It’s time to open the AstraZeneca files
By Dr Ros Jones | TCW Defending Freedom | November 2, 2022
The AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine has all but disappeared from use. We need to know why, and whether troubling evidence from its trials was ignored by the regulators or withheld from the public. That is why HART, the independent Health Advisory and Recovery Team, has demanded a ‘Pfizer files’ style data release from the Medicines and Healthcare Product Regulatory Agency (MHRA).
Last week, we submitted an FoI request to the MHRA prepared by PJH Law requiring the release of all data submitted by AstraZeneca in their application for a licence for their Covid-19 vaccine (AZD1222/Vaxzevria), the data that the MHRA relied on before granting a conditional marketing authorisation for its use.
We asked for:
1. Pre- and post-authorisation safety and efficacy data for this product;
2. All information that allowed a ‘rigorous scientific assessment’ of all the available evidence of quality, safety and effectiveness by the MHRA;
3. All information and full data set that the MHRA stated their expert scientists and clinicians reviewed from the laboratory preclinical studies, clinical trials, manufacturing and quality controls, product sampling and testing of the final vaccine and the conditions for its safe supply and distribution;
4. Anonymised data from their clinical trials.
Why is this necessary?
AstraZeneca’s Vaxzevria was approved for use in the UK on December 30 2020 to a fanfare for UK science. It had been pre-ordered and prioritised for Britain by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who boasted it was not just safe and effective but a triumph for ‘Global’ Britain. To date the failings of this novel technology vaccine have been brushed under the carpet, never explained and never apologised for.
Within weeks of AZ’s rollout, concerns about the vaccine (trials of which had been paused twice, see here and here) were being flagged. In a short time successive European governments followed Denmark’s lead in suspending its use. The UK’s advisory body, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) continued to insist it was still safe, but in May advised it should not be given to anyone under 40. By that stage millions of doses had been administered. From the start, the vaccine was disproportionately associated with adverse reactions, yet it was administered to children: some 11,500 have received 1st doses and 8,700 second doses and ‘extremely limited boosters’. These have resulted in 266 Yellow Cards at an adverse reaction reporting rate of 1 in 43 children.
To date, 49.16million adult AZ doses have been administered and 246,393 people impacted by adverse effects, according to the MHRA’s Yellow Card adverse reports, admitted by the MHRA to be likely to be only 10 per cent of the true number.
The first pay-out under the vaccine injuries compensation scheme was to the widow of a 48-year-old who died of brain blood clots commencing days after his AZ vaccination, a death that occurred two months after Denmark had suspended AZ use because of side effects. The US never purchased the AZ vaccine because of health officials’ concerns.
The British people have a right to see all the data provided by AstraZeneca to the MHRA, both as a basis for the initial conditional use authorisation, and subsequently as part of AstraZeneca’s ongoing safety surveillance. Firstly, because a large sum of taxpayers’ money was allocated to the development and subsequent rollout of this vaccine, but secondly because people put their faith in the safety of this home-produced vaccine. When told that vaccines were our way out of the pandemic, who wouldn’t want to get jabbed? Indeed, the WHO’s definition of herd immunity was changed in November 2020 to remove all mention of naturally acquired immunity, leaving only vaccination as the new ‘gold standard’ – ‘fool’s gold?’ one wonders.
The AstraZeneca product officially remains in clinical trials until next year, though like the other vaccines, volunteers in the control arm were vaccinated early on, negating much of the scientific basis for a randomised controlled trial. The latest autumn booster programme states that AstraZeneca is ‘currently unavailable’ but at no point has the public been told why this is the case. Does the company or the regulator know something that has not been shared?
‘Safe and effective’, the marketing banner whenever the ‘vaccines’ were being discussed by the MHRA, MSM or Pharma, is of grave concern, especially when it comes to the vaccination of healthy children. But at all ages, it is clear that properly informed consent has been set aside, in contravention of the General Medical Council Good Practice Guidelines.
The battle to obtain the data and information relied upon by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to licence the Pfizer vaccine pointed to the secrecy that had shrouded these trials. The FDA planning to retain the material for 75 years, but a court granted an FoI request and required the FDA to release all the data over eight months. This has resulted in 451,000 pages of information now being analysed by 3,500 experts and 250 lawyers. Evidence of fraud would negate any indemnity for Pfizer.
The overstating of efficacy and understating of harms continues unabated not least by the MHRA, the very same UK body responsible for ensuring that medicines meet applicable standards of safety, quality and efficacy, and for pharmacovigilance across the UK, the objectives of which are to:
· Prevent harm from adverse drug reactions in humans arising from the use of authorised medicinal products;
· Promote the safe and effective use of medicinal products, through providing timely information about the safety of medicinal products to patients, healthcare professionals and the public.
At a press briefing on the AstraZeneca vaccines in December 2020, the MHRA chief Dr June Raine glibly stated:
· Safety of the public comes first, and this comes after a thorough and scientifically rigorous review of all the evidence in terms of safety, effectiveness and quality;
· ‘We are facing one of the biggest threats to health, in the UK and around the world’;
· The vaccine ‘protects’ against Cov-19 and will save many thousands of lives;
· There are no specific precautions if you have had Covod-19 and you do not need testing before the injection;
· Vaccines should be considered for pregnancy (and those breastfeeding) when the potential benefit outweighs the risks following individual talks with every woman and their healthcare professional.
The latter directly contradicted the MHRA’s own summary assessment that ‘it is considered that sufficient reassurance of safe use of the vaccine in pregnant women cannot be provided at the present time’.
Dr Raine’s alarming unilateral declaration of the MHRA’s switch from a regulatory function to an enabling role alongside her consistent ‘playing down’ of vaccine injuries and treating adverse effects as coincidental, further underlined the need for the AZ trials data disclosure.
We need to know whether the MHRA has a defined point at which it pulls a drug or vaccine and if not, why not?
Conclusion:
The government has invested millions of taxpayers’ monies to develop and market the AZ product. A large percentage of its population have been injected with a liability-free vaccine and we therefore require complete transparency. It would show utter contempt for our democracy if the British people are denied access to this information.
If their due diligence has been thorough, releasing this data should confirm their oft-repeated declaration that the AZ vaccine is safe and effective, thus providing reassurance.
The public’s need for this information is urgent, given that the vaccination programme is ongoing. Despite the evidence of unprecedented harms (deaths and debilitating injuries) on their own pharmacovigilance databases, governments across the world have told their citizens and our children that the covid-19 genetic vaccines are safe. It is time for total transparency and honesty.
The full background report to the HART FoI and the FoI itself can be found on HART’s website here.
November 2, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, UK | Leave a comment
Lies, Spies and US Bioweapons on the Verge of Armageddon
By Wayne Cristaudo | The Postil Magazine | November 1, 2022
Initially, when the Russians brought the existence of the Ukrainian biolabs to the attention of the world, it was denied outright—the official Western response was—”those Ruskies just never stop lying.” And having shut down RT news, hardly anyone in the West knew anything about the Russian claim except that it was being made and it was therefore “disinformation,” and only conspiracy theorists believed it. Given there still has been no declaration of war by any Western country against Russia, one might think the “voices of social conscience” and the “guardians of truth” might at least be curious to know why the Western population was generally being “protected” from Russian news sources because the bright sparks thought the people just too dumb to be able to distinguish between truth and lie.
For a few years now, the bright sparks have decided that they alone know “the truth.” I am not sure which “settled science” it was exactly that decided that Russian media always tells lies, and that Western people are too gullible to be trusted with open access to Russian media. But it must have been the result of some scientific study by irreproachable “scientists,” because the masters of social conscience know and own the science on any given topic, and it was only us stooges that thought that such control of information was further proof of the dangerous totalitarian stranglehold of the Western world’s “leaders” and their mental enforcers.
But glory be, thanks to Victoria Nuland, that brain box and Democrat wife of Republican neo-con Robert Kagan, the current Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, and former Assistant Secretary of State European and Eurasian Affairs, the US go-to girl in the “Revolution of Dignity” (you know, the one where “Dignity” meant burning alive their political opponents in Odessa—which local Russian speakers put at close to 400. But, hey, what would they know—they only lived there)—the story needed to by updated. Nuland clarified to the hapless Marco Rubio, who, when questioning her, expected her to respond that there were no labs, that they were actually just perfectly safe biolabs, conducting public health research. But with Russians in the picture, Nuland took on the role of Cassandra to warn that said labs in Ukraine were now a cause for concern, because their benign public health research was sure to be turned into “bioweapons” by those evil Russians.
Of course, the issue of biolabs and bioweapons is central to what is happening now—and is yet another factor in Russia’s “invasion.” And to make sure we would all share “the correct” memory of all this, on June 9, 2022 AD, the Pentagon released a Fact Sheet on WMD Threat Reduction Efforts with Ukraine, Russia and Other Former Soviet Union Countries. I think the centerpiece of the document is this:
The United States has also worked collaboratively to improve Ukraine’s biological safety, security, and disease surveillance for both human and animal health, providing support to 46 peaceful Ukrainian laboratories, health facilities, and disease diagnostic sites over the last two decades. The collaborative programs have focused on improving public health and agricultural safety measures at the nexus of nonproliferation.
On its release, some journalists, like Steve Sweeney from People’s World reported (June 14) that “The Pentagon said on Thursday that it has operated 46 biolabs in Ukraine handling dangerous pathogens, after previously dismissing the charges as Russian propaganda.” PolitiFact quickly weighed in with “The 46 facilities referenced in the articles and in the government’s fact sheet are owned and operated by Ukraine.” In the world of PolitiFact “working collaboratively” does not seem to be a synonym for funding. But while for the strict grammarians and guardians of “facts,” a tomato is definitely not a tomahto, the pertinent issue is smothered in the race to present nice, neat, clean facts to prevent us from ever believing anything that was not put together by team Goody Global Two Shoes—and that is the point made by bioweapons analyst Francis Boyle:
One of the latest explanations from a U.S. State Department spokesperson is that Ukraine has ‘biodefense’ laboratories, which are ‘not biological weapons facilities.’ The problem with making a distinction between ‘biodefense’ and ‘biowarfare’ is that, basically, there is none. No biodefense research is purely defensive, because to do biodefense work, you’re automatically engaged in the creation of biological weapons. All dual use research can be used for military purposes, and often is. As explained by Boyle, the idea behind ‘biodefense’ research is that there might be a natural pathogen out there that can cause a pandemic, or someone might release an engineered biological weapon, that we need to prepare a cure for.
How did such an obvious point pass the mental geniuses who tell us what to think? By the way Boyle is a human rights lawyer for all sorts of causes that generally fit neatly into the educated politically activist academic consensus (a critic of Israel and exponent of Palestinian rights, an advocate for indigenous and first nation rights, a supporter of Hawaiian self-determination, an international-law expert and legal adviser to the first Bosnia-Herzegovinian president). Then, he took an interest in bioweaponry and connected it to COVID. At once he became a “conspiracy theorist.” Anyone who thinks Big Pharma is capable of hazardous decisions, leveraging government and being involved in cartel collusion, and profiteering, and that it should be subjected to the kinds of protocols that no longer seem to exist for any of the larger corporations — is now labeled a “conspiracy theorist.”
If such a prime fact as Boyle’s about the nature of “biodefense” is smothered by weasel words, and by simply deferring to official statements made by the very operatives whose operations are being questioned, how was it ever possible for questions about government bioweaponry to get a serious airing in the public sphere? Answer—it was not possible, because the rules governing the “public square” no longer favor any kind of critical discussion—the public square itself dictates “the acceptable answers” to topics, and the public square is what the owners of that square say that it is — for the public square is very much a private possession.
But apart from the logic that Boyle brought to the conversation, even before every major news outlet in the country was falling over itself to attack right-wing conspiracy theorists, Newspunch counterpunched by demonstrating what a bunch of fraudsters the factcheckers are—when it reached back into the archives and found a piece from BioPrepWatch.com published in 2010: “Deleted Web Pages Show Obama Ordered Ukraine BioLabs to Develop ‘Deadly Pathogens.’” Allow me to reproduce the rest of the report:
Thenationalpulse.com reports: The article, which also highlighted the work of former Senator Dick Lugar, was additionally included in Issue No. 818 of the United States Air Force (USAF) Counterproliferation Center’s Outreach Journal.
Lugar said plans for the facility began in 2005 when he and then-Senator Barack Obama entered a partnership with Ukrainian officials. Lugar and Obama also helped coordinate efforts between the U.S and Ukrainian researchers that year in an effort to study and help prevent avian flu,” explained author Tina Redlup.
A 2011 report from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Anticipating Biosecurity Challenges of the Global Expansion of High-Containment Biological Laboratories explained how the Odessa-based laboratory “is responsible for the identification of especially dangerous biological pathogens.
This laboratory was reconstructed and technically updated up to the BSL-3 level through a cooperative agreement between the United States Department of Defense and the Ministry of Health of Ukraine that started in 2005. The collaboration focuses on preventing the spread of technologies, pathogens, and knowledge that can be used in the development of biological weapons,” the report continues.
The updated laboratory serves as Interim Central Reference Laboratory with a depozitarium (pathogen collection). According to Ukrainian regulations, it has a permit to work with both bacteria and viruses of the first and second pathogenic groups,” explains the report.
A separate document detailing Ukraine’s biolab network from the BioWeapons Prevention Project outlines in greater detail the scope of pathogens the facility has conducted research with.
Among the viruses the lab studied were Ebola and “viruses of pathogencity group II by using of virology, molecular, serologica and express methods.”
Additionally, the lab provided “special training for specialists on biosafety and biosecurity issues during handling of dangerous biological pathogenic agents.”
The unearthed biolab facility follows intense scrutiny over the U.S. government’s decision to fund risky, “gain-of-function” research in Wuhan at a Chinese Communist Party-run lab with military ties.
The combination of algorithmic-controlled information and the vanishing of web sites that disprove the approved “line” of the cabal at Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc., as well as the CIA, the FBI and the Government—is now such a conspicuous feature of our information flow in the West that an obvious question arises—how can anyone, who wants to get at the truth of things, still believe any official news source today? With respect to the war, in general, and the biolabs, in particular, the only position that is now permitted to be published in mainstream media is that if the Russians claim something, it is ipso facto propaganda and false. All nice and Manichean. And the way this seems to now be proven is that Government intelligence officials tell us so. Once upon a time academics and journalists were far more inclined to think that if the CIA said something there was a fair to good chance it was a lie.
So, before we carry on with looking briefly at the history of US biowarfare and what the Russian arguments and claims about US biolabs and weapons are, and why this should be widely known and discussed, instead of being denounced, and shutdown — let us just remind ourselves of a few unpleasant truths about the CIA, and why it is utterly imbecilic (and fully in keeping with the our age of the imbecilic) that journalists have derived their facts and larger narrative for understanding the Russia-Ukraine war from the Central Imbecilic (sorry, I meant, Intelligence) Agency.
Trust US. We are the CIA
Those of a certain age will most like be familiar with Phillip Agee’s Inside the Company: CIA Diary, which is Agee’s first-hand account of his twelve years as a CIA agent during his time in Uruguay, Ecuador, Mexico and Washington. The essentials are laid out in a couple of early paragraphs of the book, where he writes:
When I joined the CIA I believed in the need for its existence. After twelve years with the agency I finally understood how much suffering it was causing, that millions of people all over the world had been killed or had had their lives destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports. I couldn’t sit by and do nothing and so began work on this book. Even after recent revelations about the CIA it is still difficult for people to understand what a huge and sinister organization the CIA is. It is the biggest and most powerful secret service that has ever existed. I don’t know how big the KGB is inside the Soviet Union, but its international operation is small compared with the CIA’s. The CIA has 16,500 employees and an annual budget of $750,000,000. That does not include its mercenary armies or its commercial subsidiaries. Add them all together, the agency employs or subsidizes hundreds of thousands of people and spends billions every year. Its official budget is secret; it’s concealed in those of other Federal agencies. Nobody tells the Congress what the CIA spends. By law, the CIA is not accountable to Congress.
In the past 25 years, the CIA has been involved in plots to overthrow governments in Iran, the Sudan, Syria, Guatemala, Ecuador, Guyana, Zaire and Ghana. In Greece, the CIA participated in bringing in the repressive regime of the colonels. In Chile, The Company spent millions to “destabilize” the Allende government and set up the military junta, which has since massacred tens of thousands of workers, students, liberals and leftists. In Indonesia in 1965, The Company was behind an even bloodier coup, the one that got rid of Sukarno and led to the slaughter of at least 500,000 and possibly 1,000,000 people. In the Dominican Republic the CIA arranged the assassination of the dictator Rafael Trujillo and later participated in the invasion that prevented the return to power of the liberal ex-president Juan Bosch. In Cuba, The Company paid for and directed the invasion that failed at the Bay of Pigs. Sometime later the CIA was involved in attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. It is difficult to believe, or comprehend, that the CIA could be involved in all these subversive activities all over the world.
Since Agee’s diary. there have been other accounts of the CIA, mainly by former operatives or academics, which go into the details of all the election rigging, coups, assassination attempts, false flag operations, torturing and various conspiracies (yes, shock, horror! the CIA has a history of conspiring to overthrow regimes, and fuel revolts and start wars). Before the Left was a woke joke, and the CIA had set up shop as a diversity service provider, scholars like William Blum (see his Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II) would write books exposing the various dirty tricks and machinations (installing bloody dictators, arming terrorists, working with drug runners, arms runners and money laundering—all for the good of the world. I thoroughly recommend Douglas Valentine’s 2017 book, The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World—it also has a chapter on the CIA in Ukraine. Here is synopsis of another book, Big White Lie: The CIA and the Cocaine/Crack Epidemic, by former DEA agent, Michael Levine which gives a pretty good account of what the CIA have been up to in the more overtly criminal stakes:
… the CIA has perverted the American criminal justice system by protecting drug dealers and murderers from prosecution; that Federal judges and prosecutors alleged to have broken narcotics laws have been protected from investigation; that the government of Bolivia and South American drug cartel leaders have been assisted and even paid by the CIA… without CIA support, South American cartels and the epidemic of cocaine and crack use in the U.S. would never have occurred.
During the Maidan revolution in 2014, McCain and Nuland were doing photo ops with Svoboda (the neo-Nazi political party) leader Oleh Tyahnybok and his cronies who were busy assisting in regime change. After all, at the end of the Second World War US intelligence agencies, including the CIA, recruited General Reinhard Gehlen, the German army’s intelligence chief for the Eastern Front during World War II, who “successfully maintained his intelligence network (it ultimately became the West German BND) even though he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals.” This was hidden from the public for some fifty years, until documents pertaining to this history were declassified in 2002. The following from The National Security Archive in 2005 is worth quoting:
The documentation unearthed by the IWG (The Nazi War Crimes Interagency Working Group) reveals extensive relationships between former Nazi war criminals and American intelligence organizations, including the CIA. For example, current records show that at least five associates of the notorious Nazi Adolf Eichmann worked for the CIA, 23 other Nazis were approached by the CIA for recruitment, and at least 100 officers within the Gehlen organization were former SD or Gestapo officers.
The IWG enlisted the help of key academic scholars to consult during the declassification process, and these historians released their own interpretation of the declassified material in May of 2004, in a publication called US Intelligence and the Nazis. The introduction to this book emphasizes the dilemma of using former Nazis as assets:
The notion that they [CIA, Army Counterintelligence Corp, Gehlen organization] employed only a few bad apples will not stand up to the new documentation. Some American intelligence officials could not or did not want to see how many German intelligence officials, SS officers, police, or non-German collaborators with the Nazis were compromised or incriminated by their past service.
Apparently, the Nazi spies were a disaster! As the report continues:
Lack of sufficient attention to history-and, on a personal level, to character and morality-established a bad precedent, especially for new intelligence agencies. It also brought into intelligence organizations men and women previously incapable of distinguishing between their political/ideological beliefs and reality. As a result, such individuals could not and did not deliver good intelligence. Finally, because their new, professed ‘democratic convictions’ were at best insecure and their pasts could be used against them (some could be blackmailed), these recruits represented a potential security problem.
