A clandestine UK Government unit dubbed the Counter-Disinformation Unit (CDU) has been implicated in a troubling endeavor to curb and control online discussions about the controversial Covid-19 lockdown policies. The covert operation allegedly involved the collaboration of social media companies in a strategic bid to quell supposed domestic “threats.”
According to revelations from Freedom of Information requests and data protection requests from The Telegraph, posts critical of Covid-19 restrictions, including those questioning mass vaccination of children, were systematically removed.
Social media companies are now under scrutiny following allegations that their technologies were deployed to thwart the wide circulation or promotion of posts tagged as potentially problematic by the CDU or its Cabinet Office equivalent.
The files revealed the surreptitious monitoring of critics of the Government’s Covid plans. Artificial intelligence firms were reportedly enlisted by the government to search social media platforms, flagging any discussions opposing vaccine passports.
In a startling revelation, the BBC was implicated in clandestine government policy discussions regarding this alleged misinformation.
The CDU, hosted by the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS), operated a “trusted flagger” system with major social media companies. This mechanism expedited requests for content removal. The CDU, still operational, was formed in 2019, initially focusing on the European elections, later shifting its attention to the pandemic.
Critics, including MPs and freedom of speech campaigners, have labeled the revelations as “truly chilling” and a strategy tantamount to “censoring British citizens” — a tactic likened to those of the Chinese Communist Party.
“Any attempt by governments to shut down legitimate debate is hugely concerning, but to discover that DCMS actively sought to censor the views of those who were speaking up for children’s welfare is truly chilling,” said Miriam Cates, a Conservative MP to The Telegraph.
A government spokesman refuted the allegations, stating that the unit was designed to track narratives and trends using publicly available information to safeguard public health and national security. The spokesman insisted that the unit never monitored individuals and had a strict policy against referring journalists and MPs to social media platforms.
A two-year-old Palestinian toddler has been severely wounded after being shot in the head by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank yesterday.
According to the Wafa news agency, the toddler was shot in the head while sitting in a car with his 40-year-old father in front of their home.
The toddler was flown to Israel’s Sheba hospital by helicopter and is currently in a critical condition, while his father, who was shot in the arm, was driven to a hospital in Ramallah.
Local Palestinian activist, Bilal Tamimi, told Wafa that the toddler was shot in the head as a result of a raid imposed by Israeli occupation forces on the village.
The army said it was opening an investigation into the shooting, saying it “regrets harm to noncombatants” and that it does “everything in its power to prevent such incidents.”
Meanwhile, Naji Tamimi, the head of the Nabi Saleh Village Council, said Israeli soldiers locked the iron gate at the village entrance and proceeded to invade several neighbourhoods and fire live rounds at protesters.
Tension has been escalating across the occupied West Bank for months, amid Israeli raids on Palestinian towns.
More than 155 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli occupation forces this year, including 26 children, according to Palestinian figures. Last year was deemed the deadliest for the occupied West Bank since 2015, but this year’s death toll has already exceeded the number of those killed in 2022.
The family of a 24-year-old man who died from complications of COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis today filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), which oversaw the development and distribution of the drug under Operation Warp Speed.
Ray Flores, the attorney representing the estate of George Watts Jr. filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the DOD and Lloyd Austin III in his official capacity as defense secretary.
The lawsuit alleges the DOD engaged in “willful misconduct” by continuing to exclusively allow distribution of the stockpiled version of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine that had been authorized for emergency use even after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted full approval to a different vaccine, Comirnaty.
According to the complaint, the DOD “capitalized on a quintessential ‘bait and switch’ fraud,” using the fact that Comirnaty was FDA-approved to bolster its claims that the vaccine authorized for emergency use was “safe and effective,” in a move that intentionally misled millions of Americans.
The DOD did this despite being fully aware that drugs granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) cannot legally be marketed as “safe and effective” because the FDA standard for EUA is only that drugs “may be effective.”
That means the DOD intentionally, without justification and with disregard for the risks, misrepresented an experimental vaccine as “safe and effective” when it could not legally use that terminology, the lawsuit states.
As a result, the lawsuit alleges, George Watts Jr. was misled into taking the investigational vaccine and he died as a result.
Attorney Michael Baum told The Defender in an email:
“This groundbreaking case filed by George Watts Jr.’s surviving family may provide a path for other Covid vaccine-injured individuals to seek recovery for their injuries.
“The Watts family’s complaint shines a light on the willful steps the Department of Defense took that led to Mr. Watts’ Pfizer-vaccine-induced death from myocarditis. Most people are unaware of the Department of Defense’s directing the development and distribution of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccine …
“The DOD’s actions led to Mr. Watts’ improper injection with the unapproved vaccine. The Watts family’s case provides an opportunity for a wider public awareness of how the Covid vaccine sausage got made under DOD’s irresponsible guidance and the tragic results of that conduct for Mr. Watts and unfortunately much of the American public.”
Watts waited for a vaccine he thought was ‘safe and effective’
Watts was a student at Corning Community College in Corning, New York, when in the summer of 2021, the school mandated the COVID-19 vaccine for all students attending fall classes. The mandate was part of the mandate at the State University of New York (SUNY), a network of 64 colleges and universities.
Watts waited to get vaccinated until the FDA “approved” the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine and got his first dose at Guthrie Robert Packer Hospital in Pennsylvania on Aug. 27, 2021. He was administered the EUA Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
The FDA approved the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine on Aug. 23, 2021, but the DOD didn’t make it available.
Despite experiencing side effects from the first dose, Watts understood the vaccine to be “safe and effective,” so he took a second dose at the same location on Sept. 17, 2021.
Following the second dose, Watts experienced more severe side effects, including numbness in his extremities, difficulty grasping and holding objects, a sinus infection, cough and sensitivity to light. He visited the ER at the Guthrie hospital on Oct. 12, 2021, also complaining of a lump on the left side of his neck.
The hospital diagnosed him with sinusitis and prescribed an antibiotic. Watts returned to the ER on October 19, 2021, concerned that he was not improving.
After that, his health continued to decline.
On Oct. 27, 2021, at home with his mother, Watts began coughing up blood and then became unresponsive. His mother called 911 and administered CPR.
Watts was taken to the ER where he was found to be in cardiac arrest and subsequently died. He had no previous medical history that could explain his sudden death. Watts also tested negative for COVID-19 in a post-mortem test.
The medical examiner ruled his cause of death to be “complications of COVID-19 vaccine-related myocarditis.” His death certificate also listed COVID-19 vaccine-related myocarditis as the sole immediate cause of death.
An independent physician, Dr. Sanjay Verma, also attested the vaccine was the proximate cause of death as alleged in the complaint.
PREP Act protects vaccine producers, not vaccine-injured people
The CICP was established under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness(PREP) Act, which protects “covered persons” — such as pharmaceutical companies, or the DOD in this case — from liability for injuries sustained from “countermeasures,” such as vaccines and medications, administered during a public health emergency.
The only exception to PREP Act immunity is if a countermeasure-related injury is caused by “willful misconduct” by a covered person or entity.
Since the start of the pandemic, people claiming injuries related to COVID-19 vaccines and other countermeasures submitted 11,686 requests for compensation.
Of those, only 23 have been declared eligible for compensation. Most of those are undergoing a “medical benefits review” to determine payment. Since last month, when the CICP started making payments to COVID-19 vaccine-injured people, it has made four payments — amounting to a total of $8,592.52. Three of the claims were for myocarditis.
Watts’ family filed a request for benefits with the CICP in August 2022. They received no determination from the CICP within the 240-day period in which the CICP is supposed to respond to complaints.
As a result, to seek compensation for the loss of Watts’ life, his family is suing the DOD.
The DOD, Operation Warp Speed and the COVID vaccines
In January 2020, then-Health Secretary Alex M. Azar of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declared a public health emergency for COVID-19.
