensive torture methods used by US operatives in the first years following the September 11 attacks.

“The systematic rendition and torture at multiple (including black) sites and thereafter at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba … comprise the single most significant barrier to fulfilling victims’ rights to justice and accountability,” the UN special rapporteur said, adding that accountability includes apologies, full remedy and reparations for “all victims.”

Stressing that closure of the prison “remains a priority,” the UN expert said, “The US government must ensure accountability for all violations of international law, both for victims of its counterterrorism practices, present and former detainees, and victims of terrorism.”

The UN expert said, “Every single detainee I met with lives with the unrelenting harms that follow from systematic practices of rendition, torture and arbitrary detention,” citing “the undue use of restraints and near constant surveillance as current shortcomings.”

The Guantanamo Bay prison was set up in 2002 by then US President George W. Bush and held about 800 inmates at its peak before the number started to shrink. Some 30 prisoners are still languishing there.

President Joe Biden had promised to close the facility but has yet to present a plan to do so. Human rights advocates are increasingly frustrated with Biden for failing to deliver on his pledge to close the prison, leaving inmates languishing in the notorious offshore detention center with no end in sight.

June 27, 2023 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Washington Loves War Criminals

Madeleine Albright to be honored with a post office in her name

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • JUNE 27, 2023

It is generally accepted in government circles as well as in the media that covers Washington politics that both major political parties now embrace foreign and national security policies that are both aggressive and brutally conducted, essentially products of the so-called neoconservatives, or neocons for short. Ron Unz has recently written a lengthy 6500 word article describing how the neocons rose to power, beginning with their relatively humble origins as a gathering of frequently radicalized Jewish students at the City College of New York in the 1930s. Their disenchantment with Stalin turned them away from the Soviet communist model and they frequently self-described as Trotskyites or other fringe elements on the political left. Some of the founders of the movement later elaborated how they were in many cases “Liberals who had been mugged by reality” as they drifted in a conservative direction to gain political power. Ironically, or perhaps as a calculated strategy, Unz notes how many of the young Jewish neocons retained their “leftist” social attitudes even as they drifted to the right over national security, a posture that gave them a foot in the door of both major political parties.

Unz describes the neocons’ utter ruthlessness in their climb to power, starting in the Reagan Administration, where they obtained key positions in the Pentagon and in the national security structure. I personally witnessed some of their presence and ambitions in the 1980s when I was in the CIA base in Istanbul. They would show up at the Consulate General in small groups drawn from the Pentagon or under the aegis of the American Jewish Committee and other similar organizations to enter into discussions with the diplomatic personnel as well as Turkish officials. They were frequently agitating for military action against Iran, Iraq and Syria and were always apologists for Israel. When Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard was arrested in 1985 and then convicted in 1987 Jewish organizations were thick on the ground arguing that he was mentally unbalanced and could not possibly be a spy for good friend and close ally Israel. One of our Consuls General bought into the argument to such an extent that he tried to sell it to the Turks, who were not buying it. I had a heated exchange with him regarding what he was ignorantly peddling, to no avail.

It is not as if the neocon reckless definition of “national security” is consequence free, as we are currently seeing in the war going on largely driven by its imperatives in Ukraine. Ron Unz had preceded his dissection of the neocon “rise to power” with an article entitled “Dislodging the Neocons, Difficult but Necessary.” Unz describes how the neocons at one level have been completely successful. “After having controlled American foreign policy for more than three decades, promoting their allies and protégés and purging their opponents,” the adherents of the view that the United States must absolutely dominate the world militarily and set the rules of behavior for everyone now is agreed upon by nearly the entire political establishment, including both political parties as well as the leading thinktanks, lobbying groups and media. By now, there are hardly any prominent figures in either party who adhere to a significantly different line, which has made “antiwar” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard so attractive to some of us. More to the point, over the last two decades, the “national security focused neoconservatives have largely joined forces with the economically-focused neoliberals, forming a unified ideological block that represents the political worldview of the elites running both American parties.”

Unz has recognized how the neocons have infiltrated both political parties and their foreign policy vision has been adopted by all, with some like Victoria Nuland posing as Democrats while others continue to pretend to be Republicans. To put it another way, progressives in the Democratic Party do not feel particularly threatened by the neoconservatives as most neocons are conventional Jewish liberals on social issues, which are what is most important to Democrats. This all means that legislators and government officials can all agree on the necessity to maintain a brutal foreign policy based on military force since it has nothing to do with abortions, race or gender issues.

I recently witnessed a manifestation of this seriously skewed and dangerous world view in my own congressional district in Virginia. Our Democratic Party congresswoman Jennifer Wexton is functionally as woke as can be. When she was first elected back in 2018 and moved into her office in the following January, one of her first gestures was to hang a transgender pride flag outside her door. Since that time, she has been an active supporter of the usual Democratic Party endorsed woke catalog of grievances. She is certainly a good fit in a county in which a biological boy who chose to identify and dress like a girl exploited high school gender neutral policies to rape one genuine girl in a unisex school toilet before being sent to another high school rather than expelled and prosecuted where he raped a second girl. One of the girl’s fathers was silenced when he sought to protest against the policies at a School Board meeting.