But now that Russia’s geopolitical concerns are strategically regional and have nothing in common with the globalist aspirations of the former Soviets, many of the very people who previously were very willing to denounce the CIA for its interventions in Chile, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Argentina, Cuba, Greece, Iran, Indonesia etc. are more than willing to read from the script prepared by the CIA. Still, the take-home point from any of the left-leaning books on the CIA, written in the last thirty years or so, is that the CIA acted covertly, criminally, and very often under the veil of “plausible deniability;” which is to say, it was often left free to do whatever it thought necessary, without there being any followable line of command that would link its actions to the President—and, of course, it lied—constantly. It also involved itself in propaganda. It is obvious that the entrenchment of nefarious practices tend to continue well after any rationale for adopting them has vanished. On the issue of propaganda, the following from Agee is important:
The CIA’S role in the US propaganda program is determined by the official division of propaganda into three general categories: white, grey and black. White propaganda is that which is openly acknowledged as coming from the US government, e.g. from the US Information Agency (USIA); grey propaganda is ostensibly attributed to people or organizations who do not acknowledge the US government as the source of their material and who produce the material as if it were their own; black propaganda is unattributed material, or it is attributed to a non-existent source, or it is false material attributed to a real source. The CIA is the only US government agency authorized to engage in black propaganda operations, but it shares the responsibility for grey propaganda with other agencies such as USIA. However, according to the ‘Grey Law’ of the National Security Council contained in one of the NSCID’S, other agencies must obtain prior CIA approval before engaging in grey propaganda. The vehicles for grey and black propaganda may be unaware of their CIA or US government sponsorship. This is partly so that it can be more effective and partly to keep down the number of people who know what is going on and thus to reduce the danger of exposing true sponsorship. Thus editorialists, politicians, businessmen and others may produce propaganda, even for money, without necessarily knowing who their masters in the case are. Some among them obviously will and so, in agency terminology, there is a distinction between ‘witting’ and ‘unwitting’ agents.
Sound familiar? Allow me to align this with a piece by NBC (April 6 2022) that is breathtaking in its combination of chutzpah and imbecilic integrity. The headline reads “In a break with the past, U.S. is using intel to fight an info war with Russia, even when the intel isn’t rock solid.” “It doesn’t have to be solid intelligence,” one U.S. official said. “It’s more important to get out ahead of them [the Russians], Putin specifically, before they do something.”
It continues:
It was an attention-grabbing assertion that made headlines around the world: U.S. officials said they had indications suggesting Russia might be preparing to use chemical agents in Ukraine. President Joe Biden later said it publicly. But three U.S. officials told NBC News this week there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the U.S. released the information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions. It’s one of a string of examples of the Biden administration’s breaking with recent precedent by deploying declassified intelligence as part of an information war against Russia. The administration has done so even when the intelligence wasn’t rock solid, officials said, to keep Russian President Vladimir Putin off balance. Coordinated by the White House National Security Council, the unprecedented intelligence releases have been so frequent and voluminous, officials said, that intelligence agencies had to devote more staff members to work on the declassification process, scrubbing the information so it wouldn’t betray sources and methods.
Who needs rock solid when the government and its intel are so great?
Let’s consider one last piece on the CIA—Tim Weiner’s, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. It is a fairly sober account of the CIA by a journalist whose recent pronouncements—short of anything resembling proof—on this war seem to me to make him prey to his own quarry. But his book of 2007 makes some good points. The first is a good summing up of the limits of “intelligence”—which is salient to why it is insane for journalists to think they are doing a democracy anything other than a disservice by parroting the “talking points” of their “intelligence” sources: “Intelligence fails because it is human, no stronger than the power of one mind to understand another. Garrett Jones, the CIA station chief during the disastrous American expedition in Somalia, put it plainly: ‘There are going to be screw-ups, mistakes, confusion, and missteps,’ he said. “One hopes they won’t be fatal.”
The second, is a good summary of how the intelligence game changed with the war on terror, and how that “war” has led to how the CIA now operates:
The CIA had run secret interrogation centers before–beginning in 1950, in Germany, Japan, and Panama. It had participated in the torture of captured enemy combatants before–beginning in 1967, under the Phoenix program in Vietnam. It had kidnapped suspected terrorists and assassins before–most famously in 1997, in the case of Mir Amal Kansi, the killer of two CIA officers. But Bush gave the agency a new and extraordinary authority: to turn kidnapped suspects over to foreign security services for interrogation and torture, and to rely on the confessions they extracted. As I wrote in The New York Times on October 7, 2001: “American intelligence may have to rely on its liaisons with the world’s toughest foreign services, men who can look and think and act like terrorists. If someone is going to interrogate a man in a basement in Cairo or Quetta, it will be an Egyptian or a Pakistani officer. American intelligence will take the information without asking a lot of lawyerly questions.” Under Bush’s order, the CIA began to function as a global military police, throwing hundreds of suspects into secret jails in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, and inside the American military prison in Guantanamo, Cuba for interrogations. The gloves were off. “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there,” Bush told the nation in an address to a joint session of Congress on September 20. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.
Of course, the justification for the “war on terror” moved from the war against the Taliban to the war against Iraq; and while the rationale of that war, mentioned below, was based on false information, the real rationale enthusiastically repeated on numerous occasions by Tony Blair was that it was the task of democracies to overthrow tyrants wherever they were. Hence the requisite procedure in the international arena becomes one of declaring one’s enemy a tyrant to legitimate regime change. And as was signaled with the passing of the Magnitsky Act back in 2012, which enabled the seizure of Russian assets, the decision that regime change had to occur in Russia precedes not only the present war in the Ukraine, but the Maidan.
And if anyone out there still thinks the CIA is a trustworthy institution (and I have not even touched upon its various debacles which have been addressed by other authors) let’s go to the third passage from Weiner, which I think particularly pertinent because even the slew of pro-war Democrats might remember where they purportedly once stood (of course, I am joshing. Most of them went in boots and all with young George W and the CIA. So much for principles):
President Bush presented the CIA’s case and more in his State of the Union speech on January 28, 2003: Saddam Hussein had biological weapons sufficient to kill millions, chemical weapons to kill countless thousands, mobile biological weapons labs designed to produce germ-warfare agents. “Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” he said. “Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. All of this was terrifying. None of it was true.
In a nutshell, there is nothing about the CIA’s history which indicates that it is a trustworthy operation. The good thing about most of the left-wing writings on the CIA—and even though I am often critical of the Left, I have always thought this aspect of their investigations to be a valuable contribution to any public considerations of state action—is that they invariably identity the nexus between corporate interests and the state. An iconic expression of the problem was by Major General Smedley Butler back in the 1930s in his War is a Racket:
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
Nothing has changed in that the real reason for NATO expansionism and for the most brazen proxy war funded by way Western governments funneling tax payers’ money, without resorting to anything remotely resembling electoral approval, to send weapons to Ukraine.
Far less reported are NATO’s nuclear war games which are being held some six hundred miles from Russia. And what is simply not known at all—is what the Russians are saying about US bioweapons.
A Brief History of The US Bioweapon Research and Why the Russians Are Bothered
US government research into biological warfare originated in the Second World War in response to British and French concerns that the Nazis might attack with biological weapons. They didn’t, but the Japanese were also developing biological weapons that they would use against the Chinese—they experimented on prisoners, poisoned wells, and dropped plague infested fleas over cities and rice fields. The Soviets had also been attacked with biological weapons, and after the war they convicted some of the Japanese researchers, although the Soviets had already been working on biological warfare from the 1920s and would become world leaders in bioweaponry until the Union collapsed.
The defeat of the Japanese provided a valuable source of new recruits for the US government in the area of biological warfare. The extent to which the US was able to make use of the Japanese research is not altogether clear, but we do know that both in the US and Japan secret research was being conducted, involving known war criminals for the next forty years. This information started coming to light in the 1990s when, as Sheldon Harris in his book of 1994, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45 and the American Cover Up, the Clinton administration “began to lift the veil of secrecy concerning United States; experiments with human subjects in hundreds of studies during and since the end of World War II.” Forgive the lengthiness of the quote from Harris; but as most people will not be aware of this, I think it important to cite in full; and it nicely provides something of a history of US, Japanese and Soviet bioweaponry:
We now know that American scientists tested humans with mustard gas, other chemical agents, exposed others to radiation tests, and still others to a variety of pathogens without the subjects’ knowledge or consent. In many instances, the most distinguished scientists from the most prestigious American universities participated both in deceiving their patients and in conducting the experiments. Even today, those scientists still active in the field, and their host universities, deny involvement. Recently opened former Soviet archives disclose that the Soviet Union inaugurated a large-scale biological warfare program beginning in the mid-1920s. Humans were used often in experiments that covered a variety of diseases potentially useful in biological warfare. Research facilities were established throughout that vast nation, and, according to Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin, such research continues covertly today.
The Soviet cover was partially blown in 1979 when a massive outbreak of anthrax affected a large area around the Urals city of Sverdlovsk. The most conservative estimates are that at least ninety-six people were infected, and that some sixty-six people died as a result of the outbreak. The true figures, no doubt, are higher. The most terrifying aspect of the outbreak was the disclosure that the Sverdlovsk biological warfare plant accidentally released less than one gram of anthrax spores, possibly as little as several milligrams. It does not take much imagination to calculate how much death and destruction the release of a few grams of anthrax spores into a heavily populated community could cause.
In Japan, scientists who participated in involuntary human experiments during World War II, and earlier, dominated the administration and controlled the areas of research of the country’s National Institute of Health for one half-century after the war ended… it should be noted here that at least seven of the NIH’s Directors and five of the Institute’s Vice Directors, during the 1930s and 1940s, engaged in biological warfare experiments which employed human test subjects. The National Institute of Health is a government-supported agency. Yet these known war criminals were employed by this institution, were given great powers within the organization and continued to use humans without their consent, and often without their knowledge, in investigations that were carried on during the course of more than forty years. It is known that experiments were authorized on prisoners, babies and patients in psychiatric hospitals in 1947, and from 1952 until 1955 by the NIH’s Vice Director Masami Kitaoka. Another researcher conducted bacteriological experiments on infants hospitalized in Tokyo’s National First Hospital in 1952. Later, this same researcher, from 1967 until 1971, used shigella in experiments on soldiers in Japan’s Self-Defence Forces. In May 1985, an NIH researcher experimentally injected an unapproved vaccine against a Japanese encephalitis virus into nearly 200 hospitalized children without their parents’ consent. At different times over a three-year period, 1987, 1988, 1989, Kuniaki Nerome experimentally tested two types of genetically modified vaccine against influenza on approximately forty hospitalized children. Their parents were unaware of the tests and did not give their informed consent for the vaccines to be used on their children.
There are a number of international treaties being drawn up that seek to outlaw biological warfare, and, by implication, involuntary human experimentation. The United States, Russia (the former Soviet Union) and Japan are signatories to the various international agreements outlawing human experimentation, and the production of biological warfare agents. Nevertheless, both these activities appear to be flourishing today in all three countries, as well as elsewhere in various parts of the world. It appears that human testing, biological and chemical weapons will be part of former President George Bush’s so-called new world order for some time to come.
It is true that in 1969 President Nixon made a statement signaling the end of US offensive biological weapons programs and in 1972, along with Soviet Union, the Biological Weapons Conventions, outlawing biological warfare. What one makes of this very much depends upon what one thinks of the efficacy of international declarations, pieces of paper and signatures, and whether one thinks public gestures disclose hidden operations.
One investigative journalist who was doing his job well was Gordon Thomas. Early in his book, Spies and Lies: A History of CIA Mind Control and Germ Warfare, in the midst of discussing the anthrax attacks that took place in the US in October 2001, he writes:
In 2004, the U.S. armory of weaponized biological agents consisted of 19 bacteria, 43 viruses, 14 toxins and 4 rickettsiae. Their use remains outlawed under the Geneva Protocol of 1925. Within five years of the protocol’s creation Italy, Belgium, Canada, France, Britain, the Netherlands, Poland and the Soviet Union had all signed. The United States did not sign until 1975. By then the U.S. had developed a massive biochemical arsenal. Shortly before the September 11 attack, the Pentagon admitted that at Nellis Air Force base, one of the most secret in America, it had established the world’s largest stockpile of biological and chemical weapons. It had been created largely by CIA scientists. One of these scientists had been an obsessive “biochemist whose work pioneered the research which eventually led to the stockpile. His name was Frank Olson.
On that terrible September day in 2001, Olson’s son, Eric, was living in the family home in Frederick, Maryland, a short distance from Fort Detrick, where his father had worked for the CIA. That establishment then—and now—remains a restricted place, guarded by a variety of electronic defenses and armed “guards. As the television set in Eric’s living room endlessly replayed the 9/11 scenes of destruction from New York and Washington, he typed into his computer—on which he had stored so many astonishing matters relating to the death of his father—the most astounding claim of all:
“My father was murdered because the CIA feared he would reveal the biggest American secret of the Cold War, perhaps of all time. It is the secret of how the CIA was involved in biological warfare as well as mind control. My father had a key part in both programs.”
The takeaways from this very brief history are simply that the US has engaged in bioweapon research; that it has stockpiles — an “armory” — of weaponized biological agents; and that it is extremely secretive. Everything can of course have a purely benign spin—the research is purely defensive/preventative. It exists to save us from bio attacks by terrorists or rogue states — like Russia — and that it is important to prevent terrorists and rogue states from getting hold of the research and having access to the biological agents. As we all know the United States is still the only state to have used nuclear weapons. It sets itself up as the moral arbiter of nations and what constitutes a just international order. It is entitled to be an exceptional state—that’s part of its Calvinist heritage (hard to believe when you see its public clowns today) — but it sticks to it. The question is: is the USA a force for the angels? Or does it say one thing and do another? Is its bioresearch all for the human good? Or is it a potential source of devastation?
Irrespective of what you or I might think, the thing that must be born in mind when the Russians went on the offensive about the biolabs in the Ukraine, and the US went from denial (and when that became too implausible) to “nothing to see here, all above-board, and there is nothing remotely dangerous in any of this.”
Apart from what seems to me to be the Western explanation—one can very easily find out why the Russians are bothered, and why it might even be reasonable for them to be bothered when one listens to what they are saying. And what they are saying is deeply disturbing, and as far as I can see it, while the very idea that Ukrainian/ US biolabs could be genuinely perceived as a serious threat to Russia is ridiculed and ‘factchecked’ by repeating government/ intelligence press releases, anyone who reads the Russian Government Report, The activities of the biological laboratories of the US Department of Defense in Ukraine will see that, at the very least, there is a story here, and that to bury it is but one more egregious example of the complete moral and intellectual bankruptcy of our “idea-broking” professionals.
An essential component of that story is the connection between the end of the Soviet Union, the expansion of NATO (which the West refuses to concede is any serious cause of aggravation for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and which involves “experts” and “journalists” repeating the lie that none ever said NATO expansion would stop with the end of the Cold War), and the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. That Program was initiated by the US government working in cooperation with the Pentagon and CIA—the Pentagon Division was originally entitled the “Defense Special Weapons Agency,” before changing its name to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and the US Army Institute for Medical Research on Infectious Diseases. The Program’s ostensible purpose was the elimination of stockpiles of Soviet nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, which effectively gave the US control over former Soviet biological weapons.
Although, it might be a source of puzzlement for those who think that the USA, unlike any other imperial or hegemonic power, simply acts for the good of all human kind — and that it and its allies are not driven by the strategic self-interests of their ruling classes — the “Cooperative Reduction Program” not only involved taking over the stockpiles (and specialists trained in developing and studying pathogens and bioweapon technology) in Russia, but also countries “along the perimeter of the borders of Russia: Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan,” before expanding into other parts of Asia and Africa.
What was meant to be an elimination program morphed into something far more in keeping with a geopolitical strategy commensurate with the continuation of NATO expansion and the United States’ mission of a unipolar world, and a source of concern for the Russians, viz. “one after another transferred their collections of dangerous pathogens to the United States in exchange for American help. Who neutralized them in America, how and whether they were actually destroyed—remained a mystery.”
But then everything to do with the labs was a mystery—which, on a tangential though not completely unrelated matter, is why the issues of the laboratory source of COVID, and the pharmaceutical and financial and political networks involved in the origin of the pandemic (whether true or fake) are still smothered in deceit and mystery.
In any case, what was officially presented as a program of elimination turned into an opportunity too good to miss, as an extensive network of labs working with dangerous viruses were set up in former Soviet countries: “All of them were financed by the US Department of Defense, were called differently everywhere and were created, as a rule, on the basis of scientific research institutes and SES, created back in the Soviet period. One of the features of this program consisted in the fact that in each country not one object was erected, but a whole cluster at once. Part of it was concentrated directly in the capitals of the former republics, while related institutions were located in different parts of the country.”
The Report then identifies what it calls two “strong opinions” about this network in the former Soviet republics, and they are worth citing at length:
First. American biological programs in the post-Soviet states are a way to circumvent the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and Their Destruction (BTWC). Despite the fact that the Convention was signed back in 1972, to this day, the control mechanism does not work largely due to the efforts of the United States, although the world expert community spent more than 45 years developing it. In 2001, the US demonstrated to the world that it had active bioprograms. After the attack on September 11, 2001, deaths of anthrax among people suddenly began to be recorded, and postal envelopes became the transmission route of this infection. The US Congress conducted an investigation (later it turned out that the recipe was combat and came out of the walls of the US Army bacteriological center at Fort Detrick). The attack against its own people, attributed to terrorists, gave huge political dividends to the US leadership. Now there was a formal reason to declare that the States are victims of biological terrorism and therefore unilaterally withdraw from the mechanism of collective control over the implementation of the BTWC. In autumn 2011, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced this in Geneva. At the same time, a biological threat reduction program (the Nunn-Lugar program) was proposed, and the United States began large-scale construction of military biological laboratories, including around Russia. But holding the United States accountable for conducting biological experiments that violate the UN Convention on the Prohibition of Biological Weapons is almost impossible. The US does not recognize the International Criminal Court and was not a signatory to the founding Rome Statute…
Second. The United States, after the collapse of the USSR, became very concerned about the conditions for the storage of pathogens and, as a result, the threat of a biological attack on America. The global American project declares its goal to minimize these threats, which is why tens and hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested in laboratories in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Moldova, and Ukraine. They say that dangerous strains of microorganisms may leak into the environment in these countries. However, it does not explain how, for example, Armenia or Uzbekistan can organize a biological attack on the United States or why the laboratories are mainly located in large cities with a high population density or at a close distance from them. After all, it is much more logical, if there is even a minimal threat of pathogen leakage, to build such facilities in a desert area in order to eliminate the possibility of the spread of pathogens and epidemics.
As for the more specific purposes of the research, the penultimate paragraph of the Report sums it up thus:
The activities of American biological laboratories damage the economy, including by indirect methods (due to the destruction of livestock of diseased livestock, discrediting livestock products on local and world markets), as well as the human potential of Russia (reduction of general immunity and resistance to seasonal diseases, ability to reproduce, decreased efficiency, etc.), the diversion of significant forces and resources of the state to combat artificial outbreaks of infectious diseases. As a result the dependence of the attacked countries (Russia, China and Iran) on the products of the Western pharmaceutical industry is increasing, hoping in the future to offer medicines against artificially caused outbreaks of infectious diseases.