“(1) the existence of a serious or life-threatening disease; (2) a product ‘may be effective’ in treating or preventing it; (3) there is ‘no adequate, approved, and available alternative to the product for diagnosing, preventing or treating such disease or condition;’ (4) a risk-benefit analysis that measures both the known and potential benefits of the product against the known and potential risks of the product is positive; and (5) that the patient’s option to accept or decline the product is protected through informed consent.”
On May 15, 2020, the Trump White House announced Operation Warp Speed — a partnership between the White House and the DOD to accelerate the development, production and distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine.
Two months later, the DOD signed a contract with Pfizer to manufacture hundreds of millions of doses of its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, guaranteeing that any vaccine produced under the contract would be protected under the PREP Act and therefore not subject to liability.
The FDA issued an EUA for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine on Dec. 11, 2020, and Army Gen. Gustave F. Perna, Operation Warp Speed chief operating officer, announced the vaccine would be rapidly distributed across the country.
Drugs fully approved by the FDA must be found to be “safe, pure, and potent,” but EUA drugs are held to a lower standard — they are required only to demonstrate that they “may be effective,” according to the FDA.
But Perna and his boss, Austin III, conveyed the message that the EUA vaccines were “safe and effective,” and urged the healthcare community to do the same, in order to “counter widespread misinformation” about the vaccines, the lawsuit alleges.
After the FDA approved the Comirnaty vaccine, the DOD did not initiate its production and distribution but instead continued to distribute existing Pfizer EUA products.
As a result, although Watts waited for the COVID-19 vaccine to be FDA-approved, he still received a version of the vaccine that had not been FDA-approved as “safe and effective.”
According to the lawsuit, the DOD blurred the line between the two legally distinct vaccines, promoting the idea that the COVID-19 vaccine was FDA-approved and therefore “safe and effective” — while administering the vaccine that was only “authorized,” and therefore not legally allowed to be described as “safe.”
The DOD knowingly blurred this line, the lawsuit alleges, because it had already been found liable for violating informed consent and of imposing an experimental vaccine. In the 2004 case of Doe v. Rumsfeld, et al., a federal court ruled the DOD could not mandate the EUA anthrax vaccine for service members because forcing them to take an experimental vaccine violated their right to informed consent.
That ruling stated that absent informed consent or a presidential waiver, “The United States cannot demand that members of the armed forces also serve as guinea pigs for experimental drugs.”
The current lawsuit further alleges that the DOD knowingly deceived Watts and other Americans for the purpose of mass human experimentation, which violates protections provided by the Nuremberg Code.
According to the complaint, the DOD committed “willful misconduct,” having “deliberately misled Mr. Watts and the public at large by blurring the critical distinction between EUA and fully licensed vaccines,” which would nullify the protections afforded the DOD under the PREP Act.
It concludes that Watts died because he believed he was receiving safe and effective vaccines, but in fact “received the deadly ones.”
The lawsuit seeks “general, special, compensatory and punitive damages.”
Commenting on the significance of the case, Kim Mack Rosenberg, acting outside general counsel for CHD, told The Defender :
“The PREP Act purports to provide an extraordinary liability shield to the government, manufacturers, distributors, and others, related to COVID-19 vaccines and other so-called countermeasures covered by the act. The Watts complaint is an important and unprecedented challenge to that liability shield.
“The complaint threads the act’s needle by pointing the finger squarely at Operation Warp Speed leadership while raising critical legal challenges to the act’s protection, particularly where, as is alleged in the Watts complaint, a defendant like the Department of Defense has engaged in willful misconduct.
“But the complaint does more than that. It will educate about the PREP Act’s far reach, actions by the DOD during the ‘state of emergency,’ and the general lack of accountability for entities and individuals protected by the PREP Act.
“The public needs to understand that this act intentionally allows potentially bad actors to go unpunished. Here, a young man lost his life, and the government has remained silent, hiding behind a legal shield.
“That is not justice for George Watts or anyone else.”
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.
The quest to develop and refine technologically advanced means to commit mass homicide continues on, with Pentagon tacticians ever eager to make the military leaner and more lethal. Drone swarms already exist, and as insect-facsimile drones are marketed and produced, we can expect bug drone swarms to appear soon in the skies above places where suspected “bad guys” are said to reside—along with their families and neighbors. Following the usual trajectory, it is only a matter of time before surveillance bug drones are “upgraded” for combat, making it easier than ever to kill human beings by whoever wishes to do so, whether military personnel, factional terrorists, or apolitical criminals. The development of increasingly lethal and “creative” means to commit homicide forges ahead not because anyone needs it but because it is generously funded by the U.S. Congress under the assumption that anything labeled a tool of “national defense” is, by definition, good.
To some there may seem to be merits to the argument from necessity for drones, given the ongoing military recruitment crisis. There are many good reasons why people wish not to enlist in the military anymore, but rather than review the missteps taken and counterproductive measures implemented in the name of defense throughout the twenty-first century, administrators ignore the most obvious answer to the question why young people are less enthusiastic than ever before to sign their lives away. Why did the Global War on Terror spread from Afghanistan and Iraq to engulf other countries as well? Critics have offered persuasive answers to this question, above all, that killing, torturing, maiming, and terrorizing innocent people led to an outpouring of sympathy for groups willing to resist the invaders of their lands. As a direct consequence of U.S. military intervention, Al Qaeda franchises such as ISIS emerged, proliferated, and spread. Yet the military plows ahead undeterred in its professed mission to eliminate “the bad guys,” with the killers either oblivious or somehow unaware that they are the primary creators of “the bad guys.”
Meanwhile, the logic of automation has been openly and enthusiastically embraced as the way of the future for the military, as in so many other realms. Who needs soldiers anyway, given that they can and will be replaced by machines? Just as grocery stores today often have more self-checkout stations than human cashiers, the military has been replacing combat pilots with drone operators for years. Taking human beings altogether out of the killing loop is the inevitable next step, because war architects focus on lethality, as though it were the only measure of military success. Removing “the human factor” from warfare will increase lethality and may decrease, if not eliminate, problems such as PTSD. But at what price?
Never a very self-reflective lot, war architects have even less inclination than ever before to consider whether their interventions have done more harm than good because of the glaring case of Afghanistan. After twenty years of attempting to eradicate the Taliban, the U.S. military finally retreated in 2021, leaving the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (as they now refer to themselves) in power, just as they were in 2001. By focusing on how slick and “neat” the latest and greatest implements of techno-homicide are, those who craft U.S. military policy can divert attention from their abject incompetence at actually winning a war or protecting, rather than annihilating, innocent people.
For decades now, military officers have expressed outright disdain toward those who dare to broach the topic of civilian casualties. When asked about the Iraqi death toll after the 1991 Gulf War, General Colin Powell infamously muttered, “That’s not really a number I’m terribly interested in.” General Tommy Franks, when asked a version of the same question after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, similarly quipped, “You know, we don’t do body counts.”
Once a war has been waged, “rules of engagement” are specified by military officers themselves, which is one of the reasons why the killing of civilians seen throughout the “War on Terror” has occurred wherever and whenever wars have been fought. In the twenty-first century, however, the problem of designating who is “fair game” for slaughter is far more serious, for the assassination of suspects has been rebranded as targeted killing and claimed by the highest authorities of the U.S. government, including the Department of Justice, to be perfectly permissible, even in “areas outside active hostilities,” i.e., beyond war zones. That the Barack Obama administration somehow persuaded nearly the entire nation to believe that it was not only acceptable but in fact laudable to execute U.S. citizen suspects located outside a war zone without so much as an indictment, much less a court trial, was a remarkable accomplishment, and in some ways unbelievable.
Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden followed the precedent set by Obama in radically expanding the use of lethal drones to target suspects on hit lists drawn up by their own administrations. The normalization of assassination achieved by the Obama administration was well illustrated by Trump’s authorization of the intentional and premeditated execution of an Iranian general located in Baghdad, General Qasem Soleimani (on January 3, 2020), as though this were a matter of business as usual. Indeed, Trump gleefully bragged about having executed a high-profile public figure using a lethal drone, effectively asserting the right to target named foreign officials at the pleasure of the U.S. president. By openly assassinating General Soleimani, Trump essentially put any leader who dares to demur from U.S. policy on notice that they, too, can be eliminated through the push of a button at the caprice of the U.S. executive.
Most of the thousands of victims of drone strikes have been unnamed persons (of unknown identity at the time of their demise) located in areas where “unlawful enemy combatants” were said to hide. After having claimed that they had killed yet another “senior Al Qaeda leader” in northwest Syria on May 3, 2023, officials at the Pentagon emended their report, acknowledging that the victim, identified by locals and his family as Lotfi Hassan Misto, a 56-year-old shepherd, may not have been the “bad guy” they had been pursuing after all. To soften the blow, a Pentagon spokesperson suggested that Misto was nonetheless somehow “associated” with Al Qaeda, a vague assertion backed by no evidence and in fact denied by area residents and effectively refuted by terrorist experts who noted the highly significant absence of jihadist group chatter in the aftermath of the event.
It is most plausible that on May 3, 2023, the “savvy” techno-killers destroyed yet another family like that of Zemari Ahmadi, who, along with nine other people, including seven children, was annihilated by the U.S. military in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 29, 2021, in a drone strike initially touted by the public relations team at the Pentagon as the successful neutralization of a terrorist attack. Ahmadi, an aid worker, had the misfortune of driving a white Toyota Corolla, which someone in the “intelligence” community had determined was being used by a “bad guy” to plan and perpetrate an attack on the airport. The usual confirmation bias kicked in as Ahmadi was followed around all day by surveillance drones while he performed actions interpreted as “suspicious” by those looking to “get some.”
After the fact of their demise, the victims of U.S. military interventions are essentially fictionalized in the minds of those who ended their lives. This tendency is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than by Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s response to a question (posed by Errol Morris in his 2003 documentary film, The Fog of War) about “mistakes made” by any commander during the prosecution of a war:
“He has made mistakes in the application of military power. He has killed people, unnecessarily, his own troops or other troops, through mistakes, through errors of judgment.”
Note McNamara’s stunning omission of civilians among the possible victims of commanders’ mistakes.
The fictionalization of civilian victims of drone strikes is especially troubling in cases where the U.S. government offers no explanation of what transpired when named persons such as Abdulrahman al-Awlaki and Mamana Bibi are erased from existence. Abdulrahman was the 16-year-old son of suspected Al Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki, and Mamana Bibi was a 68-year-old grandmother “taken out” by a U.S. drone while picking okra all alone in her family’s fields. In many cases there has not even been a report of any U.S. missiles having been fired when incinerated corpses are discovered by locals on the ground.
The capacity for high-level decision makers in the military to deny any and all responsibility for what have been decried by the public as war crimes has been amply illustrated in case after case. For example, the torture at Abu Ghraib prison was blamed on a handful of “bad apple” low-level grunts, when in fact they were acting in accordance with their interpretations of what they were asked to do. The problem in such cases is two-fold. First, low-level soldiers are required to obey the orders of their superior officers. Second, when officers or bureaucrats redefine key terminology, such as the use of the neologistic “enhanced interrogation techniques” in place of “torture,” which most everyone seems to agree is wrong, then no one should be surprised when atrocity ensues. Similarly, “rules of engagement” said to permit the targeting of any person present (as in Fallujah, Iraq in 2004) will naturally generate civilian deaths. Again, when Reuters journalists were killed in 2007 by soldiers in an Apache helicopter hovering above New Baghdad, film footage of the event made public by Wikileaks (Collateral Murder) was met with the horror and outrage of people all around the globe. The Pentagon concluded its investigation of the killings with the expected announcement that no crimes were committed on that day.
The CIA ran drone operations outside areas of active hostilities for years (most likely to avoid congressional oversight), and it appears that they continue to do so in places such as Somalia, where seven civilians, including three children were killed by a “suspected” U.S. drone strike on January 30, 2023, not claimed by the Pentagon. This is a case where irrefutable evidence of homicide, dead people destroyed by a missile and discovered by bereft family members and friends, has not prompted U.S. administrators to accept any responsibility whatsoever for their actions, no doubt under the “get out of jail free” (a.k.a. “state secrets privilege”) pretext according to which the publication of facts somehow undermines national security.
What facts undermine are spurious claims by warmakers to be accomplishing anything worthwhile for anyone but death industry profiteers in running this nonstop killing machine. Originally the marketing line for unmanned rather than manned combat planes was that the new technology would save troops’ lives. But by using lethal drones, and expanding their use to places where there were no U.S. military personnel on the ground to protect, the presumption against killing civilians was weakened to the point where, today, in many cases, only civilians’ lives are being risked by missiles launched from drones. The victims of drone strikes are labeled “collateral damage,” just as they have been for decades in combat theaters, but according to the lethality maximizers, so long as the killers “intend” to kill bad guys, they never do anything wrong. They may have curtailed the lives of innocent men, women, and children who never posed a threat to anyone, but it was all part of a good faith effort to defend the nation.
This normalization of assassination as a standard operating procedure of warfare not only endangers civilians in order to protect combat soldiers but also flouts widely accepted conventions regarding the proper conduct of war. According to longstanding international agreements such as the Geneva Conventions, soldiers are to be provided with the opportunity to surrender before they are killed. In drone strikes, the targets (usually unarmed) are summarily executed without warning under the assumption that they are guilty until proven innocent, which is of course impossible for them to do ex post facto.
What the military knows how to do is perpetrate mass homicide, and this they will continue to do, if they are not somehow reined in. The revolving door between government administrators and military industry makes it difficult to see how this might be accomplished. The problem is not only one of corruption, although that is a part of the problem. Even more intractable is that the persons who rise in the ranks of the military are precisely those who wholeheartedly agree that conflicts are to be resolved through homicide. (It turns out, felicitously for many of them, that the death industry is also highly lucrative.) It matters little whether military leaders such as current secretary of defense and former Raytheon board member Lloyd Austin are profoundly self-deceived or willfully ignore the carnage and misery which their policies have sown for people far from U.S. shores. They occupy positions of power and advise the president on matters of foreign policy.
Not everyone who joins the military rises in the ranks to become an administrator, having bought into the company line. Certainly drone operators are not always happy to learn that they have been transformed into contract killers, required to execute strangers at the request of “the customer,” and expected to deal with their reservations and guilt for what they have done through dosing themselves with psychiatric medications. Happily for war entrepreneurs, however, machines will solve all of the problems of hesitation to kill and critical thinking about what exactly the guiding strategic objective is supposed to be in “whack-a-mole and all of their family” missions conducted by soldiers at no risk of death when they terminate the lives of fellow human beings.
When computer algorithms have replaced human judgment in decisions about when and where to launch missiles from drones, it will become even more difficult to hold anyone responsible than it already is. When an automated program determines that a swarm of drones should be sent out to kill suspected “bad guys” located in an area inhabited by many civilians, no one will be held accountable when some of those civilians are stripped of their lives. Those who wrote the algorithms will continue to shirk personal responsibility by muttering the usual shibboleths: “Mistakes were made.” “Stuff happens.” Note the absence of an active subject in these sorts of reflexive responses to the military’s commission of war crimes. The move from evading responsibility through the use of passive verbs to the outright denial that any agent of the U.S. government has ever done anything wrong will be seamless once lethal drone missions are computer programmed, for there will be no identifiable moral agent behind any specific decision at all.