Wexton has now introduced into Congress a bill which will change the name of our local post office, which is currently named after the town it is located in, to honor Madeleine Albright, the recently deceased former UN Ambassador and Secretary of State under Bill Clinton. My immediate reaction to news of the bill, which will likely pass easily through Congress as it is unimportant to most legislators, is that I would not want to enter into a building that honors an unindicted war criminal. Indeed, I will not do so. I drafted up a short dissent from the move supported by an account of just how Albright was a war criminal, including her comment that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to her and Clinton’s sanctions were “worth it,” and posted it on Facebook, where the administrators immediately removed it.

Wexton, of course, praises Albright as if she were the greatest US Secretary of State since George Marshall. She enthuses in support of her bill that “Secretary Madeleine Albright was a fearless trailblazer for women and a devoted public servant who touched the lives of so many whom she taught, mentored, and worked with… Her relentless defense of democracy and advocacy for human rights, inspired by her own lived experience fleeing Nazi persecution, made her an icon here at home and around the globe.” Citing “Fleeing Nazis?” What could be a better conventional endorsement? And it is a lie. Albright and her family survived the Second World War comfortably and left Czechoslovakia on their own volition in 1948, when she was eleven, long after the conflict had ended.

And that faux glorification is precisely where the hypocrisy of most of the sanctimonious congressional parasites comes in. Here we have an ultra-liberal congresswoman promoting purely on partisan political grounds someone whose malignant and even criminal career is readily discernible, to include also her role in enabling US intervention in the Balkans, sometimes referred to as “Madeleine’s war.” And then there were Bill Clinton’s diversionary missile attacks on the Sudan and Afghanistan and the expansion of NATO contrary to agreements made with Russia. Albright also ignored direct, emotional requests by the US Ambassador to Kenya that the embassy was vulnerable to attack by terrorists and needed an urgent security upgrade. The embassy in Nairobi and in neighboring Tanzania were subsequently bombed in 1998, killing 12 American diplomats and 200 Africans.

I would point out that going beyond the dead Iraqi children, Albright was borderline deranged about the neocon-ish belief in the righteousness of the applicability of US power as a solution for every problem. When demanding the US military intervention in Bosnia she reportedly turned to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, who was reluctant to get involved, and asked “What’s the point of you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can’t use it?” And then there is her famous quote justifying America’s lead role in the world, saying “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.” Excuse me, but what sanctimonious and ultimately malicious bullshit that is!

In any event, rather than spend taxpayer money to rename a perfectly functional public building after an unindictable war criminal, Congresswoman Wexton might consider reaching into her own pocket to purchase a small commemorative plaque that can be placed in an inconspicuous location, possibly in front of her own home since she is so interested in cultivating the legend of one of America’s “finest” public servants. It would look real nice there, I am sure, and I wouldn’t have to see it when I go to pick up my mail.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

June 27, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | | Leave a comment

UN Documents Rampant Torture of Civilians by Ukrainian Security Forces

Sputnik – 27.06.2023

The United Nations has recorded a significant increase in law violations by Ukrainian security forces since the start of Russia’s special military operation, the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) said in a report on Tuesday.

“Since 24 February 2022, OHCHR has documented a significant increase in violations of the right to liberty and security of person by Ukrainian security forces. Out of the overall number of such cases, OHCHR documented 75 cases 92 of arbitrary detention of civilians (17 women, 57 men and 1 boy), some of which also amounted to enforced disappearances, mostly perpetrated by law enforcement authorities or the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” the report read.

“Of further concern, OHCHR has documented the arrests of several civilians involved in distribution of humanitarian aid in territory ‘occupied’ by the Russian Federation,” the report read.

On May 30, a Russian law enforcement source told Sputnik that the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has opened torture chambers to get testimony from people who had cooperated with the Russian authorities while the city was under Russia’s control between March and November 2022.

The source said the torture rooms were created at two district police departments, Dneprovsky and Komsomolsky. While mostly Ukrainians work at the Dneprovsky department, locals are not allowed into the second one, as only foreign mercenaries speaking English, Polish and Georgian work there, the source said.

Vladimir Malina, a former business assistant who decided to stay in Kherson after the withdrawal of the Russian troops, died in the torture chamber of the Dneprovsky police department.

“[He] was kept in the torture chamber of the Dneprovsky district department, [he was] brutally beaten, the next day, he died in the cell. In order to hide his death, for three days, two [former] employees of the Russian humanitarian center [in Kherson], Roman Gavrilyuk and Igor Gurov, who were detained with him, were tortured and forced to write an explanation that Vladimir Malina was released together with them,” the source said.

Several people were tortured to death in these chambers, including a nurse and an investigator, the source said, adding that all of them are recognized as missing.
Besides, the SBU uses a network of agents to identify and arrest people who had previously cooperated with Russia.

Russia established control over Kherson soon after the launch of the military operation in Ukraine. In October, the republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, as well as the Russian-controlled parts of the Ukrainian regions of Kherson and Zaporozhye were incorporated into Russia following referendums.

In November, the Russian Defense Ministry announced the complete withdrawal of Russian troops and hardware from the right bank of the Dnepr River in the Kherson Region, citing the need to build up defenses on the left bank. Soon after that, the Ukrainian forces entered Kherson.

June 27, 2023 Posted by | War Crimes | | Leave a comment

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