The Report also notes the mutuality of political, military and corporate interests that are embedded in bioresearch, and the geopolitical conditions that the US needs to establish and maintain for it to be effective. Again, I quote at length:
US biolaboratories located along the borders of the Russian Federation have a number of common features. These objects are strictly classified and are located in cities or near cities with a population of over a million (Odessa, Kharkov, Almaty), near seaports (Odessa), airports (Tbilisi, Yerevan, Kyiv) or in earthquake-prone countries such as Armenia (Yerevan, Gyumri, Ijevan) , and even in areas with a probability of 9-magnitude earthquakes (Almaty). The construction of laboratories as part of projects to counter biological threats allows the United States to fully control the biological situation on the territory of both the respective post-Soviet countries and their transboundary neighbors. Virologists know that there is only one step from studying bacteria to creating a bacteriological weapon. In addition, the biolaboratories created by the United States, operating in a closed regime, are removed from the control of the governments of the countries in which they are located. Laboratories are often staffed by Americans with diplomatic immunity, and local health officials do not have direct access to these facilities.
The number of laboratory staff, from 50 to 250 people, far exceeds the number of personnel needed to maintain modern civilian laboratories with stated goals. The heads of the facilities are often appointed by persons from among the military loyal to Washington or intelligence officers. So, the CRL in Tbilisi was previously headed by the chief of Georgian intelligence Anna Zhvania and he was subordinate not to the Ministry of Health, but to the Ministry of Defense of Georgia.
In the case of Ukraine, and unlike other parts of the former USSR, it was not until the Presidency of George W. Bush that bioweapon research was conducted there. Like Obama and Trump after him, George W. originally campaigned on a foreign policy platform of cooperation with Russia—but that counted for zero once elected, and his regime’s setting up of military laboratories in Ukraine would be an important part in a chain of events that has led to the brink we now live upon.
The Report quotes the Political Scientist Dmitry Skvortsov:
“Now there are 15 military laboratories in the country at once, and their activities are absolutely non-transparent and unaccountable. Hence the conclusion: these facilities were created by the Pentagon as manufacturers of biological weapons. Otherwise, why aim to prevent the spread of ‘technologies, viruses and pathogens’ used in the development of biological weapons in facilities where these weapons have never been developed?”
The Report also quotes the former Ukrainian Prime Minister, Mykola Azarov complaining about the secrecy surrounding the research and the lack of controls able to be exercised on the research.
When the story about the existence of the US/Ukraine biolabs was labelled “misinformation,” before being changed to “so what? It’s for our own good,” one might have thought that would be some follow up by journalists about claims of odd viral outbreaks in Ukraine. But that has never happened. Just because journalists do not report things does not mean such things do not exist. And the Report points out that there have been bacterial and viral outbreaks in Ukraine of the sort which indicate laboratory sources.
For example in 2010 and 2015, there were California flu pandemics:
… when the epidemiological threshold was exceeded in 20 regions. From October 2015 to February 2016, more than 350 virologically confirmed deaths from this type of A (H1N1) virus were registered in Ukraine, with 40% of deaths were young people from 18 to 26 years old who did not have chronic diseases.”
Also,
Since 1995, no cases of cholera have been registered in Ukraine. And suddenly in 2011 in Mariupol, 33 people get sick at once. In 2009, 450 Ukrainians in Ternopil suffered from a rare virus that causes hemorrhagic pneumonia. In 2014, there was another outbreak of cholera in Ukraine, which came from nowhere—then 800 people fell ill. The same thing happens in 2015 and 2017: about a hundred cases were registered in Mykolaiv.
In 2015, fatal cases of leptospirosis, rabies and other pathologies, which have long been forgotten in the EU countries, were recorded in Ukraine. In 2016, an epidemic begins in the country botulism, from which four people die, and in 2017—eight more, only according to official data.
In January of the same year, 37 residents of Nikolaev were hospitalized with “jaundice”, six months later 60 people with the same diagnosis were hospitalized in Zaporozhye. At the same time, an outbreak of hepatitis A was noted in Odessa, and 19 children from the boarding school were sent to the hospital in the Odessa region. In November 27 cases of infection have already been recorded in Kharkiv. The virus was transmitted through drinking water.
The Report also notes:
… the existence of 13,476 permanently dysfunctional anthrax sites in the country, which no one deals with, and some of them graze cattle. Only in the Odessa region there are 430 potentially dangerous objects where animals can catch the disease.
This is exactly what happened in 2018, when anthrax broke out in several villages of the Odessa region: five people ended up in the hospital with a skin form of the disease. In the Sumy region there are at least 20 animal burial grounds with anthrax, and not designated in any way.
The situation with the incidence of botulism is also close to catastrophic. In 2016, 115 cases of botulism were reported in Ukraine, of which 12 were fatal. In 2017, the country’s Ministry of health service has confirmed an additional 90 cases and 8 deaths. In subsequent years, the trend continued: 13 outbreaks were registered in the first three months of 2020 botulism, 15 people got sick, including one child of 9 years old.
The Report also draws attention to another tactic of biological weaponry that might be easier to ignore because its effects are far less dramatic and overt—and that is the release of many “small viruses, colds, varieties of runny nose, multiple strains of influenza,” that do not kill or seriously injure those affected, but which impact the general well-being and energy of a population.
And then there are the epidemics affecting agriculture and the economy:
With the beginning of the active work of DTRA in Ukraine, mass deaths from epidemics began not only of people, but also of animals. Avian flu and African swine fever have dealt a heavy blow to the country’s agriculture. For example, in 2015, 60 thousand pigs were killed and burned at the Kalita agricultural plant alone. At the end of 2016, the EU banned the import of poultry meat from Ukraine due to the epidemiological situation in the country. According to published data, since 2017 Ukraine already imports more sausage than it exports. Thus, Ukraine from a competitor in the market of agricultural products is turning into a market for these products from the EU and the USA. The money invested in the laboratory is returned.
Another example were the outbreaks of bird flu was in 2016 and 2017 that led to a temporary bans by the EU and some Eastern European countries on Ukrainian poultry.
Finally, let me cite one last section of the Report which discusses another report undertaken by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) “analyzing the risks associates with activities in the field of American biological laboratories. In particular, the document notes that the program provides for the accumulation in the Kherson Regional Laboratory Center of the State Sanitary and Epidemiological Service of Ukraine of samples of pathogens from different regions of Ukraine under the pretext of studying the specifics of local strains and determining the degree of virulence of the obtained samples among the population”:
The next stage of cooperation, according to the SBU, should be the generalization and referral of research results to the Center for Biological Research at the US Defense Ministry, ostensibly to attract American specialists to develop vaccine samples that are maximally adapted to the residents of a particular region. The persistent efforts of the United States to resume the project indicate the intention to establish control over all domestic studies of pathogens of particularly dangerous infectious diseases that can be used for creation or modernization of new types of selective biological weapons. At the same time, it is not excluded that in the conditions of broad rights and powers guaranteed by the program, a foreign party will be able to study its own test systems on the territory of Ukraine, which creates a potential threat to epidemiological and epizootic situations, both in the region and in the country as a whole.
In sum, what the Russians fear about the biolabs is that research has been done with the explicit intention of breaking down the “national biological protection system.”
I have not the slightest doubt that if these claims were being made about the Russians the mainstream media would be creating a state of utter hysteria in the Western population. Already Western propaganda has succeeded in dehumanizing not only the Russians, but anyone who does not go along with the primary main stream media and the Pentagon and Intelligence claims made about the cause, meaning and justification of the war.
For my part, and as I have indicated in various essays for the Postil, I cannot ignore the constant calls for depopulation coming from the World Economic Forum and the likes of such gigantic brains and compassionate people as Klaus Schwab and Yuval Harari—and I cannot but think that bioweaponry can easily be used for that purpose.
Indeed, I ask myself, if it is necessary to save the planet by killing a few billion people, why wouldn’t our global leaders resort to biological weaponry? Perhaps that weaponry might be used in the most charitable way by simply attacking the reproductive capacities of the weakest of the species — and the weakest would be those who come from nations whose biological protective systems have been weakened through the deliberate release of pathogens.
That is not a conspiracy theory, it is simply posing the question, why would those who openly conspire to achieve the world they want — one with far less “useless people,” and as Harari points out without the least hesitation or sense of shame, most of the world’s population simply no longer have any further use — also not do the deeds that achieve their ends?
One way of doing the culling is to condemn entire peoples by dehumanizing them — initially by taking out nations who have been branded as “monsters,” and when that is not enough simply moving on to the useless.
As for those of you who think the concerns of the Russian “monsters” are just lies and propaganda, you might ask yourself why have they just drafted a proposal urging the UN Security Council to “set up a commission consisting of all members of the Security Council to investigate the claims against the US and Ukraine contained in the complaint of the Russian Federation regarding the compliance with obligations under the [Biological Weapons] Convention in the context of the activities biological laboratories in the territory of Ukraine,” and present a report by November 30, 2022?
Wayne Cristaudo is a philosopher, author, and educator, who has published over a dozen books. He also doubles up as a singer songwriter. His latest album can be found here.
November 2, 2022 Posted by aletho | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CIA, Covid-19, Ukraine, United States | Leave a comment
GUINEA PIG KIDS
FULL BBC DOCUMENTARY (2004)
HIV positive children – some only a few months old – are enrolled in toxic experiments without the consent of guardians or relatives by US government officials in partnership with the Big Pharma/vaccine industry.
In some cases where parents have refused to give children their medication, they have been placed in care.
The city’s Administration of Children’s Services (ACS) does not even require a court order to place HIV kids with foster parents or in children’s homes, where they can continue to give them experimental drugs.
Reporter Jamie Doran talks to parents and guardians who fear for the lives of their loved ones, and to a child who spent years on a drugs programme that made him and his friends ill.
November 2, 2022 Posted by aletho | Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | Human rights, United States | Leave a comment
Moscow Wants Answers Over Truss’ Alleged ‘It’s Done’ SMS to Blinken Moments After Nord Stream Blasts
Samizdat – 01.11.2022
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wants answers regarding the mysterious “It’s done” iPhone message allegedly sent by then-Prime Minister Liz Truss to the US secretary of state moments after the sabotage attacks against the Nord Stream network in late September.
“To be honest, I don’t care who got this information and how. I’m interested in London’s answer to the following question: Did Prime Minister Liz Truss of Britain send a message to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken immediately after the Nord Stream gas pipeline was blown up with the words ‘It’s done’?” Zakharova asked in a Telegram post Tuesday.
The spokeswoman suggested that “millions of people around the world” were waiting for answers to the question of how the planet’s energy security was undermined, “and what role the Anglo-Saxons played in this terrorist attack.”
On Monday, a US defense and national security news outlet reported that among the information suspected to have been leaked from Truss’s “hacked cell phone” was the aforementioned text message between the now former UK leader and the US top diplomat.
Internet entrepreneur and free speech activist Kim Dotcom mentioned the “It’s Done” message in a Twitter thread Sunday, shortly after British media ran a piece on Truss’s hacked phone.
“iCloud admin access rocks,” sarcastically Dotcom wrote, referring to the Apple service allowing for iPhone text messages, files, photos and other information to be saved ‘to the cloud’ and accessed by authorized computers (thus making user files vulnerable to hacking). “It’s not just the Five Eyes that have backdoor admin access to all Big Tech databases,” Dotcom added, referencing the intelligence alliance of Anglosphere nations including the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. “Russia and China have sophisticated cyber units too.”
“The funny thing is Govt officials with top security clearance still prefer using iPhones over their NSA & GCHQ issued encrypted shit-phones,” Dotcom wrote.
A series of explosions knocked out three of the four strings of the Nord Stream network on September 26. Western officials and media immediately began singing in unison that Russia blew up its own $20 billion pipeline infrastructure for reasons unknown. The Kremlin accused the West of an “unprecedented act of state terrorism” involving Nord Stream, but did not name any specific states, with President Vladimir Putin only hinting involvement by the “Anglo-Saxons” (typically a reference to Brits and Americans in Russian usage).
After a month-long investigation, the Russian Ministry of Defense revealed Saturday that Britain’s Royal Navy took part in the planning, organization and carrying out of the Nord Stream attack.
The damage to the Nord Stream network has robbed Central and Western Europe of a major traditional source of natural gas ahead of the winter heating season. Yamal-Europe and Soyuz, two major Russian overland pipelines delivering natural gas to Europe, have also been halted, or experienced a major drop in usage, sparking questions about the region’s energy security. Late last month, French President Emmanuel Macron complained that Paris’s American allies had jacked up the price on natural gas deliveries to Europe, and that Europeans were being made to pay “3-4 times” more than Americans for the same gas. “That is unfair. These are double standards,” Macron complained.
November 1, 2022 Posted by aletho | False Flag Terrorism, War Crimes | Russia, UK | Leave a comment
How Fauci ignored ethics and the law as he barbarically experimented on babies and children
By Sally Beck | TCW Defending Fredom | October 21, 2022
Yesterday we published the first part of our extract from Robert F Kennedy Jnr’s book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, a critical look at Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden. This second part continues to report on horrific drug trials carried out on children.
***
Warning: Some of the following details are distressing.
***
Two years later, [investigative reporter Celia] Farber would follow the trail of child casualties left by Dr Fauci’s Aids branch, DAIDS, in Uganda, exposing the pattern of abusing African mothers and children.
After the BBC documentary aired, AP reporter John Solomon made his own efforts to calculate the number of children who died in Dr Fauci’s Aids drug experiments. Solomon’s May 2005 AP investigation revealed that at least 465 New York City foster children were subjects in NIAID’s [US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] trials and that Dr Fauci’s agency provided fewer than one-third (142) of those children with an advocate – the minimum legally mandated protection.
A March 2004 letter from Vera Sharav to Dr David Horowitz, director of FDA’s [Food and Drink Administration] Office of Compliance, charged Dr Fauci’s HIV drug trials with numerous violations of federal law, including NIAID’s failure to protect the rights and safety of foster children, particularly during the perilous Phase 1 stages in which drug companies determine toxicity effects by exploring maximum tolerance levels. Sharav accused Dr Fauci’s team of illegally failing to provide state wards and orphans with independent guardians to represent their interests and protect their rights during brutal, dangerous, and often agonizingly painful experiments.
The 2004 FDA investigation of Dr Fauci’s AIDS research division urged the head of NIH to insist on better management from NIAID. ‘The overall management of this Division requires careful review,’ the report said. A May 2005 Congressional hearing also concluded that NIAID’s experiments had violated federal statutes.
In testimony before Congress, NIAID and its local partner – New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) – sought to justify the unethical research practices by claiming they were providing first-class, cutting-edge treatments to HIV-infected children who could otherwise not afford expensive medicines.
However, AHRP’s [Alliance for Human Research Protection] investigation revealed that many of the children NIAID subjected to Dr Fauci’s experiments were perfectly healthy and may not even have been HIV-infected. Those investigations focused on thirty-six of the trials. For obvious reasons, clinical trials virtually always occur in hospital settings with trained medical personnel, doctors and nurses, in attendance. However, ICC [Incarnation Children’s Center] was a non-medical facility. The decision to allow experiments with highly toxic drugs at an orphanage devoid of medical personnel was, itself, a stunning act of malpractice. Subsequent events suggest that the decision was deliberate, calculated to avoid scientific and ethical objections that might have put Pharma PIs [principal investigators] at odds with trained medical professionals. Publicly, NIAID pretended it would permit pharmaceutical companies to conduct their dangerous dose tolerance experiments only on children who had terminal Aids and were therefore likely to die anyhow. However, AHRP found that NIAID was quietly allowing its Pharma partners to experiment not only on children with laboratory-confirmed HIV infection, but also those ‘presumed’ to be infected. In other words, NIAID required no proof that these children actually had HIV. AHRP accused NIAID of exposing children who might never have developed Aids to lethal risks and the horrific adverse effects of highly toxic drugs for purposes that were not therapeutic, but purely experimental.
On March 8, 2004, NIH [National Institutes of Health, of which Fauci’s NIAID is a division] rejected a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the adverse event reports from NIAID’s trials conducted at ICC, citing FOIA’s ‘trade secrets’ and ‘privacy’ exemptions. AHRP then filed a complaint on March 10 with the FDA and the Office of Human Research Protections (OHRP), charging that NIAID was depriving foster children of legally mandated federal protections against research risks. Two subsequent investigations validated AHRP’s complaint.
John Solomon’s AP investigation finally brought Dr Fauci’s experiments to national prominence. AP identified at least forty-eight Aids experiments NIAID conducted on foster children in seven states – mostly in violation of the federal requirement that NIAID provide those children with an advocate. In addition to the Dapsone trial that killed at least ten children, NIAID sponsored another study testing a combination of adult antiretroviral drugs. AP reported that of the fifty-two children in the trial, there were twenty-six moderate to severe reactions – nearly all in infants. The side effects included rash, fever, and dangerous drops in infection-fighting white blood cells.
From the outset, Dr Fauci’s experiments served his vain obsession to develop an HIV vaccine. (Despite these expenditures of tens of billions of dollars, he has failed – for forty years – to develop an HIV vaccine that was safe or effective for human use.) Medical records that NIAID ultimately and reluctantly released proved that Dr Fauci’s PIs were testing his dangerous vaccines on children from one month to eighteen years old. AP writer John Solomon confirmed that despite contrary requirements in official NIAID protocols, NIAID was knowingly allowing its Pharma partners to violate NIAID’s written study protocols by conducting these experiments on children with and without proof of HIV infection.
For example, published reports acknowledge that NIAID, Genentech, and Micro-Genesys co-sponsored a vaccine trial code-named ACTG #218. The ACTG #218 protocol states ‘Patients must have: Documented asymptomatic HIV infection,’ and the ‘Expected Total Enrolment’ was seventy-two. However, an internal report acknowledges that NIAID was allowing the companies to openly violate those requirements: ‘125 immunized children proved to be HIV uninfected’. Another report stated: ‘A total of 126 children were not infected’. NIAID’s final analysis acknowledged that ACTG #218 ‘showed no clinical benefit to vaccine recipients’.
Another HIV Phase 1 vaccine trial, ACTG #230, tested two experimental vaccines, one by Genentech, another by Chiron/Biocine. This time, the protocol openly declared: ‘Accepts Healthy Volunteers’. As Solomon discovered, the ‘volunteer’ subjects of that unethical experiment were newborns aged three days or less. NIAID randomized these infants to one of three doses of either experimental HIV vaccine or placebo. These reports validate AHRP’s concerns that Dr Fauci experimented on infants and children who were never at risk of Aids, and that he exposed them to deadly risks and agonizing discomforts in a speculative drug and vaccine exercise that offered absolutely no potential benefit for them.
Dr Fauci was certainly aware of the peril to which he was subjecting his gallant infant ‘volunteers’. Most of the drugs that his PIs tested on these children were previously approved for adults with Aids and carried Black Box warnings of potentially lethal side effects: Aldesleukin, Dapsone, Didanosine, Lamivudine, Nevirapine, Ritonavir, Stavudine, and Zidovudine.
Finally, even in cases when the children were genuinely ill, Dr Fauci’s pretence that his experiments were compassionate gestures to impoverished orphans was always a sham. NIAID’s claim that their experiments were the only opportunity for those children to receive ‘life-saving’ drugs was a canard from the outset. New York State law requires that physicians provide ‘life-saving’ treatment to wards of the state, if need be, to provide treatment ‘off-label’.
Furthermore, drug companies do not primarily design clinical trials to benefit the individual subjects. Their purpose is to gain safety and efficacy information that may prove helpful for subsequent patients and be profitable for their bottom line. Finally, not all subjects get the ‘most promising’ drug in a trial; some get placebos.
Liam Scheff’s January 2004 article, The House that AIDS Built, ignited an outraged internet controversy, prompting the New York Press to publish a follow-up article by Scheff,Inside Incarnation. Scheff’s detailed descriptions are worth reading if only to understand the sacrifices that Dr Fauci demanded from his venturesome ‘volunteer’ babies for ‘the greater good’.
Scheff’s chronicle suggests that Dr Fauci and his PIs purposefully took advantage of Incarnation Children’s Center’s status as a non-medical facility. The PIs had free rein to engage in conduct that experienced professional nurses and doctors would have flagged as unethical and illegal.