It is a single-minded obsession with maximizing lethality which has created the perpetual motion drone killing machine, and the problem will only grow worse with automation. The “drone warriors” have amply displayed their insouciance toward the thousands of innocent victims whom they have already killed, so it falls on people who do not serve as cogs in the machine to pose legal and moral objections to what has been going on now for more than twenty years. This is easier said than done, for citizens have become inured to the atrocities funded by them as a result of the military’s effective management of the mainstream media. With the U.S. government engaged in the suppression and outright censorship of counternarratives, the problem of profligate killing has become even more challenging to address, for citizens and politicians alike are largely ignorant of the crimes committed in their name.
Indeed, the Pentagon exerts such control over the narrative transmitted to the populace today that whistleblowers and others who expose war crimes, such as Julian Assange, are ruthlessly criminalized and persecuted as a direct result of highly effective discreditation campaigns. When the government labels even nonviolent dissidents in the homeland as extremists, then the next logical step will be to “neutralize” them, too, by all means necessary. With artificial intelligence already being used to identify so-called extremists, and the looming specter of automated lethal drones ready to deploy, it has never been more dangerous to defy the government. Nonetheless, we must find a way to turn off this killing machine while it is still possible to do.
Laurie Calhoun is the Senior Fellow for The Libertarian Institute. She is the author of We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, Theodicy: A Metaphilosophical Investigation, You Can Leave, Laminated Souls, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique, in addition to many essays and book chapters. Questioning the COVID Company Line: Critical Thinking in Hysterical Times will be published by the Libertarian Institute in 2023.
International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi has proposed a five-point plan to help ensure safety and security at the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant. Renowned nuclear expert Chris Busby says Grossi’s concerns about the plant’s safety are fully justified, but that much more needs to be done.
In an address before the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday, Rafael Grossi outlined measures which should be taken to prevent a deadly incident at the ZNPP – key among them an immediate halt to attacks of any kind against the facility.
Other necessary measures, he said, include a commitment that the plant won’t be used to store heavy weapons or launch attacks, the preservation of the safety of onsite backup cooling systems and offsite power connections, and assurances that no actions are taken which could undermine these principles.
Grossi characterized the situation at the plant as “extremely fragile and dangerous,” and urged for the measures to be implemented immediately. As usual, he did not attribute responsibility for the deterioration of the security situation around the plant, which has been controlled by Russia since March 2022, and regularly shelled by Ukrainian forces since then.
Ukrainian Permanent Representative to the UN Serhiy Kislitsa disingenuously assured the Security Council that Kiev had “never resorted and will never resort to any steps that could lead to a nuclear incident” at the ZNPP.
Russian Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzya told the body that the Russian side is already in compliance with Grossi’s recommendations, having implemented them independently “in accordance with decisions taken at the national level.”
“Thus, there have never been any attacks from the territory of the ZNPP [by Russia]. Heavy weapons and ammunition have never been deployed at the plant. There are no military personnel at the Zaporozhye NPP which could be used to carry out attacks from the territory of the plant,” Nebenzya said. Furthermore, he said, Moscow has taken “concrete steps” to protect the plant’s most sensitive structures and systems from sabotage and attack.
‘Absolutely Right to Be Freaking Out’
The IAEA chief “is fully aware” of the dangers associated with the deteriorating security situation at the ZNPP, is “understandably panicking,” and is “absolutely right to be freaking out,” says Chris Busby, a veteran chemical physicist with decades of experience studying the health effects of internal ionizing radiation, who currently serves as the scientific secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk.
Speaking to Sputnik and commenting on Grossi’s recommendations, Dr. Busby said that the “common sense” proposals are really just “a list of things that everyone must have been aware of from the very beginning” of the Ukraine crisis, but that regular shelling and missile attacks, and the possibility of the ZNPP becoming a direct battleground in a possible Ukrainian counteroffensive, makes them all the more pressing.
“The Ukrainian ambassador to the United Nations, Mr. Kislitsa, apparently stated [that] ‘we have never resorted and never will resort to steps that could lead to a nuclear incident.’ Well, one problem I have with this is the pronoun ‘We.’ I am a scientist, not a political commentator, but it seems to me that there are many different groups fighting in this war, and all kinds of attacks occur in all kinds of places, people are assassinated, bridges are blown up, undersea pipelines are destroyed, and no one seems to blame the Ukrainian government. Maybe there are a lot of independent nationalist groups (Terrorists? Assassins?) who take matters into their own hands and devise independent strategies,” Busby quipped.
‘Controlled Nuclear Bomb’
“Nuclear energy is a very dangerous technology,” the scientist emphasized, pointing out that at their core, nuclear power plants are “effectively a controlled nuclear bomb.”
“The enormous energy released when a nuclear bomb is detonated—and we have seen the pictures of Hiroshima—is released all at once. Bang! But the chain reaction in uranium that levelled Hiroshima and killed all those people is the same neutron-controlled reaction that occurs in nuclear power plants, except that the reaction is controlled with materials that moderate the rate of production of neutrons, so that the uranium fuel remains at a temperature where it can turn cooling water into steam which in turn turns the turbines that make the electricity,” Dr. Busby explained.
“The problem is, that if the cooling system is damaged, so that the water cannot circulate, the neutrons heat up the uranium fuel very quickly, and there is a meltdown. When the uranium fuel rods melt, they fall to the bottom of the reactor pressure vessel, and at that point, the neutron density increases, a chain reaction occurs and the reactor turns into a bomb and explodes, as happened at Fukushima, and as happened at Chernobyl. Other bad things can also happen: the enormous increase in temperature and radiation can produce hydrogen and this can also explode,” he added.
The same thing could happen to spent fuel, the scientist said, with these elements continuing to contain all of the fission products of uranium, and will continue to be radioactive for thousands of years.
“These spent fuel rods are still very hot, and have to be kept apart and cooled, just as in the reactor. So, they are stored in spent fuel ponds and cooled with water, or else dry stores and cooled with air and heat exchangers. If the cooling to the spent fuel fails, you have another nuclear bomb scenario,” Busby said.
The scientist estimates that there are about 20,000 tons’ worth of spent fuel rods at the ZPP, plus 60 tons in each of its reactors.
“If one component goes up, they all will, because the radiation levels will, just as with Fukushima and Chernobyl, prevent anyone getting near the plant,” he stressed, noting that this includes even robots – whose electronic circuits would be “wiped out” by the radiation.
The radioactive fallout from a disaster at the ZNPP would “make Europe pretty much uninhabitable,” in Dr. Busby’s estimation, leading to skyrocketing rates of premature deaths from cancers, fertility loss, congenital defects and a host of other illnesses. According to the scientist, the Ukrainian forces shelling the plant probably don’t “have the faintest idea” of what they’re doing, and “what Grossi has termed ‘the rolling of the dice.'”
What Can Be Done?
Dr. Busby believes the best thing that can be done to ensure the ZNPP’s safety is putting the Ukraine crisis to bed. “Failing that, the integrity of the [plant’s] lake must be ensured,” which means protecting the dam feeding it.
“It is water from the lake that is at the base of the cooling system. A buffer zone capable of protecting the power station from attacks should be organized, and this must constitute a no-fly area for missile attacks or personnel incursions. What else? Prayer. It is as bad as you can imagine,” Busby summed up.
The Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, with its six reactors capable of generating up to six gigawatts of power – enough to power over 1.8 million average European homes.
Freedom of Information request by Dr Busby to Atomic Weapons Establishment Aldermaston UK showed increased level of Uranium in all the environmental measurement filters. He discusses the health implications of this for Europe in an interview, where he outlines what his research found in Iraq, increases in cancer and congenital birth defects in Fallujah. His paper on the Ukraine Uranium in UK is at: https://www.researchgate.net/publicat…
Nobody believes in Remdesivir anymore. How can you possibly make a case for it? Remdesivir is so lethal it got nicknamed “Run Death Is Near” after it started killing thousands of Covid patients in the hospital. The experts claimed that Remdesivir would stop Covid; instead, it stopped kidney function, then blasted the liver and other organs.
As word got around, some patients started showing up in the emergency room with signs saying, “NO REMDESIVIR” and refusing to take it. (Not that their refusal helped: many were given it anyway, often without their knowledge.)