When children declined to take the toxic drugs, NIAID and its Pharma partners arranged to surgically implant feeding tubes in their bellies to force obedience. Scheff wrote, ‘When Mimi [a staff member with no medical background] started at ICC, the tubes were used infrequently. “But when the kids got older, a lot of them started to refuse the medication,” she recalled. “Then they started coming in with the tubes more and more. Kids who refused too much, or threw up too much, they’d get a tube. First it was through the nose. But then it was more and more through the stomach. You’d see a certain child refusing over and over, and one day they’d come back from the hospital from surgery, and they had a tube coming right out of their stomach. If you asked why, the doctors said it was for ‘compliance’ – the regimen. Got to keep up the regimen,” said Mimi. “Those were the rules”.’
Mimi describes how children suffered – and how some died: ‘One girl, a six-year-old, Shyanne . . . She was the most delicate little flower – beautiful, polite, full of life. Her family never gave her meds. So, Administration for Children’s Services brought her into ICC . . . she came in and started the meds. And it was three months, maybe three months. And she had a stroke. She could not see. She was this normal girl, singing, jumping, playing. Then, poof, stroked out. Blind. We were freaked out. Then, in a few months, she was gone – dead.’
Between 1985 and 2005, NIAID and its Pharma partners conscripted at least 532 infants and children from foster care in New York City as human subjects of clinical trials testing NIAID’s experimental Aids drugs and vaccines. ICC and the medical research centers that conducted the trials received substantial payments for hosting the experiments, from both the National Institutes of Health and the manufacturers of the drugs. Among those companies were Merck, Bristol Myers Squibb, Micro-Genesys, Biocine, Glaxo, Wellcome, and Pfizer.
Further reading: https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/exclusive-an-interview-with-faucis-nemesis/
October 31, 2022 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Anthony Fauci, HIV/AIDS, Human rights, NIAID, United States | Leave a comment
Exposed: How Anthony Fauci tortured vulnerable children in his obsessive hunt for an HIV vaccine
By Sally Beck | TCW Defending Freedom | October 20, 2022
Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to President Biden and director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for 38 years, has resigned and is leaving his post in December. He also steps down as director of the National Institutes for Health (NIH); both organisations are government-funded.
The 81-year-old virologist, who has served seven presidents, is quitting not because (as he says) he wants ‘new challenges’, but because of two books Robert F Kennedy Jnr (RFK) has written exposing him as a liar and a fraud, says Tony Lyons, President at Skyhorse Publishing, the independent publisher of both books.
Lyons said: ‘He used every available form of censorship to protect himself about the allegations in the first book and he doesn’t have any tools left to combat the likely congressional hearings in January.
‘Censorship as a government weapon against dissent has grown to unprecedented levels in the US. It’s a danger to the future of real science, real freedom, and real democracy.’
RFK’s first book, The Real Anthony Fauci, sold one million copies and topped the New York Times best-seller list despite extreme mainstream media censorship. It exposed Fauci’s role in the Covid pandemic and in the disastrous response to the HIV/Aids crisis in the 1980s and 1990s.
In a second book called ‘The Wuhan Cover Up – How US Health Officials Conspired with the Chinese Military to Hide the Origins of COVID-19’ due to be released next year, RFK uncovers the complex web of control and censorship at the heart of this story. Kennedy accuses Fauci of being the architect of the pandemic by funding ‘gain-of-function’ research – or bioweapon research, in plain English – in China’s Wuhan lab, the source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
If the books were not enough to send Fauci running for cover, this week RFK released a free-to-view documentary The Real Anthony Fauci Documentary (salsalabs.org) based on his first book’s findings.
Here is an extract from The Real Anthony Fauci, which details experiments he sanctioned on vulnerable American children during his HIV research.
***
Warning: Some of the following details are distressing.
In 2004, investigative journalist Liam Scheff chronicled Dr Fauci’s secretive experiments on hundreds of HIV-positive foster children at Incarnation Children’s Center (ICC) in New York City and numerous sister facilities in New York and six other states between 1988 and 2002. Those experiments were the core of Dr Fauci’s career-defining effort to develop a second generation of profitable AIDS drugs as an encore to AZT.
Scheff described how Dr Fauci’s NIAID and his Big Pharma partners turned black and Hispanic foster kids into lab rats, subjecting them to torture and abuse in a grim parade of unsupervised drug and vaccine studies: “This former convent houses a revolving stable of children who’ve been removed from their own homes by the Agency for Child Services [ACS]. These children are black, Hispanic, and poor. Many of their mothers had a history of drug abuse and have died. Once taken into ICC, the children become subjects of drug trials sponsored by [Dr Fauci’s] NIAID (a division of the National Institutes of Health), NICHD (the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development) in conjunction with some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies – GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Genentech, Chiron/Biocine and others.”
NIAID’s Pharma partners remunerated Incarnation Children’s Center (ICC) for supplying children for the tests. As usual, Dr Fauci had the safety oversight board rigged with his loyal principal investigators (PIs), foremost of whom was Dr Stephen Nicholas, a generously funded NIAID AIDS drug researcher. “Stephen Nicholas was not only director of the ICC until 2002; he also simultaneously sat on the Paediatric Medical Advisory Panel, which was supposed to oversee the tests—which signifies a serious conflict of interest,” criticizes [Holocaust survivor and medical abuse investigator] Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), a medical industry watchdog organization.
Scheff continued, “The drugs being given to the children are toxic – they’re known to cause genetic mutation, organ failure, bone marrow death, bodily deformations, brain damage, and fatal skin disorders.
“If the children refuse the drugs, they’re held down and force fed. If the children continue to resist, they’re taken to Columbia Presbyterian hospital, where a surgeon puts a plastic tube through their abdominal wall into their stomachs. From then on, the drugs are injected directly into their intestines.
“In 2003, two children, ages six and twelve, had debilitating strokes due to drug toxicities. The six-year-old went blind. They both died shortly after. Another fourteen-year-old died recently. An eight-year-old boy had two plastic surgeries to remove large, fatty, drug-induced lumps from his neck.
“This isn’t science fiction. This is AIDS research.”
Even the foster children who survived Fauci’s experiments reported dire side effects, ranging from skin outbreaks and hives, nausea, and vomiting, to sharp drops in immune response and fevers—all common adverse reactions associated with the drugs he was targeting for development.
During one of his trials involving the drug Dapsone, at least ten children died. A May 2005 Associated Press investigation reported that those “children died from a variety of causes, including four from blood poisoning.” Researchers complained they were unable to determine a safe, useful dosage. Their guessing game cost those children their lives.
“An unexpected finding in our study,” the researchers pitilessly observed, “was that overall mortality while receiving the study drug was significantly higher in the daily Dapsone group.” NIAID researchers shrugged off the deaths as a mystery: “This finding remains unexplained.”
Vera Sharav spent years investigating Dr Fauci’s torture chambers as part of her lifelong mission to end cruel medical experimentation on children. Sharav told me, “Fauci just brushed all those dead babies under the rug. They were collateral damage in his career ambitions. They were throw-away children.” Sharav said that at least eighty children died in Dr Fauci’s Manhattan concentration camp and accused NIAID and its partners of disposing of children’s remains in mass graves.
The BBC’s heart-breaking 2004 documentary, Guinea Pig Kids, chronicles the savage barbarity of Dr Fauci’s science projects from the perspective of the affected children. That year, the BBC hired investigative reporter Celia Farber to conduct field research for the film, which exposes the dark underside of Big Pharma’s stampede to develop lucrative new AIDS remedies. “I found the mass grave at Gate of Heaven cemetery in Hawthorne, New York,” she told me. “I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was a very large pit with AstroTurf thrown over it, which you could actually lift up. Under it one could see dozens of plain wooden coffins, haphazardly stacked. There may have been 100 of them. I learned there was more than one child’s body in each. Around the pit was a semi-circle of several large tombstones on which upward of one thousand children’s names had been engraved. I wrote down every name. I’m still wondering who the rest of those kids were. As far as I know, nobody has ever asked Dr Fauci that haunting question.
“I remember the teddy bears and hearts in piles around the pit and I recall the flies buzzing around. The job of recording all those names took all day. NIAID, New York, and all the hospital PIs were stonewalling us. We couldn’t get any accurate estimate of the number of children who died in the NIAID experiments, or who they were. I went to check the gravestone names against death certificates at the NYC Department of Health, which you could still do at that time. The BBC wanted to match these coffins to the names of children who were known to have been at ICC. It was a very slow, byzantine project with tremendous institutional resistance, but we did turn up a few names. We learned the story of a father who had come out of prison looking for his son. He was told his son had died at ICC of AIDS and there were no medical records, as they’d all been ‘lost in a fire.’ He was devastated. This story ran in the NY Post, believe it or not. But one after the other, every media outlet that touched this story got cold feet. Even then, the medical cartel had this power to kill this kind of story. Dr Fauci has built his career on that attitude. Nobody even asks him a follow-up question. NIAID’s narrative, at that time, was that these children were among the doomed as they ‘had AIDS,’ so supposedly they were all going to die anyway. When people died, in large numbers, gruesome deaths, NIAID’s medical researchers called it ‘lessons learned.’”
Further reading: https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/exclusive-an-interview-with-faucis-nemesis/
In Part 2: How Fauci ignored ethics and regulations in his experiments on babies and children.
October 30, 2022 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, NIAID, NIH, Tony Fauci, United States | Leave a comment
FDA Slow-Walked Studies on COVID Vaccine Safety Signals in Elderly
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 26, 2022
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) took more than a year to follow up on a potential increase in serious adverse events in elderly people who received Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, according to an investigative report published Tuesday by The BMJ.
According to The BMJ, in July 2021, the FDA “quietly disclosed” the findings of a potential increase in four types of serious adverse events in elderly people who had received a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine: acute myocardial infarction, disseminated intravascular coagulation, immune thrombocytopenia, and pulmonary embolism.
The FDA disclosure lacked specific details, such as the magnitude of the increased potential risk, and the agency said it would “share further updates and information with the public as they become available.”
The FDA did not alert physicians or the public, via a press release or any other means, The BMJ investigator said.
Eighteen days later, the FDA published a study planning document that outlined a protocol for a follow-up epidemiological study for investigating the matter more thoroughly.
The BMJ said:
“This recondite technical document disclosed the unadjusted relative risk ratio estimates originally found for the four serious adverse events, which ranged from 42% to 91% increased risk. (Neither absolute risk increases nor confidence intervals were provided.)”
That was over a year ago. “More than a year later, however, the status and results of the follow-up study are unknown,” The BMJ reported, adding:
“The agency has not published a press release, or notified doctors, or published the findings by preprint or the scientific literature or updated the vaccine’s product label.”
The BMJ report also alleged the FDA has not “ publicly acknowledged other published observational studies or clinical trial reanalyses reporting compatible results.”
FDA ‘irresponsible’ for keeping information from scientific community, critics say
Critics of the FDA’s failure to warn the public voiced their concerns about the data to The BMJ and called on the FDA to notify the public immediately.
“To keep this information from the scientific community and prevent us from analysing it ourselves, is irresponsible,” said Dr. Joseph Fraiman, an emergency medicine physician in New Orleans who recently carried out a reanalysis of serious adverse events in Pfizer and Moderna’s randomized trials. “It presumes that these organisations are perfect and cannot benefit from independent scrutiny.”
Dr. Tracy Høeg, an epidemiologist and physician currently conducting COVID-19 vaccine research with the Florida Department of Health and California’s Marin County Department of Health and Human Services, told The BMJ :
“The fact that the FDA found these four safety signals means they should have followed up on the results and I don’t understand why we haven’t had more information since then.
“It has been over a year.”
Fraiman concurred. “The protocols say that they’re looking into these data further, but I’d like to know the results now, it’s been long enough. They need to view this from a public health perspective, they need to consider a person’s right to informed consent.”
“As physicians, we recommend medical therapies and we need to explain the full risks and benefits to the patient. This is not happening,” Fraiman added.
Dr. Dick Bijl, an epidemiologist in the Netherlands, pointed out, “The FDA managed to determine the efficacy of the vaccines in a short period of time, but they have not analysed the pharmacovigilance data with the same speed. If they found signals in July 2021, they should have been analysed and published within months.”
Bijl is the president of the International Society of Drug Bulletins and has campaigned for years to get safety data communicated to doctors in a timely fashion. He told The BMJ he credits his organization for prompting the World Health Organization to begin publishing regular updates about drug safety signals in its WHO Pharmaceuticals Newsletter so that all doctors can take note of them.
Bijl said:
“The FDA should have informed doctors about any early safety signals from the vaccines.
“Most doctors are not trained to, nor are they focused on, recognising side effects, especially because vaccines are generally regarded as quite safe. It’s important that doctors are told what to look out for.”
Why the delay in acknowledging safety signal study results?
The FDA’s July 2021 findings came from the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) “near real-time” surveillance system called Rapid Cycle Analysis (RCA) that the FDA used to monitor a list of 14 adverse events of special interest.
Data obtained from the RCA system is not intended to establish a causal relationship between a vaccine and adverse events but rather is intended to detect potential safety signals rapidly.
The RCA data referenced by the agency in its July 2021 disclosure study appeared to only detect safety signals associated with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.
“The agency said the associations were not identified for the other two COVID-19 vaccines authorised in the U.S. made by Moderna and Janssen (Johnson & Johnson),” The BMJ said.
The July 2021 follow-up study protocol stated there is a “manuscript in preparation” for the original RCA study but to date, nothing has been published for either that original study or the follow-up study.
According to The BMJ, the FDA’s medical record review and statistical analyses have recently been completed, and the overall study results are “currently under internal review.”
The FDA downplayed the findings:
“The findings to date from the fully adjusted epidemiologic study on the primary series vaccinations do not provide strong support for an association between the vaccine and any of the four outcomes described in the posting to the FDA website. Additional analyses, including evaluation of booster doses, are still being conducted. Release of the study findings is expected later this fall.”
Furthermore, according to The BMJ, the FDA made no public announcement when the results from an unspecified study it conducted raised safety concerns — but instead “buried” the findings in the introduction section of an Aug. 31, 2022, research protocol document:
“In a cohort study of the third dose safety in the Medicare population where historical controls were used, we detected a statistically significant risk for immune thrombocytopenia (incidence rate ratio 1.66, confidence interval 1.17 to 2.29) and acute myocardial infarction (IRR 1.15, CI 1.02 to 1.29) among people with prior covid-19 diagnosis as well as an increased risk of Bell’s palsy (IRR 1.11, CI 1.03 to 1.19) and pulmonary embolism (IRR 1.05, CI 1.0001 to 1.100) in general.”
Additionally, a June 2022 observational study from three Nordic countries — Denmark, Finland and Norway — found statistically significant increases in thromboembolic and thrombocytopenic outcomes following both Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.
Dr. Christine Stabell Benn, M.D., Ph.D., a vaccinologist and professor in global health at the University of Southern Denmark, told The BMJ of yet another study — this one done by her research group that is currently published in preprint.
“The safety signal seems to be gathering around cardiovascular and cerebral vascular events, things to do with circulation and our larger organs, and these are the same signals that appear to be popping up in the FDA surveillance data as well,” Benn said.
She added, “We don’t want to create a lot of unnecessary anxiety and we can’t say there is now proof that the vaccines cause these events because the data are of poor quality, but we can say there is a danger signal, and the medical profession needs to be alerted to this.”
Earlier this year, the CDC admitted to deliberately withholding critical data on the COVID-19 booster shots and hospital admissions, The BMJ reported.
Kristen Nordlund, CDC spokesperson, in February told the New York Times the agency had been slow to release data to the public on breakthrough infections “because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.”
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
his article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
October 29, 2022 Posted by aletho | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA, United States | Leave a comment
British navy involved in Nord Stream 2 ‘terrorist attack’ – Russia
Samizdat – October 29, 2022
Units of the British Navy were involved in a “terrorist attack”, which destroyed the key Nord Stream gas pipelines, the Russian Defence Ministry alleged on Saturday.
Writing on its official Telegram channel, the ministry alleged that Royal Navy operatives “took part in planning, supporting and implementing” the plot to blow up the infrastructure in September. It did not provide any direct evidence to support its assertion.
The accusation follows a Russian Foreign Ministry claim that NATO conducted a military exercise during the summer, close to the location where the undersea explosions occurred.
The September incident put the pipelines, connecting Germany to Russia, out of commission. Western countries have blocked a transparent international investigation.
The Defence Ministry further alleged that the same UK operatives trained Ukrainians involved in a drone offensive in Crimea earlier on Saturday.
In late September, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova noted that this summer, NATO conducted military drills not far from Bornholm, which featured intensive use of “deep-sea equipment.’’
While the officials stopped short of naming the culprit, they were said to be “working under the assumption that Russia was behind the blasts.” Moscow has repeatedly denied that it had anything to do with the incident.
Meanwhile, Sky News has cited a UK defense official as saying Nord Stream 1 and 2 could have been damaged by a remotely detonated underwater explosive device. At the time, the broadcaster said the pipelines might have been breached by mines lowered to the seabed, or explosives dropped from a boat or planted by an undersea drone.
October 29, 2022 Posted by aletho | False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | NATO, Russia, UK | Leave a comment
The Ukraine war of words that heralds ethnic cleansing
By Dr Gregory Slysz | TCW Defending Freedom | October 28, 2022
As The Ukrainian forces and their Western backers celebrate their recent military advance, the fate of ethnic Russians in the reclaimed territories looks bleak now that local and national leaders have declared a reckoning against those whom they consider to be collaborators and traitors.
It’s a policy that originates from the early stages of the conflict based on a law passed in March that threatened anyone who co-operated with the occupying Russian authorities with up to 15 years of imprisonment together with the confiscation of property. Hitherto there have been many arrests of those accused of pro-Russian collaboration, including the leader of Ukraine’s official parliamentary opposition Viktor Medvedchuk, and assassinations of officials such as Alexei Kovalev, deputy head of the military and civil administration in the Kherson region. But as the Ukrainian forces wrest back territory from Russia, a wide net is being cast against alleged collaborators that extends well beyond officials to include teachers, social media warriors and victims of unsubstantiated claims of snitches, shedding light on the intentions of Ukrainian authorities in the unlikely event of total victory.
Ukraine is a culturally heterogenous population in which linguistic affiliation is complex, being governed by both cultural and social situations. At least 17 per cent of Ukrainians claim Russian heritage, with about 14 per cent declaring Russian as their main language and a further 17 per cent Russo-Ukrainian bilingualism, with an unknown number opting to converse in a hybrid Surzhyk dialect. Russian speakers are overwhelmingly concentrated in the eastern and southern regions of the country. It’s a situation, moreover, that has reflected the electoral geography of the country of both parliamentary and presidential elections with the eastern and southern parts of the country exhibiting close affinities with Russia.
Starting as a reasonable initiative at nation-building that intended to correct the inequalities of institutional Russification of the Soviet era, language policy came to be weaponised by nationalist political forces that sought to use it to marginalise Russian culture. Although a cultural reset was inevitable after the collapse of the Soviet Union to redress years of Russification, its initial steps were measured, such as the Law of Languages of 1989, which extended legislative protections to Russian as well as other languages. For Ukraine’s increasingly influential nationalists, overwhelmingly located in the West of the country, the Law was intolerable and unsurprisingly fell victim to the Maidan coup of 2014, that replaced the Russophile President Viktor Yanukovich with Petro Poroshenko.
While its provisions were maintained by Ukraine’s subsequent leadership, following international condemnation of its revocation, the decision of the Constitutional Court to deem the Law unconstitutional was viewed by the Russian minority as a sign of a broader assault on Ukraine’s Russian heritage and served to fuel separatist sentiment in the Crimea and the Donbas. It also played into the hands of Vladimir Putin who could now claim to be the champion of Ukraine’s oppressed Russian speakers, by military means if necessary. Such fears were not unwarranted as in 2019 a new language law sought to end the hitherto ad hoc implementation of existing legislation and subject transgressors to severe fines. Poroshenko, who was campaigning for re-election, weaponised Ukraine’s language policy with his election slogan ‘Army, faith, language’, declaring that ‘the only opinion that we weren’t going to account for [in drafting the legislation] is the opinion of Moscow’. Salt was further rubbed into the wounds of the third of the country which rejected it by its being signed off by the Speaker of Parliament, Andrei Parubiy, a former activist in the neo-Nazi Social-National Party, who warned chillingly that ‘those people who try to revise the language law . . . will soon feel the whole anger of the Ukrainian people’. Remaining loopholes were filled in January 2022, just before Russia’s military incursion, which for instance compelled Russian language print media to produce Ukrainian translations for all publications in a move that de facto targeted Russian for discrimination.
To indigenous Russian speakers, such rhetoric marked the creation of an ethnic state in which they were not welcome. The escalation of the war in 2022 seemed to confirm their worst fears as not only did Russian become ‘the language of the enemy’ but things Russian, political parties, music, literature were officially shunned, banned or marginalised in a policy that hitherto had been executed only by the far right nationalists of Lviv City Council in West Ukraine. Whereas then the likes of Canadian and British ambassadors joined Moscow in condemning such action as ‘just plain dumb’ and intolerant, now such nationwide ‘de-Russification’ initiatives were met with silence.
International opinion recognised Ukraine’s language policy as conflict-bearing due to its increasingly divisive and discriminatory nature. The scrapping of minority language provisions by Ukraine’s Constitutional Court in 2014, for instance, raised concerns in the European Parliament which deemed it as ‘undermining any notions of justice, freedom, civilisation, progress and democracy’ and called for the EU Commission to ‘condemn the action of the Ukrainian Parliament and the nationalistic attacks on minority communities in Ukraine’. The 2019 law came under similar criticism from the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe’s advisory body on constitutional affairs, which declared that it threatened to become ‘a source of inter-ethnic tensions within Ukraine’. It reiterated its conclusion following the passing of the January 2022 Law, noting that ‘historical oppression of Ukrainian . . . may lead to the adoption of positive measures aimed at promoting Ukrainian, but this cannot justify depriving the Russian language and its speakers of the protection granted to other languages’.
Both the intra-parliamentary brawls and street standoffs between Ukrainian and Russian speakers during the passage of the language legislation were chilling portents of what was come. Although the escalation of the war in 2022 has seen some ethnic Ukrainian Russian speakers distance themselves from ‘the language of the enemy’ and embrace Ukrainian as their main language, it has also seen ethnic Russians fortify their Russian identity. While this in itself has demonstrated the complexity and malleability of identity in Ukraine, it has also reinforced pre-existing cultural fissures, leaving ethnic Russians with no option other than to embrace Mother Russia as their homeland.
While the conflict in the Donbas since 2014 rendered reconciliation between the Ukrainian authorities and the Russian minority problematic, as the failure of the Minsk agreement testifies, the escalation of the conflict has entrenched pre-war hatreds. With the national conversation decisively turning against the reintegration of Russian culture and language into Ukraine’s social fabric, it is difficult to see how a status quo ante bellum with even rudimentary cultural and linguistic protections for ethnic Russians is possible were the Ukrainian state reconstituted within its pre-war borders. In fact, everything points towards mass retribution and ethnic cleansing on a scale not witnessed in Europe since the Second World War, in a scenario that is likely to overshadow the grim events of the conflict itself. Ukraine’s Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council, certainly didn’t mince his words on a recent Ukrainian talk show in calling for the ‘complete disappearance of the Russian language from our land’ in what sounded like incitement to ethnic cleansing.
Nothwithstanding the difficulty such actions would present for social reconstruction, the questionable legality of extra-judicial killings of officials and political persecution of ‘collaborators’ threatens to draw attention to atrocities committed by Ukrainian paramilitary forces during the Second World War against Russians, Jews, Poles and other minorities. These crimes, together with the ritualistic celebrations by Ukraine’s highest political authorities of those who perpetrated them like nationalist leader and Nazi collaborator, Stepan Bandera, have been conveniently whitewashed so as to not tarnish the image of a virtuous Ukraine that has been carefully cultivated over the past few months. The sources which once regularly condemned Ukraine for not only celebrating wartime collaboration but also tolerating a revival of neo-Nazi paramilitarism now declare similar condemnation by Russia as hostile propaganda. A Ukraine seen to be persecuting minorities again would be a propaganda disaster for its Western backers.
Dividing Ukraine’s population into ‘the people’ and ‘the rest’ where the latter were made to feel subordinate in their ancestral lands to the former was always going to lead to conflict. Yet just as wise counsel of the likes of George Kennan, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski warned of the grave risks of Nato’s expansion to Russia’s borders, so warnings came aplenty of the dangers of a divisive language policy. To Ukraine’s detriment, however, neither was heeded and now a reckoning against ‘the rest’ will be as useless in knitting back together shattered communities as the pre-war language policy was in solving peaceful coexistence between Russian and Ukrainian in a single public space.
October 28, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, Russia, Ukraine | Leave a comment
US shuns limits on nuclear weapon use
Samizdat | October 28, 2022
The Pentagon revealed on Thursday in its long-awaited National Defense Strategy (NDS) report that given the growing national security threats posed against the US and its allies, Washington must leave the door open to such options as a nuclear first strike and use of nuclear weapons to prevent non-nuclear attacks. That conclusion was approved by the White House after the Pentagon’s thorough review of “no first use” and “sole purpose” nuclear policies.
“Those approaches would result in an unacceptable level of risk, in light of the range of non-nuclear capabilities being developed and fielded by competitors that could inflict strategic-level damage to the United States and its allies and partners,” the NDS said. “Some allies and partners are particularly vulnerable to attacks with non-nuclear means that could produce devastating effects.”
Biden pledged while running for president in 2020 that he would work to narrow the potential uses of America’s nuclear weaponry. “The sole purpose of the US nuclear arsenal should be deterring — and if necessary, retaliating against — a nuclear attack. As president, I will work to put that belief into practice, in consultation with our allies and military.”
The decision to instead reject limits on use of nuclear weapons comes amid rising tensions with Russia and China. Beijing is investing heavily in expansion and modernization of its nuclear capabilities, the Pentagon said. “By the 2030s, the United States will, for the first time in its history, face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries.”
Washington won’t use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states that are party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, according to the NDS report. “For all other states, there remains a narrow range of contingencies in which US nuclear weapons may still play a role in deterring attacks that have a strategic effect against the United States or its allies and partners.”
The report labeled China as the No. 1 national security threat against the US, despite rising tensions with Moscow over the Ukraine conflict. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said China is “the only competitor out there with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the power to do so.”
The US remains the only nation to have ever used nuclear weapons against another country – the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945.
October 28, 2022 Posted by aletho | Militarism, War Crimes | United States | Leave a comment
Kiev asks for cluster munitions – report
Samizdat – October 27, 2022
Ukrainian officials have been pressuring the US to supply controversial cluster munitions to fight Russia, Foreign Policy has reported. The Pentagon sits on a stockpile of old rounds that many other nations have banned, but is barred from exporting them by law.
“We are requesting new rounds all the time that have longer range and more explosiveness,” a Ukrainian military official was quoted by the magazine as saying on the condition of anonymity. “We need them to destroy Russian fortifications on our territory.”
The outlet reports that Kiev started making the request about a month ago, due to the wear and tear of its own Soviet-made artillery guns and a need to further switch to NATO rounds.
The report said Ukraine asked for DPICMs, or dual-purpose improved conventional munitions, which come in various NATO calibers and contain different kinds of submunitions tailored for anti-personnel and anti-armor roles – hence “dual-purpose.”
Like most other types of cluster munitions, they are controversial because their use can leave behind unexploded submunitions that pose a threat to civilians. The 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), which most EU members signed, bans these types of weapons. But Ukraine and the US (as well as Russia) are not signatories.
Washington reversed its pledge not to use cluster munitions in 2017, but retains a ban on exporting them, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). The Pentagon switched away from them in favor of GPS-guided munitions and has a large number of DPICMs in its stockpile.
Some Russia hawks on Capitol Hill are frustrated by Washington’s inability to send cluster rounds to Ukraine, according to the Foreign Policy report.
“These cluster munitions were literally designed specifically with Soviet advantages in artillery tubes in mind,” a congressional aide familiar with the request was quoted as saying. “The Ukrainians are saying, ‘You have these weapons purpose-built for the type of threat we’re facing — why can’t we have them’?”
There were multiple reports on Kiev’s use of Soviet cluster weapons against residential areas, both before and after Moscow sent its troops into the country. One of the worst recent incidents happened in March, when a Tochka-U missile with a cluster payload killed more than 20 people and injured dozens of others in Donetsk. Kiev denied responsibility for the attack. HRW said in May it could not verify the claims.
October 27, 2022 Posted by aletho | War Crimes | Ukraine, United States | Leave a comment
False Flags: The Secret History of Al Qaeda – Part Three: The War of Terror
Corbett • 09/12/2022
America’s decades-long debacle in the Middle East—from the invasion, occupation and eventual choatic retreat from Afghanistan to the illegal invasion of Iraq and the rise of ISIS to the regime change operations in Libya and Syria—had been portrayed as a “failure” of military planning.
But, when viewed in its proper context, the war on terror was no failure. In fact, waged on fictitious grounds against a shadow enemy, the great military campaign of the 21st century was not a war on terror at all. It was a war of terror, a pretext for the construction of an international security grid in the name of fighting a bogeyman that never existed in the first place.
And by that metric, the war of terror was successful beyond its planners’ wildest dreams. . .
Watch on Archive / BitChute / Odysee / Substack or Download the mp4 video / mp3 audio
TRANSCRIPT
“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect.”
Jonathan Swift
INTRODUCTION
Kabul, Afghanistan. August 29th, 2021.
A white 1996 Toyota Corolla races down the dusty streets of the Afghan capital.
Just days earlier, a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport had killed thirteen US Marines and dozens of Afghans. American forces, on high alert, track the Corolla from above. An American MQ-9 Reaper drone hovers high up, monitoring the driver—Zemari Ahmadi—as he stops at a suspected ISIS safe house and loads the car with explosives before continuing his journey to the airport.
But Ahmadi never reaches his destination. At 4:50 PM, the order is given and the Reaper drone launches a hellfire missile at the vehicle, killing the would-be terrorist and destroying his explosive payload.
The media, focused on the conflict in Afghanistan for the first time in years, air live coverage of the Pentagon’s announcement: In the waning hours of America’s two-decade-long military presence in Afghanistan, another terror threat has been liquidated and more innocent lives have been saved.
GEN. WILLIAM TAYLOR: Yesterday, US military forces conducted an over-the-horizon counterterrorism operation against an ISIS-K planner and facilitator. The air strike occurred in the Nangarhar province of Afghanistan. I can confirm, as more information has come in, that two high-profile ISIS targets were killed and one was wounded and we know of zero civilian casualties.
SOURCE: Military officials hold news conference at Pentagon after drone strike
But as the smoke cleared on the scene of the strike, some grisly truths began to emerge: Ahmadi had not been a terrorist. He was not on his way to set off a suicide bomb at the Kabul Airport. The car didn’t even have explosives.
In reality, Ahmadi had been an aid worker for an American NGO distributing food to malnourished Afghans. He wasn’t on his way to the airport; he was arriving home after a day at the office. The “suspicious packages” that the drone operators had watched him load into his car were in fact water bottles that Ahmadi was bringing home because his neighbourhood was dealing with a water shortage.
In perhaps the greatest irony, Ahmadi had applied for a special visa to emigrate to the US with his family just days before his death. Now, that family was devastated, torn apart by an explosion that left Ahmadi and nine of his relatives—including a two-year-old—dead.
Finally forced to admit that every part of the drone strike story had been a lie, the Pentagon called it a “tragic mistake.” And, after a three-month self-investigation, it was decided that no one involved in that “mistake” would receive any punishment for killing 10 innocent Afghans.
The story of the killing of Zemari Ahmadi is the story of the War on Terror in a nutshell. Ahmadi’s death was cast as a “tragic mistake” for which no one was to blame, just as America’s decades-long debacle in the Middle East—from the invasion, occupation and eventual choatic retreat from Afghanistan to the illegal invasion of Iraq and the rise of ISIS to the regime change operations in Libya and Syria—had been a “failure” of military planning.
But, when viewed in its proper context, the war on terror was no failure. In fact, waged on fictitious grounds against a shadow enemy, the great military campaign of the 21st century was not a war on terror at all. It was a war of terror, a pretext for the construction of an international security grid in the name of fighting a bogeyman that never existed in the first place.
And by that metric, the war of terror was successful beyond its planners’ wildest dreams.
Part Three: The War of Terror
For many in the general public, the war on terror was a direct consequence of 9/11, and that war began with George W. Bush’s address to Congress on September 20, 2001:
GEORGE W. BUSH: Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them. Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.
SOURCE: President Bush’s address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001
Some even believe that the war ended with Barack Obama’s declaration of May 23, 2013:
BARACK OBAMA: Beyond Afghanistan, we must define our effort not as a boundless “global war on terror,” but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.
SOURCE: Remarks by the President at the National Defense University
But, as convenient as these statements are for creating bookends for the story of the war on terror, they do not tell the real story of that war. In fact, the origins of the global war on terror go back much further than the general public has been led to believe.
In 1962, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by General Lyman Lemnitzer, issued a startling proposal to President John F. Kennedy on how to get the public on board with military invention in Cuba to remove Fidel Castro from power. Called Operation Northwoods, the plan suggested a number of staged provocations, secretly committed by the US itself but blamed on Castro, including: blowing up a US ship in Guantanomo Bay and blaming the incident on the Cuban government; staging terror attacks in the United States to be blamed on Cuban terrorists; and even painting up a remote-controlled plane to resemble a passenger jet and destroying it over Cuba.
The incredible plan, rejected by Kennedy, who subsequently refused to renew Lemnitzer’s term as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was classified and was not revealed to the public until 2001, just months before 9/11.
JAMES BAMFORD: The idea was to create a pretext to show that the there was an attack by Cuba on the United States. And the idea was to have US personnel from the CIA and other places secretly create terrorism in the United States. The document actually said people would be shot on American streets, bombs would be blown up. And again, all this the evidence would be laid to point the finger at Castro.
One other idea was they were going to—they had a very complex plan where they were going to take an aircraft and load it with CIA people that looked like college students, fly it over to—have it take off from an airport in Miami with a lot of publicity and then it would—quickly after it got into the air—land at a secret CIA base. At that same time, an identical plane would take off from that CIA base, except this plane would be empty and it would be remotely piloted from the ground. It would be a drone plane that would be very similar to the passenger plane that had just taken off.
And once the plane was over Cuba, there was going to be a tape recorder that would have played a distress call to a microphone saying, “Help, we’re being shot at!” And a few minutes later—once the plane was over the Caribbean Sea after it passed over Cuba—somebody would have pressed the button on the ground, blowing up the plane. And they would have blamed Cuba for killing a plane load of American college students.
But even after its rejection, the Northwoods idea of using spectacular terror attacks as the justification for a widescale war continued to be employed by military planners.
In November 1998, Philip Zelikow—who would go on to chair the 9/11 Commission—co-wrote an article in Foreign Affairs, the Council on Foreign Relations’ publication, with Ashton Carter, the future Secretary of Defense under President Obama, and John Deutsch, the former director of the CIA. Titled “Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger,” the article warns of a potential “transforming event,” such as an attack on the World Trade Center:
“Like Pearl Harbor, the event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either future terrorist attacks or U.S. counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently.”
The solution to this impending threat of catastrophic terrorism, Zelikow and his co-authors argue, is to take that threat seriously—as the US government did in 1940 when it “pondered what kind of forces it would need to wage a global war”—and to create new offices for coordinating homeland security and waging pre-emptive strikes against potential terrorists around the world.
Then, unnoticed by much of the public, the global war on terror was first proposed on live TV on the morning of 9/11. At 11:28 AM New York time, as the blanket of dust from the freshly exploded towers was still settling on Manhattan and much of the world was still trying to process what was happening, a guest on BBC World News laid out the dawning of the new age of global terror with remarkable foresight. But this prediction was not delivered by a US government official or an American intelligence agent or a Washington Beltway insider. It was delivered by Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister of Israel.
PRESENTER: Joining me now here in the BBC World studio is the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who’s in London at the moment. Mr. Barak, welcome to BBC World. First, your reaction, having heard what’s happened. At least four planes have been hijacked and there may be more.
EHUD BARAK: The world will not be the same from today on. It’s an attack against our whole civilization. I don’t know who is responsible. I believe we will know in 12 hours.
If it is a kind of bin Laden organization, and even if it’s something else, I believe that this is the time to deploy a globally concerted effort led by the United States, the UK, Europe and Russia against all sources of terror—the same kind of struggle that our forefathers launched against the piracy on the high seas.
SOURCE: September 11, 2001 – 11:28am EDT (4:28pm BST) – BBC World News
In the chaos of September 11, 2001, mere minutes after the destruction of the Twin Towers, the global viewing public was presented all the key takeaways of 9/11: that “this is the time to deploy a globally concerted effort led by the United States”; that “the world will not be the same from today on”; and, of course, that we “don’t know who was responsible,” although “we will know in 12 hours.” But the name immediately implanted in the minds of the audience—not for the first nor the last time on that long day of news coverage—was that of Osama bin Laden.
In the following days, these takeaways became the talking points for the US government and its allies around the world. Before the day was over, President Bush was already laying the rhetorical groundwork for the coming war, vowing that “we stand together to win the war against terrorism.” By the end of the week, the American public was being prepared for a conflict much bigger than a conventional war: “This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.”
And, in the following week, Bush confirmed what the public had been told since the moment of the live televised strike on the World Trade Center:
JON SCOTT: We just saw on live television as a second plane flew into the second tower of the World Trade Center. Now, given what has been going on around the world, some of the key suspects come to mind: Osama bin Laden. Who knows what?
SOURCE: Original News Broadcast on 9/11/01
BUSH: Americans are asking: Who attacked our country? The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as Al Qaeda.
SOURCE: President Bush’s address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001
By the end of the month, the public had heard so many authoritative pronouncements about “the evidence” pointing to bin Laden’s responsibility for the 9/11 attacks that few noticed when the US government declined to release a promised white paper outlining that evidence—a decision prompted by a “lack of solid information” about the plot, according to government sources cited by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh. Instead, the presentation of such evidence was outsourced—as so much of the dirty work in the global war on terror would be—to a third-party nation-state: the United Kingdom.
On September 30, 2001, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair appeared on the BBC’s Breakfast with Frost program to declare he had been shown “absolutely powerful, incontrovertible evidence of [bin Laden’s] link to the events of the 11th of September,” but because the evidence came from “sensitive sources” he could not simply reveal it to the public. Rather, the UK government would release a report laying out its case against Osama in great detail.
That dossier, titled “Responsibility for the terrorist atrocities in the United States,” was released on October 4th and was touted by the press as “the clearest case yet of Osama bin Laden’s involvement in the September 11 attacks.” The document opens, however, by noting that it “does not purport to provide a prosecutable case against Osama bin Laden in a court of law.” The first 60 points of the report provide general background information about bin Laden and previous terror attacks attributed to Al Qaeda, and the last ten points, dealing with “Osama bin Laden and the 11 September attacks,” are almost incomprehensibly vague.
It claims that “at least three” of the hijackers have been identified as “associates of Al Qaeda,” without listing how this conclusion was arrived at or even who these associates are.
It claims that the attack “follows the modus operandi” of Al Qaeda and is “entirely consistent” with the planning of previous attacks attributed to the group.
And, most remarkably, it states that “[t]here is evidence of a very specific nature relating to the guilt of bin Laden and his associates that is too sensitive to release.”
At almost the exact same time, momentous events were taking place in Europe, where the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s main decision-making body, was receiving a classified briefing from a US State Department operative.
LORD ROBERTSON: This morning, the United States briefed the North Atlantic Council on the results of their investigation into who was responsible for the horrific terrorist attacks which took place on 11 September.