When I heard that Remdesivir is still being used, I couldn’t believe it. How could hospitals be so brazen as to push this killer drug, even after the lawsuits started flying? Fourteen California families are now suing three hospitals, claiming their loved ones suffered wrongful deaths from what they call “the Remdesivir protocol.” Expect other lawsuits to follow, because the Remdesivir carnage was nationwide.
I began to poke around to see if hospitals are still giving Remdesivir and I think I’ve found the smoking gun. Two smoking guns, in fact. First, it’s still listed on the NIH web site as its standard of care for Covid. Second (and in my opinion, more importantly), the CMS.gov official website says, “The COVID-19 public health emergency (PCE) ended at the end of the day on May 11, 2023.” Two sentences later, it states, “The enhanced payments described on this page will end on September 30, 2023.” And there it is, listed in bold: Remdesivir.
Allow me to translate the bureaucratese. “Even though we acknowledge the Covid emergency is over, the federal government will continue to pay lavish bonuses to hospitals who kill their patients with Remdesivir through the end of the fiscal year.”
Money; it all comes down to money. There’s SO much money in the Covid con game. The CARES Act of 2020 slathered $2 trillion across the country to deal with Covid, and lots of it went to hospitals. The 20 largest hospitals enjoyed a 62 percent increase in their combined net assets during those glorious Covid years, providing many top executives with a $10 million salary or more.
Alas, the federal government insisted that if hospitals wanted to get paid, they had to treat Covid patients with Remdesivir. The fact that this drug was made by their good friends at Gilead Science and everybody was getting rich from the deals they cut had absolutely nothing to do with it, of course. It was all done for love of the people. But just to make sure that Remdesivir could attain its current billion-dollar status, the feds incentivized hospitals with a 20 percent boost to the entire hospital bill of patients treated with Remdesivir.
And here’s the kicker: the feds did not allow hospitals to even consider using safe, cheap drugs like ivermectin.
“Remdesivir caused a lot of renal failures,” Ralph Lorigo told me. Mr. Lorigo is a lawyer in Buffalo who spent last year helping families rescue loved ones who were trapped inside hospitals that were killing them. “If you got Covid, the hospital put you on this government protocol and didn’t even check if you have kidney disease. There was a real lack of monitoring.”
“I was surprised when the FDA approved it, even though The World Health Organization (WHO) had advised against using it. But Big Pharma had the strength to push it through.”
He added, “Hospitals had stopped doing elective cases, which is how they made money. So now they made money giving people Remdesivir and putting them on ventilators, which the government also paid big bonuses for. Every day you’re on a vent, it’s damaging you. When I managed to get people out of the hospital and off the vent and they got ivermectin, they lived. When I couldn’t get into court or lost the case, they died.”
It’s way past time for there to be a hard stop on the use of Remdesivir. And we must work fast to save the children. “In late April 2022, the FDA even approved remdesivir as the first and only COVID-19 treatment for children under 12, including babies as young as 28 days, an approval that boggles the mind, considering COVID-19 is rarely serious in children while remdesivir is ineffective and carries a risk of serious, and deadly, side effect,” writes Dr. Joseph Mercola.
In all my reporting on the Hospital Death Protocol, I’ve never heard a single person say, “You’re wrong. My mother perked right up when they gave her Remdesivir and the ventilation made her bounce out of bed. They saved her life!”
Instead, my inbox and Twitter feed are filled with messages that would make you break down and cry. The Bereaved Army in America needs an investigation into exactly who shattered their lives and why.
Stella Paul is the pen name of a writer in New York who has covered medical issues for over a decade. In 2021, she lost her husband in a locked down nursing home in New York City where he had been brutally isolated for almost a year. He died one week after getting the vaccine. Stella is focused on exposing the Hospital Death Protocol to honor her husband’s memory and to support thousands of bereaved families.
US Senator Lindsey Graham’s name has been trending on social media in recent days. As exposed in a video circulating on the internet, on May 26, during a trip to Ukraine, the Republican allegedly said that killing Russians was a good investment. Obviously, the statement generated controversy and all sorts of reactions, including state measures on the part of Russia. However, the lack of clarification on the case leaves many questions unanswered.
In the aforementioned video, the senator seems to say: “And the Russians are dying… it’s the best money we’ve ever spent.” At the time, Graham was personally speaking to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky. It is known that Lindsey led an American delegation on an official trip to Kiev, in which topics of interest to both countries in the context of the current conflict would have been discussed. The meeting at which the controversial phrase was allegedly voiced took place during this trip.
There are no means to prove the veracity of the video. Some analysts have claimed that there is a media editing connecting Graham’s words. According to some experts, the mention of the death of Russians and the comment about money were not originally in the same sentence. However, as well as there is no proof to believe in the edited version that circulates on the networks, there is also no full and official version to verify what was actually said by the Senator. Therefore, there is no certainty about what happened at the meeting.
Graham responded to the allegations circulating on the networks by classifying them as “Russian propaganda“. He said in a letter to Reuters that he told Zelensky that “it has been a good investment by the United States to help liberate Ukraine”, with no mention on the murder of Russians. However, despite possible video editing, it is evident that at some point in the conversation there was such a mention, and Graham failed to clarify what he really thinks about killing Russians.
Regardless of the veracity of the video, Graham’s accusations that the case is related to some kind of “Russian propaganda” are absolutely unsubstantiated. The edited video was shared on the internet precisely by Andriy Yermak, the head of the Ukrainian president’s office. So, if there is any propaganda intent around the case, it is on the part of Kiev, not Russia. Russians just reacted to something that was posted on social media and generated outrage among netizens and ordinary people.
In addition to the strong responses on social networks, the US senator also suffered state sanctions for his possible declaration. Moscow’s authorities have added the politician to a list of wanted international criminals due to his Russophobic behavior. It is necessary to emphasize that the case comes amid a serious wave of anti-Russian intolerance fomented by the Collective West as a reaction to the special military operation on the borders with Ukraine. Moscow has done its best to combat anti-Russian mentality around the world, and, in this regard, measures are needed to sanction Russophobic hate-based behavior on the part of foreign officials.
In fact, there are two possibilities around the topic. On the one hand, it is possible that Graham was unconsciously used by Ukrainian propaganda. As well known, the Kiev regime maintains open neo-Nazi and anti-Russian rhetoric, publicly promoting every type of attack against Russian citizens. The government’s propaganda sectors, in this sense, could have deliberately edited the video, without the senator’s authorization, and published it to boost their racist campaigns and fuel the West’s Russophobic frenzy.
On the other hand, it is possible that the Americans themselves were involved in the case and consented to the misuse of Graham’s words for propaganda purposes. Considering that the politician failed to provide concrete clarification on the matter, limiting his response to vague accusations against Russia, the hypothesis of his direct involvement definitely cannot be ignored.
Furthermore, it is necessary to remember that Graham is already highly known for his Russophobic pronouncements, having even suggested the assassination of Vladimir Putin in March 2022. Being a fanatical supporter of American interventionism, advocating the death of Russians would not be something really new for him.
So, in order to clarify the situation once and for all and enable Moscow to reconsider its decision to include Graham on the wanted list, the Republican should make a public statement denying American interest in the death of Russians. Otherwise, even if there is video editing, the accusations against him will continue to be appropriate, given his omission.
Lucas Leiroz is an journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.
“Vaccine hesitancy and the spread of misinformation on social media have been recognised by the World Health Organization as an urgent threat to public health, with potentially lethal consequences.”
Well that’s settled then. Being recognised by the unelected, pharma-funded, supranational organisation that is the WHO does not lend any credibility to the article’s claim.
They go on to say:
“US president Joe Biden concluded that misinformation on social media was “killing people”.
If this Biden quote is the best they can find to lend support to their hypothesis, it may be time for the authors to go back to the drawing board.
A final excerpt (we recommend reading the whole piece):
“Although doctors are typically among the most trusted professionals, during the covid-19 pandemic some medical credentials were used to peddle fake cures and outright misinformation about vaccination.”
Given the well-established, proven vaccine (in)efficacy, and the military grade coercion that was employed to get people to take them, it’s hard to know where to start in critiquing this particular sentence.
HART felt compelled to write a Rapid Response to the BMJ pointing out that there may in fact be a more pressing need to address the glaring holes in current vaccine trial methodologies, rather than ‘studying’ those raising valid questions.
HART Rapid Response (which unsurprisingly the BMJ chose not to publish):
Dear Editor,
Rather than working out rules for gold standard RCTs on how to reduce online misinformation and vaccine hesitancy, maybe the best thing would be to re-address the golden rules for RCTs of vaccines in the first place.
The Covid-19 vaccine trials provide a classic example of how to increase vaccine hesitancy.
Firstly, the clinical trials were commenced before any human pharmacokinetic and biodistribution studies of all the components were carried out let alone published.
Secondly, they allowed unblinding to take place and many of the control arm then received the vaccine, making the longer term safety assessment from the Phase 3 trials meaningless.
Thirdly they looked at mortality only from the disease in question rather than looking at all cause mortality.
Fourthly, they failed to provide raw anonymised data so that readers could check the results. The dangers of lack of transparency have been highlighted before.[1]
Fifthly, there was no clear separation of the authors from the drug company sponsors, which has its own dangers.[2]
Sixthly, the manufacturers required unlimited indemnity, which tends to make the public ask why.
Seventhly, many studies are underpowered. The children’s trials in particular were too small to elucidate safety – their efficacy was largely based on the concept of ‘immunobridging’.
Eighthly, use of saline placebo. Some vaccine trials used other unrelated vaccines as a control rather than a saline placebo, which is a problem if the comparator vaccine also has under-reported side effects.
It is time to return to proper independently conducted RCTs in which the trial organisers are genuinely in ‘equipoise’, previously the ethical basis for any trial. It is also time to ensure that ‘all cause’ morbidity/mortality are used as end points rather than allowing the investigators to decide whether an individual SAE was or was not related to the vaccine under investigation and use a double-blind placebo-controlled methodology with a minimum 12 month follow-up as recommended by the International Coalition of Medicines Regulatory Authorities (ICMRA)[3]
Such an approach could go a long way to restore faith in the whole process of approvals.
Dr Rosamond Jones, retired consultant paediatrician
[1]Doshi, P. (2018). Pandemrix vaccine: why was the public not told of early warning signs? BMJ, 362:k3948. doi: 10.1136/bmj.k3948
[2]Jureidini J, McHenry L B. (2022).The illusion of evidence based medicine BMJ 2022; 376 :o702 doi:10.1136/bmj.o702
Der Spiegel, after running multiplestories peddling the canard that mysterious “Russian ships” were implicated in the Nord Stream attacks of 26 September 2022, has in a familiar pattern now totally reversed course and declared instead that there is increasing evidence pointing to Ukrainian attackers. They report that the theory of a Russian “false-flag operation,” to which they’ve given so much attention, is in fact “considered extremely unlikely” by “those familiar with the case.” The key evidence is unspecified “email metadata” from the mysterious parties who rented the Andromeda.
The investigators of the Public Prosecutor General Peter Frank … are now certain that the sailing yacht “Andromeda” was used for the attack. She sailed from Rostock-Warnemünde in early September 2022 and returned after the attacks. Forged identity documents were apparently used for her charter.
Remains of an underwater explosive were found across a large area of the cabin of the “Andromeda.” It is said to be octogen, an explosive widely used both in the West and in the former Eastern Bloc. …
Octogen is much lighter than TNT, capable of transport in a relatively small boat. Experienced combat divers could have placed it at the site of the attack on the bottom of the Baltic. The often-heard argument, that the weight of the explosives would have required a larger ship and perhaps a miniature submarine, is therefore no longer convincing.
The traces found by the Federal Criminal Police Office align with the assessments of several intelligence services, according to which the perpetrators hail from the Ukraine. Intelligence services have also asked whether the attack could have been carried out by an uncontrolled commando, or by Ukrainian intelligence services – and to what extent elements of the Ukrainian state apparatus may have been implicated. ,,,
Even before the attacks, the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) received a warning from the American CIA that were indications Ukrainian perpetrators were planning an attack on the pipelines. The BND did not, however, consider the reports to be very credible.
The story, picked up within hours by multipleGermanpressoutlets, follows slightly earlier reporting from the Süddeutsche Zeitung and German state media broadcasters WDR and NDR that likewise claims to have evidence of Ukrainian complicity, though the details of these earlier reports are so murky and unclear, I decided it was better to ignore them at the time. Allegedly, these news organisations discovered that the entity which rented the Andromeda is a shell company masquerading as a travel agency registered in Poland. The unnamed president of this unnamed company lives in Kiev; her name is also on the paperwork of various other companies, and so it seems likely she’s merely a frontman who has no specific involvement with the firm.
The same journalists also reported that, among the forged passports used to rent the Andromeda, was a Romanian document in the name of a certain “Stefan M.”
A person with this name and date of birth appears actually to exist, but according to the findings of the BKA [the German Federal Criminal Police Office], he was likely in Romania at the time of the explosions. But who was the man who presented the passport in the Baltic? According to research by WDR, NDR, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and their media partners, German investigators believe it could be a Ukrainian national – a man in his mid-20s from a town southeast of Kiev …
Social media photos show a young man, often smiling, sometimes in military uniform with a helmet – and with conspicuous tattoos. The young Ukrainian is said to have previously served in an infantry unit. Investigators are apparently following up on other names and clues. Only one of the young man’s relatives can be reached on the phone: she says he is currently serving in the military. … So far, official Ukrainian agencies have not responded to enquiries.
So, to sum up: One of the emails sent to rent the Andromeda came from Ukraine; the shell company that rented the Andromeda is registered under the name of an unrelated Polish woman living in Kiev; and one of the forged passports presented in this transaction carried a photo that might be of a Ukrainian soldier.
The duelling narratives here are clearly more significant than the specific facts (or, “facts”) which they relate. As I noted in my last Nord Stream update, the Russian-ships theory of the attack has been put about by some source within NATO and laundered through OSINT propagandists, and it looks for all the world like an implicit attack on Hersh’s story, for it centres on the alleged movements of the SS-750, a Russian ship outfitted with a miniature submarine designed for underwater rescue operations. The subtext is that the divers of Hersh’s scenario could never have done the job.
The Andromeda story, meanwhile, hails from intelligence services, specifically the CIA and (probably at second-hand) the German BND, whence it flowed to German criminal investigators and the press. This scenario is framed as an explicit attack on the Russian-ships theory, which the anonymous Spiegel informants go out of their way to discredit. The reason, as far as I can tell, is that the Russia-did-it line has overtly escalatory potential, for it posits a Russian attack in Swedish and Danish waters on energy infrastructure that, in the case of Nord Stream 1, is even partly owned by Germany. The Andromeda story generally strives to make room for a non-state actor, thus removing the immediate diplomatic significance of the attacks. This would explain the bizarre and thinly veiled suggestion of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, back in March, that former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko may have been involved in orchestrating the explosions, because they took place on his birthday.
Once again, it remains an enduring mystery, why none of the major published scenarios – not even Seymour Hersh’s detailed account of How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline – accounts for the specifics of the sabotage, which featured two sets of explosions at two separate locations, exactly 17 hours apart. John Mearsheimer recently remarked that if he “had to bet,” he’d “bet that the United States destroyed Nord Stream,” because such an action would be “completely consistent with what America’s overall policy is towards Russia.” It’s very easy to imagine that the United States would have orchestrated the attack through proxies, and it’s at least worth asking whether Hersh’s source fed him an incomplete account for the purposes of obfuscating Ukrainian involvement. On the other hand, the Andromeda theory is very hard to believe; if it is an intelligence service “cover story,” as Hersh claims, we must ask why it is so implausible.