The briefing was given by Ambassador Frank Taylor, the United States Department of State Coordinator for Counter-terrorism.
[. . .]
The briefing addressed the events of 11 September themselves, the results of the investigation so far, what is known about Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda organization and their involvement in the attacks and in previous terrorist activity, and the links between Al Qaeda and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
The facts are clear and compelling. The information presented points conclusively to an Al Qaeda role in the 11 September attacks.
SOURCE: Statement by NATO Secretary General, Lord Robertson, October 2, 2001
This was no ordinary briefing. The result of that briefing was that for the first time in its history, NATO invoked Article 5 of its charter—the self-defence clause that compels the organization to assist any member nation that is attacked by an outside force. By “proving” that bin Laden had committed the attack in connection with the Taliban, the United States could launch the war on terror and compel NATO to assist in its invasion of Afghanistan.
LORD ROBERTSON: On the basis of this briefing, it has now been determined that the attack against the United States on 11 September was directed from abroad and shall therefore be regarded as an action covered by Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, which states that an armed attack on one or more of the Allies in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.
I want to reiterate that the United States of America can rely on the full support of its 18 NATO allies in the campaign against terrorism.
Given the stakes involved, questions long swirled around this mysterious, classified briefing. What had Ambassador Frank Taylor told the North Atlantic Council that was so compelling? What information persuaded the world’s largest and most powerful military alliance to launch an invasion of another nation? The public, it seemed, would never know.
LORD ROBERTSON: Today’s was a classified briefing and so I cannot give you all the details. Briefings are also being given directly by the United States to the Allies in their capitals.
But then, in 2009, intelwire.com quietly posted a document online under the title “Secret Post-9/11 Briefing to World Leaders.” The document is a US State Department cable addressed to the American embassies in the NATO countries and American allies around the world under the subject line “September 11: Working together to fight the plague of global terrorism and the case against Al Qaeda.” The cable is dated October 1, 2001—the day before Ambassador Taylor’s meeting with the North Atlantic Council—and instructs its recipients to brief their host country’s government on “the information linking the Al Qaeda terrorist network, Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban regime to the September 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and the crash of United Airlines Flight 93.”
The document went largely unnoticed until 2018, when Professor Niels Harrit wrote an article, “The Mysterious Frank Taylor Report: The 9/11 Document that Launched US-NATO’s ‘War on Terrorism’ in the Middle East,” connecting the dots between this document and the briefing that Ambassador Taylor gave to the North Atlantic Council.
HARRIT: This is in my mind with no doubt simply the legal basis for eighteen years of perpetual war in the Middle East. This is the basis for NATO’s activation of Article 5. And so what is in the document and what is the evidence? What is the evidence which Lord Robertson calls “clear and compelling”? None. There’s absolutely no evidence in that paper.
Much like the UK government dossier, the State Department cable contains no actual evidence of a link between bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks. In fact, the cable is virtually identical to the UK report. After spending a full fifteen pages talking in generalities about terror, about the US government’s officially sanctioned history of Al Qaeda, and of previous attacks attributed to Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, the document finally arrives at “Part III” purporting to demonstrate Al Qaeda’s involvement in the attacks.
But Part III begins by admitting that the investigation into the attacks is “still in the early stage” and that “[t]here are still gaps in our knowledge.” It then goes on to detail circumstantial “evidence,” including the observation that “bin Laden and his associates seemed to be anticipating what we could only identify as an important event or activity.” Finally, the document talks about how the incident is “tactically similar to earlier attacks” because it involved planning and a desire to inflict mass casualties.
And with that complete lack of evidence, the war on terror was launched and the invasion of Afghanistan began.
And so, in October 2001, the bombs began dropping on Afghanistan. The war of terror had officially begun, and the public was told that one of the key objectives of that war was to kill or capture Osama bin Laden.
REPORTER: Do you want bin Laden dead?
BUSH: I want him . . . hell, I want justice. And there’s an old poster out West, as I recall, that said “Wanted: Dead or Alive.”
SOURCE: CNN: 2001, President George W. Bush ‘bin Laden, Wanted dead or alive’
But as we have seen, one of the defining hallmarks of Al Qaeda throughout its reign of terror was its agents’ uncanny ability to cross borders illegally, evade capture repeatedly and generally slip through intelligence agency dragnets unimpeded. This remarkable string of “good luck” included:
- the “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel Rahman, who entered the US with CIA support and lived there unmolested even after his green card was revoked;
- World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, who entered the US without the proper paperwork, working and living with a suspected terror ring that was under FBI surveillance, and fleeing the country before he was even a person of interest in the WTC investigation;
- Khalid Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, whose entry to the US from an Al Qaeda summit in Malaysia was known about and actively covered up by the CIA and who lived openly in the United States under their real names for over a year, repeatedly calling the Al Qaeda communications hub in Yemen that was being monitored by the NSA;
- and, most infamously, Al Qaeda “triple agent” Ali Mohammed, whose career as an Egyptian army officer, a “failed” CIA asset, a trusted aide to Al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman Al-Zawahiri, a US special forces training officer, a volunteer fighter in Afghanistan, an FBI deep-cover asset, Osama bin Laden’s personal bodyguard and the trainer of many of Al Qaeda’s terrorists throughout the 1990s is so improbable that it is generally ignored in most histories of Al Qaeda.
As incredible as all of those stories are, however, they pale in comparison to the story that was about to unfold: the “disappearance” of Osama bin Laden, ostensibly the most wanted man on the planet, from under the noses of the American military and intelligence services.
Osama bin Laden’s remarkable post-9/11 “disappearance” actually began on 9/11 itself, when his whereabouts were not a mystery to America or its allies in the region. In fact, his location and activities on the night before 9/11 were well known to the US, although that information would not be revealed to the public until after his “escape.”
BARRY PETERSEN: Everyone remembers what happened on September 11th. Here’s the story of what may have happened the night before. It is a tale as twisted as the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
CBS News has been told that the night before the September 11th terrorist attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the US war on terror in Afghanistan. Pakistan intelligence sources tell CBS News that bin Laden was spirited into this military hospital in Rawalpindi for kidney dialysis treatment.
SOURCE: Dan Rather Reports: 9/11 bin Laden At Rawalpindi Hospital September 10th 2001
Despite knowing bin Laden’s precise location and activities right up to the moment of 9/11, however, and despite the fact that the Al Qaeda leader was already a wanted fugitive subject to international arrest warrants and under indictment by a US federal court, bin Laden continued to move around internationally with the full knowledge and complicity of state intelligence services. And, as remarkable as this may seem, bin Laden’s trip to Rawalpindi on the eve of 9/11 was neither the first nor the last time that the US would allow him to evade capture.
In the weeks after the attack, the Taliban offered to try bin Laden in Afghanistan or even hand him over to a third-party country if the US provided them with the same proof of Bin Laden’s guilt for 9/11 that Ambassador Taylor had supposedly provided NATO. Bush turned the offer down. Then, after the invasion of Afghanistan began in October, the Taliban again tried to hand bin Laden over, this time dropping the request for proof of his guilt. Bush again refused.
The war of terror, it turned out, was not about getting Osama. In fact, if bin Laden had been captured or killed, it would have derailed the carefully laid plans for the Bush Administration’s aggressive new foreign policy.
But, having been sold on the simplified version of the war on terror—the one that held the objective of that war was to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and to liquidate the Al Qaeda network—the public believed that the fighting would be short and decisive, like the first Gulf War. After all, how hard would it be for the army of the world’s unrivaled military superpower employing the tools of the most high-tech intelligence community in history to capture a lone fighter on dialysis in the caves of Tora Bora?
Bush administration officials were quick to temper the public’s expectations on this point. This was no ordinary elderly man living in an undefended cave, after all. This was a comic book supervillain, an evil millionaire mastermind directing a terrorist army from his elaborate cave fortress.
TIM RUSSERT: . . . there is constant discussion about him hiding out in caves, and I think many times the American people have a perception that it’s a little hole dug out of a side of a mountain.
DONALD RUMSFELD: Oh, no.
RUSSERT: This is it. This is a fortress! A complex, multi-tiered. Bedrooms and offices on the top, as you can see. Secret exits on the side and on the bottom. Cut deep to avoid thermal detection. A ventilation system to allow people to breathe and to carry on. The entrances large enough to drive trucks and even tanks. Even computer systems and telephone systems. It’s a very sophisticated operation.
RUMSFELD: Oh, you bet. This is serious business. And there’s not one of those, there are many of those!
This was a lie, of course. There were no high-tech cave fortresses, no “multi-tiered bedrooms and offices on the top,” no “secret exits on the side,” no ventilation system or computer systems. It was a fabrication, a literal artist’s rendering with as much reality as that of a comic book or a cartoon.
But, as an unfolding drama for the public following the war on their television sets half a world away, this story had enough twists and turns to keep any audience engaged.
The first phase of the war went as predicted. By November, America’s relentless bombing had already routed the Taliban, driving them from Kabul toward Kunduz in the north. There, the trapped fighters—including not only Taliban but Al Qaeda members as well as Pakistani Army officers, intelligence advisers, and volunteers—were saved from certain defeat by a miracle: the arrival of a squadron of Pakistani aircraft that flew in and airlifted them back to Pakistan.
It was later confirmed that the operation—dubbed the “airlift of evil“—was signed off on by the Bush Administration, who had cut a secret deal with Pakistani President Musharraf to let the fighters escape and who “ordered the United States Central Command to set up a special air corridor to help insure the safety of the Pakistani rescue flights.”
But what about Osama bin Laden? As it turns out, his whereabouts were no great mystery to American forces, and, once again, he was allowed to escape.
On the eve of the invasion of Afghanistan in October, the Guardian reported that “Osama bin Laden was in Kabul last week and US and British intelligence agencies have a ‘pretty good idea’ where he is now,” suggesting that “Western intelligence has a much clearer picture of bin Laden’s recent movements than has been admitted.” The report went on to note that bin Laden’s “capture or death would reduce the pressure for wider military action against Afghanistan.” But this intelligence did not lead to bin Laden’s apprehension.
As American forces honed in on Kabul in early November, bin Laden and all of his closest advisors managed to escape to Jalalabad in a very conspicuous late-night convoy. One eyewitness reported: “We don’t understand how they weren’t all killed the night before, because they came in a convoy of at least 1,000 cars and trucks. It was a very dark night, but it must have been easy for American pilots to see the headlights.”
On November 13th, just one day before the Northern Alliance captured Jalalabad, bin Laden escaped once again, this time in a convoy of several hundred cars. Despite believing bin Laden to be in one of the vehicles, US forces opted to ignore the convoy and instead bombed the nearby Jalalabad airport.
Bin Laden and his men, now numbering a few hundred fighters, arrived in mid-November at the mountainous Khyber Pass on the border of Pakistan. On November 15th, with the remaining Al Qaeda and Taliban holdouts pinned down in the caves of Tora Bora, the US military was in a position to eliminate the Al Qaeda threat, kill Osama bin Laden and end the war on terror.
But, remarkably, the Marines, special forces and CIA operatives who were positioned and ready to do this were blocked from doing so by their own superiors.
NARRATOR: That winter, the CIA was still at war. The Taliban had fallen. Now it was Osama bin Laden’s turn.
GARY BERNTSEN: I’m looking for bin Laden right away. I want to start killing him and his people immediately.
GARY SCHROEN: We had intelligence that continued to develop that bin Laden and Zawahiri were in Afghanistan, probably in the eastern areas, hiding out there.
NARRATOR: The CIA tried to put together a team to chase bin Laden. It wasn’t easy.
GARY BERNTSEN: I asked Army special forces if they’ll send people in. They say, “No, we’re not going down there. It’s unstable. You don’t have a reliable ally.”
STEVE COLL: The conditions for Al Qaeda’s retreat were quite favorable, and the United States did not do the one thing that the Pentagon had within its power to do, which was to move regular US troops into a blocking position behind these mountains.
SOURCE: The Dark Side (Frontline)
The story, exhaustively documented by CIA operatives, special forces operators, journalists and even a US Senate report, is clear and unambiguous.
As the US Senate report notes: “By early December 2001, bin Laden’s world had shrunk to a complex of caves and tunnels carved into a mountainous section of eastern Afghanistan known as Tora Bora.”
Both the CIA and Delta Force—the US Army’s elite special operations unit—had tracked bin Laden from Jalalabad to Tora Bora. They had “real-time eavesdropping capabilities on Al Qaeda almost from their arrival, allowing them to track movements and gauge the effectiveness of the bombing” and were able to pick up radio communications featuring bin Laden directly issuing commands to his troops. They had him surrounded on three sides, and the relentless air strikes—including the use of a 15,000 pound “daisy cutter” not used since Vietnam—were decimating what was left of bin Laden’s forces. All that was needed was to secure the mountain pass leading out of Tora Bora and into Pakistan.
Gary Berntsen, the head of the CIA’s paramilitary operation against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, knew that the Afghan militias that the US had cobbled together were not up to the job of securing the pass. From mid-November to mid-December, he repeatedly begged his superiors for one battalion of US Army Rangers—just 800 troops—to help stop bin Laden from slipping away.
As the US Senate later noted, fulfilling Berntsen’s request “would have been a manageable task”:
In late November, about the time US intelligence placed bin Laden squarely at Tora Bora, more than 1,000 members of the 15th and 26th Marine Expeditionary Units, among the military’s most mobile arms, established a base southwest of Kandahar, only a few hours flight away. [. . .] Another 1,000 troops from the Army’s 10th Mountain Division were split between a base in southern Uzbekistan and Bagram Air Base, a short helicopter flight from Tora Bora.
General James Mattis, the commander of the Marines at Kandahar, told a journalist that his troops could seal off Tora Bora, but his superiors rejected the plan.
Berntsen fared no better in his quest to obtain 800 Army Rangers for the mission. Not only was his request rejected, but, remarkably, in the middle of the most important battle of the war, he was replaced as head of the CIA force in Afghanistan, effective immediately. His replacement was to be Rich Blee, the same CIA bin Laden unit chief who had helped conceal the information about Al-Mihdhar and Alhazmi’s entry to the US from the FBI. Blee was accompanied to Afghanistan by Michael Anne Casey, the bin Laden unit staffer who had actually stopped Doug Miller from sharing that info with the FBI.
At first, Berntsen was told that his request was denied because it might “alienate our Afghan allies.”
“I don’t give a damn about alienating our allies!” he replied. “I only care about eliminating Al Qaeda and delivering bin Laden’s head in a box!”
Later, though, a different story emerged. As it turns out, at the exact same time that bin Laden was holed up in Tora Bora, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered General Tommy Franks, who was leading the Afghan invasion, to redirect planning resources from Afghanistan to the Pentagon’s next target in the war of terror: Iraq.
As even the official story of the war on terror acknowledges, bin Laden and his top aides, seizing their opportunity, simply walked out of Tora Bora and into Pakistan.
And, just like that, the bogeyman of the war on terror was gone, allowed to escape yet again. He would reappear from time to time to continue reminding the public about the origins of the terror war. But now, the public’s attention was being turned to a new bogeyman.
QUESTION: Mr. President, in your speeches now, you rarely talk [about] or mention Osama bin Laden. Why is that?
Also, can you can tell the American people if you have any more information—if you know if he is dead or alive. Deep in your heart, don’t you truly believe that until you find out if he is dead or alive, you won’t really want to make—
BUSH: Well, deep in my heart, I know the man’s on the run if he’s alive at all. And I—you know, who knows if he’s hiding in some cave or not? We hadn’t heard from him in a long time.
And the idea of focusing on one person is really—indicates to me people don’t understand the scope of the mission. Terror’s bigger than one person. And he’s just—he’s a person who has now been marginalized. His network is—his host government has been destroyed. He’s the ultimate parasite who found weakness, exploited it, and met his match.
He is—you know, as I mention in my speeches—I do mention the fact that this is a fellow who is willing to commit youngsters to their death. And he, himself, tries to hide, if, in fact, he’s hiding at all.
So I don’t know where he is. Nor—you know, I just don’t spend that much time on him really, to be honest with you.
BUSH: Some have argued that confronting the threat from Iraq could detract from the war against terror. To the contrary, confronting the threat posed by Iraq is crucial to winning the war on terror.
That the Bush Administration would pivot so quickly from hunting Osama bin Laden to toppling Saddam Hussein was only surprising to those who did not know the neocons populating the Bush administration or their well-documented and long-held desire to affect regime change in Iraq.
In 1996, a group of prominent neoconservatives—including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser—wrote a report for then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” the report urged Israel to “shape its strategic environment” by “weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria.” The way to do this, the report concluded, was to “focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq—an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right—as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.”
In 1997, twenty-five prominent neocons—including ten who would go on to serve in the Bush Administration, and even Jeb Bush, the future president’s brother—signed a “Statement of Principles” as the founding charter of a new think tank called the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The statement called on then-President Clinton to reverse the defense spending cuts that marked the post-Cold War era and to “increase defense spending significantly.” In 1998, the group followed up with an open letter to Clinton urging him to “turn your Administration’s attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power.”
Surrounding himself with neocons on the campaign trail and eventually installing those neocons in all of the key security positions in his cabinet, President George W. Bush wasted no time in making these regime change dreams a reality.
As Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill later revealed, at his first major national security council meeting—held just ten days into the new administration—”President Bush tasked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Hugh Shelton to begin preparing options for the use of US ground forces in the northern and southern no-fly zones in Iraq to support an insurgency to bring down the Saddam regime.” The second national security council meeting of the Bush administration, held two days later, also discussed regime change in Iraq, with one briefing document at the meeting marked “secret” and bearing the title “Plan for post-Saddam Iraq.”
RON SUSKIND: From the very first instance, it was about Iraq, it was about what we can do to change this regime.
LESLEY STAHL: Now, everybody else thought that grew out of 9/11.
SUSKIND: No.
STAHL: But this book says it was day one of this administration.
SUSKIND: Day one, these things were laid and sealed.
SOURCE: Before 9/11, Bush Asked To “Go Find Me A Way” To Invade Iraq
And, infamously, on the day of 9/11 itself, the administration was already beginning plans for a retaliatory strike not just on bin Laden in Afghanistan but on Iraq.
A note taken at 2:40 PM on September 11, 2001, records Rumsfeld saying he wanted “best info fast. Judge whether good enough to hit Saddam Hussein at the same time. Not only bin Laden.” He also made sure to order staff to “go massive” and “sweep it all up” including “things related and not.”
From before Bush even got into office, there was no doubt that he would attack Iraq. 9/11 and the war on terror merely presented the neocons with the perfect opportunity to fulfill that agenda. The only problem was how to tie Iraq into the war on terror in the minds of the public, a problem that Bush himself admitted to.
BUSH: You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror.
SOURCE: Couric Interview Bush September 6, 2006
BUSH: Of course we’re after Saddam Hussein . . . I mean bin Laden. He’s . . . he’s . . . he’s isolated.
SOURCE: George W. Bush and John Kerry 1st Presidential Debate 2004
The job of connecting the public face of the war on terror—bin Laden and Al Qaeda—to Saddam and Iraq was made more difficult by the fact that there was no such connection. Difficult, but not impossible, for a committed cadre with no qualms about using mendacity to achieve their political objectives.
The most direct link between Al Qaeda and Iraq was a trip that alleged 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta was reported to have made to the Iraqi consulate in Prague in April 2001. After Atta’s pictures were published in the media in the wake of 9/11, a Middle East informant told Czech intelligence that he had seen Atta meeting with a suspected Iraqi intelligence agent in the Czech Republic that spring.
The story became even more salacious when—at the height of the anthrax scare in October 2001—”anonymous Israeli intelligence sources” planted a story in the German media that Atta had in fact received anthrax spores from his Iraqi contact in Prague.
But the entire story was such a preposterous lie that it was quickly disowned by both the FBI and the CIA. Investigators found “there was no evidence Atta left or returned to the US” during that time frame and “pointed to other evidence, including Atta’s cell phone records, to cast doubt on the idea that any meeting had occurred.” And, despite the fantastical, anonymous, evidence-free reports in German media, the anthrax used in the anthrax attacks on America in the fall of 2001 did not source from Iraq, but from the US military’s own bioweapons laboratory.