So, Henry Kisisinger has done it. He has emulated Vietnam’s legendary General Võ Nguyên Giáp by reaching 100 years of age and not out. Congratulations! Happy birthday! Roll out the red carpet and give him a 100 gun salute! Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light….
But after all that superficial 4th of July, Apple Pie, Disneyland tinsel, go look at that guy’s rap sheet to get a grasp of how he and his have drowned the world with the blood of the innocents.
NATO awarded this bastard its 1973 Nobel Peace award for helping to end the Third Indo-China War, that led to independence for Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. In point of fact, it was not Kissinger’s alleged diplomacy but the heroic armed forces of Vietnam, led by the inestimable General Giáp, and armed and abetted by the Soviet Union and China, that ended that unremitting genocide the United States and its coalition of the willing (the United States, the ANZAC criminals, France, South Korea, the Philippines, Germany, Taiwan, Malaysia, Italy and Singapore) waged against the women of children of My Lai and tens of thousands of other Vietnamese villages, hamlets and towns. If Kissinger is hale and hearty enough to still opine on matters like Ukraine, then he is fit enough to swing for his culpability in America’s mass use of chemical and biological weapons in Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. If he lived like a dog, then he should have no complaints about being hanged like one.
And, after hanging him over Indo-China, Kissinger should be dug up and hanged again over Chile, where he and his Chicago school of economic hit-men orchestrated the overthrow of Allende, the pauperisation of the Chileans and the installation of the CIA trained fascist butcher Pinochet.
Och sure that was so long ago, would you not leave the old war criminal alone to enjoy his old age, something that bastard denied so many millions of others? Chile and Vietnam are so yesterday.
If only they were. Leaving to one side the tens of thousands of Vietnamese babies who are born with congenital diseases as a result of Kissinger spraying Monsanto’s Agent Orange on their grandmothers and even forgetting that Kissinger’s Yankee mates this very day oppose Chinese aid to Cambodia, a country whose people they unmercifully slaughtered with the active help of their media shills, Kissinger’s neck must still answer for his complicity in the crimes of Pakistan, whose military, led by the United States, committed the most unspeakable outrages in Bangladesh, East Pakistan, which was the Donbas of its day, and which these gangsters are now perpetrating in Pakistan itself.
And then there is Israel, with whom Kissinger directly colluded not only against Egypt, Jordan and Assad’s Syria in the Yom Kippur war, but where he also colluded against POTUS Nixon. If that is not another hanging offence, what is?
Let’s momentarily forget, if we can, the hanging hyperbole and look at Kissinger the man if we can assume, for the sake of argument, he is a man and not the anti-Christ incarnate. Although many others before him, from at least the time of Cardinal Richelieu, had the ear of the king, it is fair to say that Kissinger’s control of Nixon was a turning point for the worst in the affairs of man. Kissinger, often with Nixon’s connivance and as often without, manipulated the Beltway’s movers and shakers to a degree that the world had previously not witnessed and people are still being slaughtered in Donbas, in Pakistan and in Latin America as a result.
Out were the self-made politicians, folk like Eisenhower, Kennedy, de Gaulle, Harold Wilson and Willy Brandt, who had excelled, as often as not in the field of battle, but always under their own steam, owing favours to no one. In were the mandarins, the Yes Prime Ministers, snivelling wretches like Kissinger, who owed their prominence to backroom deals and favours cut, thanks to the Epsteins and other shadowy king makers of the Beltway’s netherworld.
Let’s look at the U.S. military to illustrate this important point. There are currently 39 active duty four-star officers in the uniformed services of the United States: 13 in the Army, 3 in the Marine Corps, 10 in the Navy, 12 in the Air Force, 1 in the Coast Guard, 2 in the Space Force, and none in the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.
This bloated number, which is far in excess of what the Yanks had at the height of the Second World War, is explained by the Kissinger effect, creeping Jesuses like Kissinger playing their own game, rather than playing for Team America. The objective of the top brass is not to win wars, to defend America or any such thing but it is to enrich themselves and the defence companies they will be parachuted into upon retirement.
The same goes for the Beltway’s movers and shakers, those creeping Jesuses who have inherited Satan’s relay baton from Kissinger and who, like him, consider American domestic and foreign policy, along with America’s piggy bank, to be their own personal plaything. If you look at those at the Beltway’s centre, anti-Christs like Victoria Nuland, Lindsey Graham and John Bolton, you can trace a slime trail via the Bush Presidencies all the way back to Kissinger and Nixon. Though America might periodically change its king, its permanent government of war mongers and piggy bank robbers stays firmly in place.
But what then of General Giáp? Wasn’t he too around almost forever? Yes, but Giáp was tested not once, but always against the Japanese, the French and the hated Americans. And, because each and every time he proved his mettle, he is, arguably, the most outstanding leader of the twentieth century.
Although Giáp might conceivably have liked to have ended his adult life, as he began it, as a history teacher in provincial Vietnam, fate dictated otherwise. Not so with the Beltway’s creeps, Kissinger’s droppings, who have to this very day to see a war they did not like or profit from.
So, as the world’s hypocrites salute this degenerate’s 100th birthday on May 27th, let’s first of all remember the millions of Cambodians, Laotians, Vietnamese, Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanians, Palestinians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Chileans who died the most horrible of deaths because of this conniving creep, and then let’s also say an Ave for the millions of others whose lives were sacrificed on the altars of Blair, Bush, Clinton, Obama and Kissinger’s other criminal clones.
Dr. Lucy Morgan Edwards has impeccable establishment credentials (Ph.D International Relations, Exeter; former political advisor to the EU Ambassador in Kabul). She’s calm, sensible, down-to-earth, and blessed with uncommonly good judgment. If the invaders and occupiers of Afghanistan had listened to her, things might have turned out differently. (See her book The Afghan Solution for details).
So why, her establishment ex-colleagues must wonder, does Dr. Morgan-Edwards suspect that Dr. Rashid Buttar, the famous COVID dissident physician, may have been assassinated? Does she really take seriously Dr. Buttar’s ravings about a COVID vaccine depopulation plot? What could have led her to wander so far off the reservation?
The answer, of course, is that Lucy Morgan-Edwards has experienced the extreme untrustworthiness of today’s Western elites first-hand. Given the outrageous mendaciousness and utter corruption of the Western oligarchy and its propaganda-pumping mainstream media, the notion that a faction of Big Pharma biowarriors may have simultaneously developed COVID and mRNA vaccines for nefarious purposes is hardly implausible. Indeed, a fair bit of evidence points in that direction. And when one of the most prominent voices warning of such possibilities, Dr. Rashid Buttar, claimed he was poisoned during an appearance on CNN, and then dropped dead a few months later at age 57, you don’t have to be paranoid to wonder whether “they” might have been out to get him.
It is an article of faith in mainstream media that only crazy people worry about politically suspicious deaths… at least in the USA. If an enemy of Putin or Xi or Assad or the Iranian government or any other “hostile” regime dies suspiciously, we are supposed to automatically assume the worst. But as we all know, politically-motivated assassinations by insiders could never occur in America. Or as Frank Zappa memorably put it, “It can’t happen here.”
How do we know that it can’t happen here? Because the CIA told us so! In CIA Document 1035-960, “Countering Criticism of the Warren Report,” distributed in January 1967 to Agency moles illegally infiltrating the media, we learn that only crazy “conspiracy theorists” harbor suspicions about such events as the murder of President John F. Kennedy. And since only a conspiracy theorist would care that the CIA invented the whole “conspiracy theory” meme in order to cover up its own murder of a sitting president, we can all sleep well knowing that bad things never happen in America.
One of Dr. Rashid Buttar’s supporters, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,* knows better than anyone that America has a political assassination problem. His father and uncle, America’s two most promising post-WWII leaders, were shot dead in the two-part coup d’état that defined the 1960s and shaped the course of subsequent American history.
The 1960s were also defined by the assassinations of America’s two most charismatic black leaders, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Both were killed not only because they were mobilizing African-Americans to demand change, but because they had begun to criticize the US empire and side with Third World insurgents rising up against it.
The 1960s assassination epidemic illustrates the fact that the American empire’s domestic assassination problem is related to its murderous activities abroad. The majority of the most prominent suspected political assassinations in America have been related to foreign policy rather than domestic issues, power-plays, or grudges between factions. The reason most of these people have been killed, it appears, is that they were viewed as a threat to the US empire (and/or to the Zionist occupation of Palestine).
Let’s consider a few of the most prominent suspected assassinations and the likely motive.
December 21, 1945: Gen. George S. Patton, Jr. is shot dead with a blunt object during a rigged car crash. William Donovan and his OSS, which would become the CIA, were probably responsible. Patton’s opposition to the genocidal occupation policies in Germany, and his intention to run for president on an off-script platform, were the likely motives.
May 22, 1949: Secretary of Defense James Forrestal plunges to his death from a 16th floor window. Strongly opposed to the creation of Israel, Forrestal was probably killed by Zionists.
February 21, 1965: Malcolm X is killed in the Audubon Ballroom, New York, in the wake of his attempts to unite Muslims and blacks with Third World anti-US-empire forces. As usual, elements of the CIA are lead suspects.
June 6, 1968: Robert F. Kennedy is shot from behind by a gun pressed against the back of his head, shortly after a hypnotized Palestinian patsy distracted onlookers by firing randomly from 10 feet in front. The same hardline-CIA-plus-Israel group that killed JFK was almost certainly responsible.
December 10, 1968: Thomas Merton is murdered in Bangkok, Thailand. The world’s most influential Catholic (with the possible exception of the Pope), Merton had turned hard against the Vietnam war before he was killed. Once again, elements of the CIA were likely responsible.
October 16, 1972: US Rep. Hale Boggs (D-LA), a member of the Warren Commission who privately rejected and scoffed at its findings, is killed in a rigged plane crash. He was presumably on the Hit Listof many dozens, if not hundreds, who were killed as part of the JFK-RFK assassination coverup.
April 3, 1996: Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown dies in a rigged plane Croatia after a failed bid to broker a corrupt deal between the CIA-linked Clinton crime family and Croatian dictator Franjo Tudjman. Once again, the CIA and its corrupt international dealings are on display.
October 25, 2002: Senator Paul Wellstone, along with his wife, daughter, and campaign staff, die in a rigged plane crash in Minnesota. Wellstone’s desire to investigate 9/11, and his opposition to the looming war on Iraq, almost certainly motivated his killers.
December 19, 2008: High-level Republican software consultant Micheal Connell dies in a rigged plane crash shortly before he is scheduled to testify against Karl Rove. Connell allegedly rigged the 2004 presidential elections by hacking voting machines. (That election was probably rigged in order to prevent the appearance of voters rejecting and rebuking the 9/11 and 9/11-wars perpetrators in and around the Cheney-Bush Administration.)
July 10, 2016: Seth Rich, the suspected DNC Wikileaker, is shot dead. Deep State backers of the empire’s anointed candidate, Hillary Clinton, are obvious suspects.
The above list obviously comprises only a minuscule fraction of likely US domestic political assassinations since World War II. Plausible reports that such towering figures as Franklin D. Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover were poisoned, that Jack Ruby and Hugo Chavez were dosed with fast-acting cancer, and that the CIA has a weapon that can induce heart attacks indistinguishable from natural ones suggest that America’s “Murder Incorporated” can easily disguise assassinations as natural deaths. So the real number of US political assassinations is quite possibly orders of magnitude larger than even the longest list of suspected hits compiled by the most paranoid conspiracy theorist.
If we asked “Bodycount Bill” Clinton why America has so many officially-unsolvable political assassinations, he might perchance reply: “It’s the empire, stupid.” A cursory review of the above list belabors the obvious: Getting seriously in the way of the empire’s dirty deeds in general, and wars in particular, can get you snuffed. People rarely get offed because of their views or actions on tax policy, social questions, educational reform proposals, or other domestic issues. Messing with your local sheriff or school board or state legislator or even governor probably won’t place your life in jeopardy. But if you stand in the way of empire as an “actionable threat,” you’d better wear body armor and stay out of small planes.
The domestic assassination epidemic represents classic imperial “blowback”—what Malcolm X called “the chickens coming home to roost.” To maintain an international empire, a great many high-IQ people with psychopathic tendencies are trained to, in the immortal words of Mike Pompeo, “lie, cheat, steal”… and, last but far from least, kill. Since the US empire has killed roughly 60 million people worldwide since World War II, according to the well-documented Chomsky-Vltchek estimate, the empire seems to have trained a considerable number of highly proficient murderers. These well-paid liars, cheaters, stealers, and killers are unlikely to magically change their skunk-stripes every time they return across the US border. Trained to commit assassinations abroad, they inevitably find ways to use their black ops skills at home.
The ever-worsening epidemic of foreign political assassinations that accompanied the rise of the US empire post-WWII is ably summarized in Ron Unz’s recent article “Assassinating Vladimir Putin?” Unz notes that “this American policy represented a radical change from the practice of past centuries, with the major Western countries having abandoned the use of assassination in the 17th century after the end of the bloody Wars of Religion.” He aptly remarks that the ascent of neocon supporters of Israel, the worst assassination outlaw state in history, is a likely factor driving the US government’s ever-accelerating assassinations—the great majority of which target Muslim enemies of Israel. Given the palpable strategic idiocy of America’s drone assassination program, one wonders whether the Israelis are deliberately making the US commit senseless acts that will enrage the Muslim world against America in order to distract from Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians.
Though Unz is right that the West largely abandoned assassination after the Wars of Religion, it’s worth noting that the re-emergence of assassination has coincided with a decline in religious belief and observance among the elites charged with making such decisions. The neocons, the worst offenders, are avowed atheists who believe that the nonexistence of God frees man to be as evil as he wants to be. Whole articles, even books, could be written on the return of political assassination as a symptom of moral and spiritual decline.
But this is not the place for those articles and books. Instead, I will terminate this essay with proverbial extreme prejudice by tersely noting that yes, it is the empire, stupid, and that if we want to solve the assassination problem, or at least mitigate it, we need to roll back—or, better yet, end—the empire.
*I’m asserting that RFK Jr. supported Dr. Rashid Buttar’s right to speak his mind and at least some of his claims, not that he agreed with all of Dr. Buttar’s positions. Some of Buttar’s statements, including arguments that all COVID vax recipients will be dead within a few years, were obviously fallacious.
By Jamal Kanj – Intifada-Palestine.com – January 14, 2011
Israel’s survival kit is: perpetuate conflict, insecurity to rationalize collective hate and finally playing victim.
Devoid of conflict, Israel implodes internally; without hate, Zionism loses its justification; and playing eternal victim to continue blackmailing the West. Absence of this holy trinity, Israel ceases to exist.
From its inception, the house of Zion has mastered exploiting adversarial powers to advance Israel’s cause. For instance, their influence over the Democratic Party in the US began with President Truman’s bid for 2nd term election in 1948.
Responding to strong opposition from Secretary of State General George Marshall and Department experts urging against recognition of Israel, President Truman replied: “I’m sorry gentlemen but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands [Jewish voters] who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of [voting] Arabs among my constituents”
Zionists influence over liberal American politics was matched with the doctrinal school of Conservative theoreticians aligning the Republican Party’s platform with Israel’s objectives. The Neoconservative Zionists, coined Zioncons, invented the “Clash of Civilization” concept to fight Israel’s wars. … continue
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A two-year-old Palestinian toddler has been severely wounded after being shot in the head by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank yesterday.
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