None of this stopped Vice President Dick Cheney from repeating the lie in his media appearances in the run-up to the Iraq War, however.
CHENEY: We’ve seen, in connection with the hijackers, of course, Mohamed Atta, who was the lead hijacker, did apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions. And on at least one occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center.
The story of Iraqi agents handing flasks of anthrax to 9/11 hijackers was a little too fanciful even for the credulous American public, however, and it was soon dropped from the neocons’ sales pitch for the Iraq war.
Instead, a different set of lies would need to be found to sell the public on the illegal invasion of a sovereign nation.
On January 31, 2003—six months after senior British intelligence complained behind closed doors that the “facts were being fixed around the policy” of invading Iraq—Bush met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the White House for a discussion on the matter. As a now-infamous memo documenting the meeting records, Bush had already decided on military action, and a start date for the bombing of March 10th “was now pencilled in.” Given that it was unlikely that the UN would pass a resolution authorizing the invasion absent some compelling incident, Bush suggested a way that Iraq could be provoked into aggressive action.
According to the memo: “The US was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach” of existing UN resolutions, thus justifying military action. The stunning and documented admission that President Bush had suggested staging a false flag event as one option for provoking a war received some press attention at the time but has since largely been forgotten.
After all, they did not need to get Iraq to shoot down a spy plane. The neocons had hit on a different strategy for selling the war to the public.
PRESIDENT BUSH: If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately and unconditionally foreswear, disclose and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction.
SOURCE: President Bush at United Nations General Assembly 2002
COLIN POWELL: One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq’s biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents.
CHENEY: He now is trying, through his illicit procurement network, to acquire the equipment he needs to be able to enrich uranium to make the bombs—
RUSSERT: —Aluminum tubes.
CHENEY: Specifically, aluminum tubes. There was a story in The New York Times this morning . . .
RICE: The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
SOURCE: Condoleezza Rice on CNN Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer September 8, 2002
As these drawings, based on their descriptions, show, we know what the fermenters look like. We know what the tanks, pumps, compressors and other parts look like. We know how they fit together. We know how they work. And we know a great deal about the platforms on which they are mounted.
BUSH: And my message to Saddam Hussein is that, for the sake of peace, for the sake of freedom, you must disarm like you said you would do. But my message to you all, and to the country, is this: for the sake of our future freedoms, and for the sake of world peace, if the United Nations can’t act, and if Saddam Hussein won’t act, the United States will lead a coalition of nations to disarm Saddam Hussein.
SOURCE: Remarks by the President at South Dakota Welcome October 31, 2002
As decades of after-the-fact journalism has exhaustively documented, every aspect of the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” story was a transparent and admitted lie. But it was a remarkably successful lie. Six months into the Iraq war, a stunning 82% of the American public believed that Saddam Hussein had “provided assistance” to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and 69% believed that Saddam was personally involved in the September 11th attacks.
As the months wore on, however, it became harder to hide the fact that the mythical WMD stashes and mobile weapons labs and aluminum tubes that the public had been assured were keys to the “imminent threat” posed by Saddam’s regime simply weren’t there. Even the corporate press that had worked so hard to sell these lies to the public had to start pointing out the obvious: the Bush administration had lied in order to sell an illegal invasion of a sovereign country to the American public and to the people of the world.
The neocons realized that a renewed effort was going to be needed to connect Iraq to the war on terror in order to keep the public on board with the war as the invasion of Iraq morphed into the occupation of Iraq. And, as always, the Al Qaeda threat would serve the purpose of terrifying the public into rallying once again behind their government. The fact that Iraq and Al Qaeda were mortal enemies might have been an insurmountable obstacle to anyone concerned with the truth. But these were neocons. Their logic was simple: if the Al Qaeda bogeyman didn’t exist in Iraq, they would have to create it. So that’s exactly what they did.
Founded in Jordan in 1999, even the official history of the terrorist organization that became known as “Al Qaeda in Iraq” acknowledges that the group originally had nothing to do with either Al Qaeda or Iraq. Instead, its founder, Ahmed al-Khalaylah, was a Jordanian militant whose terror cell Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, or “Congregation of Monotheism and Jihad,” was dedicated to the overthrow of the Jordanian monarchy.
Like many of the figures in the Al Qaeda story, the biography of al-Khalaylah is not that of a devout Muslim, let alone a dedicated jihadi. A high school dropout, al-Khalaylah was known for drunken brawls and drug dealing and was jailed for sexual assualt before going to Afghanistan to join the Mujahideen in 1989, just as the Soviets were leaving. From there, the story of this soon-to-be-feared terrorist leader tells us he returned to Jordan “a few years later,” founded a terror cell known as Jund al-Sham that attracted the attention of the authorities, and was sent to prison in 1992 where he “adopted more radical Islamic beliefs.”
After his release from the Jordanian prison in 1999, he immediately became involved in a new plot to bomb the Radisson SAS Hotel in Amman and several tourist sites in Jordan just before New Year’s Day 2000. The plot was foiled, and al-Khalaylah fled through Pakistan to Afghanistan, where, we are told, he met with bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders, with whose assistance he set up a terrorist training camp for Jordanian militants in Herat.
Joining the resistance to the US invasion after 9/11 and adopting the nom de guerre Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, he fled to Iran in January 2002. His whereabouts and activities during 2002 are “difficult to pin down” but “Western and Arab intelligence agencies” assured The Washington Post that, despite being a known terror operative and wanted by numerous governments, Zarqawi, like many other Al Qaeda figures, “moved frequently and with relative ease among Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, expanding his network.”
Then, in 2003, still a relative unknown even within the world of militant jihad, Zarqawi turned up in Baghdad, where he was catapulted to international infamy not by his actions, nor by the promotion of Osama bin Laden or other jihadis, but by the US government.
POWELL: But what I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder. Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Usama bin Laden and his al-Qaida lieutenants.
The remarks, delivered during Colin Powell’s infamous speech justifying the forthcoming invasion of Iraq to the UN Security Council in February of 2003, were—like most of the specific accusations in the address—demonstrably false. Zarqawi was a relative nobody in Iraq at the time; the CIA later admitted there was no evidence that Hussein had been “harboring” him; and his group was not, in fact, affiliated with Al Qaeda when Powell made his speech.
Nevertheless, these falsehoods started to become true after the spotlight of attention was showered on Zarqawi by the US State Department.
Attacks attributed to or claimed by Zarqawi were relatively few, but received inordinate amounts of attention from the international press. These attacks were often designed to inflame Shia/Sunni hatred, thus turning resistance to the occupation into a full-on sectarian conflict that tore the country to its roots.
And in 2004, Zarqawi—who, we are told, calculated that attaching the Al Qaeda brand name to his group would give it more caché in the jihadi world—pledged his allegiance to Osama bin Laden and received the Al Qaeda title “Emir of Al Qaeda in the Country of Two Rivers.” The specter of Al Qaeda in Iraq—just another cynical and calculated lie when used by Powell to justify the Iraq invasion—had become a reality.
What resulted from this US government-promoted character was a career so remarkable that it could only be believed in a Hollywood action movie . . . or a history of Al Qaeda.
In 2004, after being allegedly caught and freed by Iraqi security forces in the Fallujah area because “they didn’t realize who he was,” Zarqawi was then reportedly killed in an American bombing raid in northern Iraq in March before pledging his allegiance to Osama and officially joining Al Qaeda in October.
In 2005, Zarqawi was, according to various sources: arrested in Baakuba in January; left “seriously injured, possibly dead” after a US-led offensive in May; evacuated to a neighbouring country “with the help of doctors from the Arab Peninsula and the Sudan”; killed in fighting in Ramadi in June and buried in Fallujah; and killed again in a terrorist bombing in Mosul in November.
This remarkable career finally came to an end when, we were told, Zarqawi had been killed yet again (and presumably for good) in June of 2006.
MILITARY BRIEFER: The lead aircraft is going to engage it here momentarily with a 500-pound bomb on the target.
ROSS CAMERON: Two bombs dropped by an American F-16 strike home. A house outside Baqubah, north of Baghdad, is flattened. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq and one of the world’s most wanted men, has been eliminated.
Iraqi police, who’ve lost hundreds of comrades in attacks blamed on Zarqawi, are celebrating. The White House is relieved.
BUSH: Now Zarqawi has met his end and this violent man will never murder again.
But not everyone believed that this final account of Zarqawi’s death was the true one. Rather than simply mistakes in reporting, other members of the Iraqi resistance insisted that Zarqawi had in fact been killed early on in the US invasion and that his name was simply being used to create an excuse for the continued American occupation of the country.
Sheikh Jawad Al-Khalessi, a noted Shiite imam in Baghdad, was quoted in Le Monde as saying:
I don’t think Abu Musab al-Zarqawi exists. He died in Northern Iraq at the beginning of the war (his family even conducted a funeral ceremony in Jordan). Since then, his name has been nothing but a toy, an excuse used by Americans to stay in Iraq.
Al-Khalessi was not the only one with his doubts about Zarqawi’s true nature. The Project on Defense Alternatives of the Commonwealth Institute in Massachusetts released a report in 2004 excoriating the US government for its propaganda attempting to portray Zarqawi as a terrorist leader in Iraq:
The evidence offered to support the administration’s assessment of Zarqawi as a driver of the Iraqi insurgency and top lieutenant of bin Laden is reminiscent, in form and substance, of the spurious evidence regarding Iraq weapons of mass destruction. Indeed, some of the sources may be the same.
Similarly, The Financial Times, The Telegraph, Knight Ridder Newspapers, The Los Angeles Times and Newsweek all published stories in 2004 calling various aspects of the Zarqawi myth into question.
A report in The Telegraph in 2006 called him “a figurehead around whom dissident groups in Iraq were rallying, rather than an elusive fighter directing military operations,” noting that “the more the Americans blamed al-Zarqawi for terrorist atrocities, the greater his credibility on the Arab street,” and quoting an “unnamed Sunni insurgent leader” as calling Zarqawi “an American, Israeli and Iranian agent who is trying to keep our country unstable so that the Sunnis will keep facing occupation.”
According to The Atlantic, even Osama bin Laden himself “suspected that the group of Jordanian prisoners with whom al-Zarqawi had been granted amnesty [in 1998] had been infiltrated by Jordanian intelligence.”
And then, right before he was reported dead for the last time, skeptics of the Zarqawi narrative were proven right in a remarkable fashion. On April 9, 2006, The Washington Post published proof in the form of internal military documents that the US government had played up the myth of Zarqawi and Al Qaeda in Iraq as part of a psychological operations campaign:
The US military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. [. . .] For the past two years, US military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi’s role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the ‘U.S. Home Audience’ as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.
In case there was any doubt that the propaganda campaign was targeted at Americans, the program included the Pentagon “selectively leaking” a letter to a US reporter purported to be written by Zarqawi and boasting of his role in the wave of suicide attacks terrorizing Iraq. The letter was dutifully covered by The New York Times even though there were serious questions about whether it was real at all.
The Washington Post exposé quotes an internal briefing document produced by US military headquarters in Iraq revealing that US military chief spokesman Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt boasted that “[t]he Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date.”
And then, two months after these explosive revelations, Zarqawi was reported dead for the last time, a character written out of the script once his value as a propaganda construct was exhausted.
With Zarqawi out of the picture, something else would would be required to keep the American public, and the people of the world, invested in the War on Terror. The main villain in the battle would have to return. Thankfully for the US government, Osama bin Laden was only too happy to oblige.
From the time of his miraculous “escape” from Tora Bora on, the outside world only knew Osama bin Laden from his occasional video releases.
The most infamous of these productions was a video released to the public by the US Defense Department on December 13, 2001. Supposedly “obtained in Afghanistan during the search of a private home in Jalalabad” after anti-Taliban forces moved in to the city, the tape, we are told, “bore a label indicating it was made on November 9” and “shows bin Laden sitting on the floor in a bare room in a house in Kandahar” with “several other men, including two aides and an unidentified cleric, or Sheikh.” Most importantly, it contains—according to the Pentagon-provided subtitles that were added to the video before its distribution to the press—bin Laden’s confession to planning the 9/11 attacks.
“We had notification since the previous Thursday that the event would take place that day,” the US government translation has bin Laden saying. “We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy who would be killed based on the position of the tower.”
The press release provided by the Pentagon noted that, due to the poor quality of the tape, they were not able to produce a verbatim transcript, but that their translation “does convey the messages and information flow” of the conversation, an answer that was apparently good enough for the White House press corps.
REPORTER: Ari, on the bin Laden video that the government released last week, can you offer assurances that the omissions in the government-supplied translation were not deliberate?
ARI FLEISCHER: Mark, I think Secretary Rumsfeld addressed that very eloquently earlier today, when he said, number one, this tape doesn’t change anything—or, this translation doesn’t change anything about the facts in the case. The Department of Defense translators worked very diligently on a very short timetable to put together a faithful translation and that’s what they did. And if you note on the cover note of what the Department of Defense put out, they wrote “due to the quality of the original tape, it is not a verbatim transcript of every word spoken during the meeting; but does convey the messages and information flow.”
So I think what you saw was the very best effort possible and, as the Secretary said about the translation of Arabic, it’s not a precise art that is agreed to by every translator.
SOURCE: White House Daily Press Briefing — December 13, 2001
But this answer was not sufficient for the foreign press. The following week, German TV channel Das Erste broadcast an edition of their investigate program, “Monitor,” in which they hired their own independent translators to check the Pentagon’s transcript of the tape. The report calls the Pentagon translation “very problematic,” noting that “at the most important places where it is held to prove the guilt of bin Laden, it is not identical with the Arabic.”
Translator Dr. Murad Alami, for instance, found that in the sentence “We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy,” the words “in advance” had simply been inserted by the US government translators. Those words did not appear on the tape. Similarly, the word “previous” in “We had notification since the previous Thursday,” was never said, and the subsequent statement that an event would take place on that day cannot be heard in the original Arabic version.
The Monitor report concludes that the Pentagon translation of Osama bin Laden’s supposed confession tape—deliberately adding words in key passages to make it sound like a confession—was not only inaccurate but actually manipulative. As Gernot Rotter, a professor of Islamic and Arabic Studies at the Asia-Africa Institute at the University of Hamburg, states in the report: “The American translators who listened to the tapes and transcribed them apparently wrote a lot of things in that they wanted to hear but that cannot be heard on the tape no matter how many times you listen to it.”
The startling revelation that the Osama bin Laden confession tape was not a confession tape at all—aired on Germany’s premiere public broadcaster and widely discussed in the German press—was never reported in the US.
That video was followed in short order by a 30-minute video of a visibly gaunt and graying Osama bin Laden delivering what appears to be a last message to the Arab world. Released on December 27, 2001, and presumably recorded during the fight at Tora Bora, bin Laden comments on his own mortality: “God willing, America’s end is near. And it doesn’t depend on my continued existence. Whether Osama is killed or not, the awakening has begun.” In the 30-minute video, bin Laden does not move his left arm at all and appears visibly weak.
Interested at that moment in turning the public’s attention away from Osama bin Laden and toward the next front in the War on Terror, Iraq, the Bush administration dismissed the video as “sick propaganda possibly designed to mask the fact the Al Qaeda leader was already dead.”
“He could have made the video and then ordered that it be released in the event of his death,” The Telegraph quoted one White House aide as saying. “The guy is trying to show he’s untouched by the US bombing but he looks under pressure to me.”
Recorded months after his reported journey to Rawalpindi for kidney dialysis, this video would not be the first or the last time that Osama bin Laden would be reported as dead or dying. Like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, bin Laden was also reported dead on several occasions in the ensuing years, including:
- on December 26, 2001, when it was reported that Osama bin Laden had died from a serious lung complication in Tora Bora;
- on January 18, 2002, when Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf told CNN: “I think now, frankly, he is dead for the reason he is a . . . kidney patient”;
- in September 2006, when French intelligence leaked a report suggesting bin Laden had died of typhoid fever in Pakistan;
- and in March 2009, when former US foreign intelligence officer Angelo Codevilla stated: “All the evidence suggests Elvis Presley is more alive today than Osama bin Laden.”
But, also like Zarqawi, none of these reported deaths stopped the Osama bin Laden character from reappearing on the TV screens of a traumatized public to remind them of the importance of the ongoing war on terror.
What followed in the ensuing years was a series of video and audio releases of questionable provenance, often reported in carefully worded turns of phrase that gave the press plausible deniability as to whether or not the recordings really were of Osama bin Laden. A message aired on Al Jazeera in February 2003, for instance, was reported by the BBC as “a poor quality audio recording in which a man’s voice, identified as bin Laden’s, is heard calling for suicide attacks against Americans and resistance to any attack on Iraq.”
The recordings were often mundane. An April 2006 audio message of a speaker “believed to be Osama bin Laden” called on Muslims to “prepare for a long war” in Sudan. A January 2010 audio message warned of the dangers of climate change. “Talk about climate change is not an ideological luxury but a reality,” the speaker, purportedly bin Laden, told his fellow jihadis.
Other recordings appeared at opportune times for the planners of the war on terror, catapulting the terror threat back into the public consciousness just when questions about that narrative were beginning to emerge.
The 2004 US presidential election contest between George Bush and John Kerry, for instance, featured an unusual “October surprise”: a new Osama bin Laden videotape in which the terror mastermind appears to claim responsibility for 9/11 and to warn the American public of future strikes.
ANNOUNCER: This is the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather reporting from CBS News Headquarters in New York.
DAN RATHER: Good evening. With just four days left in the presidential campaign, Osama bin Laden suddenly dropped himself right in the middle of it with a videotaped message to the people of the United States. The fugitive Al Qaeda leader admits for the first time that he indeed ordered the September 11th attack on America, he lays out his reasons for it and he threatens another attack.
This tape tends to confirm that bin Laden is alive and well safely somewhere. President Bush responded by saying the United States will not be intimidated. Senator Kerry said the country is united in its determination to hunt bin Laden down.
And then again, in September 2007, just days before General David Petraeus was set to deliver his report to Congress on the controversial “surge” in Iraq and just days before the sixth anniversary of 9/11, there was Osama bin Laden to remind the public of the ever-present terror threat.
CHARLES GIBSON: Just days before the sixth anniversary of 9/11, the man responsible for the death and horror that day is coming out of the shadows with a new videotape and more invective aimed at the United States. He lectures Americans on everything from religion to politics to taxes. No overt threats, but authorities are looking at whether the tape contains any signal to indicate a future attack.
SOURCE: ABC World News Tonight With Charles Gibson In Kansas City, MO, September 7, 2007
Capitalizing on the conveniently timed video release, President Bush was quick to cite it as evidence that Al Qaeda was connected to the war in Iraq and that the increasingly unpopular war—now generally understood to have been an illegal invasion waged on false pretenses—was in fact an essential part of the war on terror.
BUSH: I found it interesting that on the tape, Iraq was mentioned, which is a reminder that Iraq is a part of this war against extremists.
SOURCE: Remarks Following a Meeting With Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan in Sydney, Australia
But buried beneath the attention-grabbing headlines and substance-less soundbites with which the media covered this release, troubling questions began to arise about the nature of the video. The aging, weary, gaunt, graying and partially paralyzed Osama bin Laden of 2001 was gone, replaced by a visibly younger and healthier man, despite having numerous health problems and despite having presumably spent the better part of a decade on the run as the world’s most wanted man.
Sporting jet black hair and what many media commentators pointed out looked like a fake beard, the figure on the screen seems to be moving in an unrealistic way. Bizarrely, the video freezes at the 1-minute-and-58-second mark while the audio continues. The image remains frozen for most of the video message, only resuming briefly around the 12-minute mark. What’s more, all of the references to current events—those parts referenced in passing on the evening news as “proving that Osama is still alive”—take place during the times when the video is frozen.
In fact, the video proved so unusual that media commentators had to go out of their way to assure their viewers that it was indeed real.
GIBSON: Our chief investigative correspondent, Brian Ross, joins me again tonight from New York. Brian?
BRIAN ROSS: Charlie, US authorities say tonight there is no doubt the tape is authentic. It is bin Laden, black beard and all.
SOURCE: ABC World News Tonight With Charles Gibson In Kansas City, MO, September 7, 2007
Perhaps the strangest part of the video, however, was the manner in which it was released to the public. The video, it turns out, was not released by Al Qaeda, but by the US government.
The month after the video’s release it was reported that the video had originally been “intercepted” by SITE Intelligence Group, described as “one of several small, commercial intelligence firms that specialize in intercepting al-Qaeda’s internet communications, often by clandestine means.” According to The Washington Post:
SITE founder Rita Katz told The Post that her company covertly obtained an early copy of a bin Laden video message in early September, then shared the video with senior administration officials on Sept. 7 on the condition that it not be distributed or made public before its official release. Soon afterward, the video was downloaded by dozens of computers registered to government agencies. Within hours, SITE’s copy of the video was leaked to television news networks and broadcast worldwide.
It was not explained how SITE had “obtained an early copy” of an Osama bin Laden video, but it was far from the only time that mysteriously well-connected internet researchers had unexplained exclusive access to Al Qaeda video productions. Researchers and companies who supposedly scooped the intelligence agencies by “discovering” and publishing Al Qaeda messages (sometimes even ahead of Al Qaeda itself) included:
- SITE, or the “Search for International Terrorist Entities,” whose promotional materials touted the company’s “one-of-a-kind access” to “messages, videos, and advance warnings of suicide bombings” from “the most hard-to-reach corners of violent online extremist communities,” whose clientele included leading media outlets and even government agencies, and whose founder, Rita Katz, was born in Iraq to a wealthy Jewish businessman father who was convicted of spying for Israel in 1969 in a military tribunal and executed in a public hanging (which, we are told, Katz did not think had much bearing on her work) and who, despite not having any intelligence connections herself, found a job allowing her to search for terrorists online shortly after moving to New York in the 1990s;
- “Laura Mansfield,” a pseudonymous South Carolina housewife who—despite being a self-described “mom sitting here in her dining room typing away on my computer”—is fluent in Arabic, who likes to “monitor” jihadi message boards and chat rooms, and who—with no special training or connections to the world of terror or espionage—was consistently able to find and publicize Al Qaeda videos before anyone else, including: a “2007” video of Osama bin Laden that, it was quickly discovered, was actually a five-year-old video that had already been previously released but reported as “new” by the credulous mainstream press; and multiple releases featuring “Azzam the American,” a.k.a. Adam Pearlman, the Jewish Californian whose grandfather was a board member of the Anti-Defamation League and who, we are told, converted to Islam with a single internet post and was quickly recruited by Al Qaeda to serve as “translator, video producer, and cultural interpreter” for their media committee;
ADAM GADAHN: All you who believe, fight the unbelievers who are closest in proximity to you and let them find harshness in you. And know that Allah is with those who fear him.
SOURCE: Al Qaeda: Hoax
- and IntelCenter, a company described as “a private contractor working for intelligence agencies” and headed by Ben Venzke—the former Director of Intelligence Special Projects at iDefense, where he worked alongside people like Jim Melnick, a psychological operations specialist who served sixteen years in the US Army and the Defense Intelligence Agency—that similarly supplied the US government and media with Al Qaeda videos released by As-Sahab, the terror group’s media production arm, and somehow exclusively obtained by this private contractor in Virginia.
The public had good reason to question the reality of these suspiciously timed and mysteriously sourced audio and video recordings.
In 1999, William Arkin wrote a piece for The Washington Post called “When Seeing and Hearing Isn’t Believing” in which he reported on the digital morphing technologies that were then being worked on by research teams at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and elsewhere. He reported on one demonstration of this technology—a fake recording of Gen. Carl W. Steiner, former Commander-in-Chief, US Special Operations Command, announcing “Gentlemen! We have called you together to inform you that we are going to overthrow the United States government.” The fake audio was so impressive that General Steiner asked for a copy. Another demonstration involved Colin Powell announcing that he was being well treated by his captors.
“Digital morphing — voice, video, and photo — has come of age, available for use in psychological operations. PSYOPS, as the military calls it, seek to exploit human vulnerabilities in enemy governments, militaries and populations to pursue national and battlefield objectives. [. . .] Being able to manufacture convincing audio or video, they say, might be the difference in a successful military operation or coup.”
The technology continued to feature in PSYOPS planning as the war of terror dragged on. In 2003, the CIA Iraq Operations Group came up with a “wacky idea” for discrediting Saddam Hussein in the eyes of his people: to create a video purporting to show the Iraqi dictator having sex with a teenage boy. Amazingly, Stein also confirmed that the CIA did make a fake video of Osama bin Laden:
The agency actually did make a video purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys, one of the former CIA officers recalled, chuckling at the memory.
But as successful as these information operations and Al Qaeda media releases were in keeping the terror threat in the minds of the public, the neocons directing this war of terror were going to need much more than that to meet their objectives. The war on terror, launched in Afghanistan and waged in Iraq, was never meant to end there.
BUSH: The other strain of radicalism in the Middle East is Shi’a extremism, supported and embodied by the regime that sits in Tehran. Iran has long been a source of trouble in the region. It is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.
[. . .]
Iran’s actions threaten the security of nations everywhere. And that is why the United States is rallying friends and allies around the world to isolate the regime, to impose economic sanctions. We will confront this danger, before it is too late.
SOURCE: Remarks at the American Legion National Convention in Reno, Nevada
But getting the public—already weary of the years-long struggle in Afghanistan and increasingly disillusioned with the debacle in Iraq—on board with the invasion of yet another country was going to be difficult unless another spectacular terror event came along to justify opening up yet another front in the war on terror. And, if the terror bogeyman was not willing to provide such a justification, the neocons were once again ready and willing to create it.
FAIZ SHAKIR: What you’re writing there is that Cheney—there was a meeting in the White House where Cheney presided over looking to cook up the next war, a false war based on false intelligence!
[. . .]
SEYMOUR HERSH: There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build – we in our shipyard – build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy SEALs on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up. Might cost some lives and it was rejected, because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. But that that’s the level of stuff we were talking about. Provocation.
Seymour Hersh was not the only one warning about the possibility of the Bush White House staging a terror event in the waning days of its administration to trigger a bold new escalation with Iran. Even Zbigniew Brzezinski—whose involvement in Operation Cyclone started the American involvement in Afghanistan that led to the creation of Al Qaeda in the first place—warned the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2007 that a military provocation or terrorist act whose origin “would be very difficult to trace” could be staged and blamed on Tehran in order to justify US military action on Iran.
BRZEZINSKI: A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks followed by accusations of the Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the United States blamed on Iran, culminating in a “defensive” US military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
SOURCE: Zbigniew Brzezinski: Transcript of Testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
But the neocons—suffering from plummeting approval ratings, mounting domestic difficulties and the ramifications of a global financial crisis—no longer had the political capital to stage terror events and garner public approval for their agenda. By 2008, after seven long years in the grip of the existential threat that they were told was the basis for a generation-defining, civilizational struggle with no end in sight, the American public was getting tired. They didn’t want the neocons and their endless war on terror. They were hoping for change.
Luckily for them, that’s precisely what the 2008 US presidential election seemed to offer.
The public was ready for change. In fact, the idea of a shift from the bellicose, belligerent, aggressive foreign policy and the war on terror rhetoric of the neocons to the promised hope and change of the Obama administration was so enticing that not only did Obama win the 2008 election, he also won over the world at large. So excited were people for the prospect of peace that the Nobel Peace Prize committee decided to bestow their 2009 prize on Obama before he had taken a single substantive action in office.
THORBJORN JAGLUND: Good morning. Den Norske Nobelkomite har bestemt at Nobels fredspris for 2009 skal tildeles president Barack Obama for hans ekstraordinære innsats for å styrke internasjonalt diplomati og mellomfolkelig samarbeid.
Those not swept up in the hope and change delirium were quick to point out that the committee had made a mistake in handing a peace prize to a president still actively involved in military engagements. What not even his most cynical critics seemed prepared for, however, was the idea that Obama would not only continue the Bush administration’s war on terror but that he would greatly expand it. From the two-front war in Afghanistan and Iraq under Bush, Obama would ultimately lead the war of terror into seven countries.
One of Obama’s first moves in office was to oversee a dramatic escalation in Afghanistan, a “troop surge” that was meant to resolve the security issues in the country but actually exacerbated them, finally leading to the dramatic downfall of the US-backed regime and the reinstallation of the Taliban in 2021. And, as we shall see, despite promising a swift resolution to the war in Iraq, not only was the handover of authority to the Iraqi government delayed as long as legally possible but the US was ultimately drawn in again as the terror group that they fostered led to a battle against the Islamic State.
But the newly revitalized war on terror—now given new cover by a smiling, peace-prizing-winning, softer-spoken Commander-in-Chief—did not end there.
Obama oversaw the expansion of Bush’s drone war into Pakistan:
ANCHOR: US President Barack Obama, meanwhile, has admitted for the first time that drones are regularly striking Taliban and Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
OBAMA: I want to make sure that people understand actually drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties. For the most part, they have been very precise, precision strikes against Al Qaeda and their affiliates.
He led the “kinetic military action” in Libya against previous war on terror ally Moammar Gaddafi:
OBAMA: Good afternoon, everybody. Today I authorized the Armed Forces of the United States to begin a limited military action in Libya in support of an international effort to protect Libyan civilians. That action has now begun.
SOURCE: President Obama Authorizes Limited Military Action in Libya
He began the decade-long attempt to overthrow previous war on terror ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria:
OBAMA: My policy from the beginning has been that President Assad had lost credibility, that he attacked his own people, has killed his own people, unleashed a military against innocent civilians, and that the only way to bring stability and peace to Syria is going to be for Assad to step down and to move forward on a political transition.
He waged war in Yemen along with the Saudi government, who had supported and fostered terror groups in the region for years:
AMY GOODMAN: Documents obtained by Reuters show the US government is concerned it could be implicated in potential war crimes in Yemen because of its support for a Saudi-led coalition air campaign. The Obama administration has continued to authorize weapons sales to Saudi Arabia despite warnings last year from government lawyers that it might be considered a co-belligerent under international law.
And he extended the “Authorization for Use of Military Force“—the legislation passed in the wake of 9/11 authorizing the president to “use all necessary and appropriate force” against those nations, organizations or persons he determines “planned, authorized, committed or aided” that attack—to include Al-Shabaab in Somalia.
JOHN KERRY: The United States, obviously, has been engaged in helping Somalia fight back against tribal terror and the challenges to the cohesion of the state of Somalia. And the President and his allies have really done an amazing job of fighting back and building a state structure.
SOURCE: Secretary Kerry Delivers Remarks With Somali President Mohamud
But although these escalations appeared to be a mere continuation of the War on Terror that was sold to the public in the wake of 9/11, they were not. In fact, it quickly became apparent that a remarkable transition had begun to occur. Al Qaeda, the ultimate face of evil and the undisputed enemy in the grand terror war narrative, were now the “good guys”—or at least serviceable allies—in the fight against the next target in the war of terror.
This unbelievable turnaround had in fact begun during the Bush administration, when the neocons had started to set their sites on Iran. Being predominately Shiite, Iran is in fact the enemy of the radical Wahabbis and Salafist Muslims that populate the ranks of Al Qaeda and other Sunni terror groups. In targeting Iran, the US—like the British Empire before them—found it convenient to switch allegiances, arming, funding and promoting the very radicals they had just been at war with in order to defeat their enemy of the moment.
As Seymour Hersh reported in 2007:
In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The “redirection,” as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.
To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. [. . .] A byproduct of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
As Hersh detailed in his articles on “The Redirection” and “Preparing the Battlefield,” and as other mainstream sources eventually corroborated, this “shift in Middle East strategy” by the Bush administration included:
- supporting Fatah al-Islam—a militant Islamic fighting force led by a “former associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi” dedicated to “spreading the ideology of Al Qaeda”—in their struggle against Iranian ally (and Israeli enemy) Hezbollah;
- providing covert funds to the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, a strange cult-of-personality that, as a violent group of radicals that participated in bombings inside Iran and even aided Mossad in assassinating Iranian scientists, was not merely lauded by the US but openly promoted at gala events by neocons and their fellow-travellers;
- secretly backing “opposition groups” in Syria, one of Iran’s most important regional allies;
- and “supplying money and weapons” to Jundullah, a group with “close ties to Al Qaeda” (including reportedly being at one time headed by alleged “9/11 mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) that “conducted raids into Iran from bases in Pakistan” with covert CIA assistance.
That these operations would have started under Bush and the neocons came as little surprise to those who knew anything about the real nature of the so-called war on terror. That they would be continued and even expanded under Obama, the Ambassador of Hope and Change, was more surprising to those who did not yet grasp the true scale and scope of this war.
No, the substance of the Bush redirection did not change under Obama, only the tone and flavour of that policy changed. Obama did not win multiple advertising awards for his 2008 Hope and Change election campaign for nothing. As a shrewd salesman of an unpopular agenda, he knew that to get the public on board with such a radical shift in objectives, he was going to need an equally radical event to take place to tie a bow on the Osama bin Laden narrative and redirect the public’s attention.
And, on May 2, 2011, that event occurred.
OBAMA: Good evening. Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.
SOURCE: Osama bin Laden Dead
Codenamed Operation Neptune Spear, the mission to kill bin Laden involved a daring team of Navy SEALs flying two stealth-modified Black Hawk helicopters from the Jalalabad military base in Afghanistan through Pakistani air space straight to Abbottabad—the affluent military town where the world’s most wanted man had evidently been living for years, evading the most comprehensive dragnet in history. Crash landing one of the choppers in the compound courtyard, a massive firefight broke out. The SEALs, clearing weapons stashes and barricades while fending off bin Laden’s henchmen, made their way to the third-floor bedroom where the dastardly villain used one of his wives as a human shield. Shooting her in the leg to get her out of the way, the SEALs then managed to land two shots on their target, one hitting bin Laden in the head and the other in the chest—just as the terror kingpin was reaching for the gun he kept at the ready by his headboard.
Making good their escape, the Navy SEAL heroes blew up their damaged helicopter while a standby chopper that had been prepared for the mission in case of an emergency flew in and whisked the remaining task force members out with bin Laden’s body in tow. Returning to Bagram Air Base, bin Laden’s body was immediately flown out to the USS Carl Vinson, where it was buried at sea in accordance with Islamic tradition.
And just like that, it was done. Public Enemy number one, the face of the war on terror, was dead; slain by the valiant Navy SEALs in a daring operation that was broadcast in real time to the White House Situation Room, where the Commander-in-Chief of the War of Terror, Barack Obama, and his iron-willed cabinet of terror warriors watched with steely determination.
Indeed, this was not the stuff of history books, no dry, dusty tale of some minor police action or military operation. It may not have been the grand showdown in the cave fortress that the public had been prepared for, but—befitting the comic book supervillain of the war on terror narrative—this was the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters.
DEVGRU OPERATOR: Geronimo. For God and country. Geronimo.
SOURCE: Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
Yes, this was the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters. But, like a Hollywood blockbuster, the story of the raid was itself fiction. In fact, in the face of mild questioning by the generally deferential press, every single aspect of the confusing and often contradictory story that was told to the public in those euphoric hours after Obama’s momentous announcement was proven to be a lie.
There had been no firefight.
Osama was not armed.
He did not use his wife as a human shield.
Burial at sea was not part of Islamic tradition. In fact, it was directly opposed to that tradition.
Even the famous picture from the Situation Room was a lie; there had been no live video feed of the raid.
But it wasn’t just the details of the raid itself that had been a fabrication; the entire story of the decade-long manhunt for Osama, dramatized in Oscar-winning movies like Zero Dark Thirty and recounted in countless reports, books and tell-alls, proved to be similarly fraudulent.
In fact, the story began to fall apart from the very moment it was told to the public. But while most of the press remained content to pick at the corners of the story, leaving the substance of the narrative intact, others dug deeper, looking for answers amid the confusing confluence of lies, obfuscations, cover-ups and contradictions that surrounded the raid.
In a lengthy article for The London Review of Books in 2015 that—sourcing to unnamed, retired officials with no direct knowledge of the events recounted—was about as solidly sourced as the official account, Seymour Hersh alleged that, while bin Laden had indeed been killed in Abbottabad, he had in fact been living at the compound as a prisoner of the ISI for years and that every part of the official narrative of the raid—from the story of the “Al Qaeda courier” by which the CIA allegedly discovered the compound to the phony vaccination drive to collect bin Laden’s DNA to the burial at sea—was in fact an element of an elaborate (and seemingly unnecessary) cover story to obscure that fact.
In a piece for The Independent the year after the raid, Patrick Cockburn pointed out the inherent contradiction between early reports that the raid had uncovered a “treasure trove” of intelligence that “portrayed bin Laden as a spider at the centre of a conspiratorial web” and later admissions that he had had almost no contact with the outside world and was increasingly delusional about his organization and its capabilities.
Others simply pointed out that, given this was at least the ninth occassion in which journalists, politicians, intelligence officials or others had pronounced Osama bin Laden dead, it was not to be believed without evidence.
But that evidence was not forthcoming. Instead, the government went to extraordinary lengths to cover it up. All the files from the raid—including “copies of the death certificate and autopsy report for bin Laden as well as the results of tests to identify the body”—were deleted from the Pentagon’s computers and transferred to the CIA, where they could be more carefully guarded from Freedom of Information Act requests.
Pictures and video of the raid, including pictures of Osama bin Laden’s dead body that—the public were told—may be released, were instead sealed away forever.
At the time, all that was released were a few short videos of a man purported to be Osama bin Laden that—it was claimed—had been taken from the compound (although it was never explained why bin Laden would have poorly shot video of his back to the camera, watching himself on TV) and some salacious details about the records allegedly seized from the compound’s computers—like the devout Muslim jihadi‘s predilection for porn—that seemed reminiscent of the CIA’s previous “wacky ideas” for faking videos about Hussein and bin Laden.
But CIA director Leon Panetta did leak classified details of the raid at a 2011 award ceremony attended by Mark Boal, the screenwriter who would go on to write and produce Zero Dark Thirty, the Hollywood dramatization of the manhunt for Osama that portrayed the official version of the raid on the silver screen and even falsely implied that the CIA’s illegal torture program had been essential in helping to track down the terror kingpin.
The full truth of what happened in Abbottabad, now obscured by lies, misinformation, selective “leaks,” self-serving tell-alls and still-classified data will likely never see the light of day. But to the directors of the War of Terror, that is beside the point. Osama bin Laden had served his purpose as the villain in the terror war story. And, having served that purpose, he was being written out of the script.
In the end, that was all Osama bin Laden had ever been: a character in the terror war drama. One so good that, if he didn’t exist, they would have had to invent him.
RATHER: Well, it’s pretty obvious the judgment is coalescing around the president that it was Osama bin Laden.
MILT BEARDEN: I know we live in a country where we’re often told that the first thing that comes to your mind, put it down. Put the little mark in there.
I feel slightly uncomfortable because I spent so many years wondering how the myth of Osama bin Laden got started. We have the Osama bin Laden who was the great war hero in Afghanistan. We have Osama bin Laden who was trained by CIA, funded and supported by CIA during three years of war.
I was there at the same time bin Laden was there. He was not the great warrior that went in and fought the Soviet Union to a standstill. The CIA had nothing to do with him.
I think that that mythological Osama bin Laden—never mind that he’s an absolutely evil man—but the mythological Osama bin Laden causes me trouble, and I think maybe there is another answer out there. I’m not certain that I know what it is.
[. . .]
RATHER: There’s no question in my mind that you’re skeptical that Osama bin Laden, aided and abetted or at least protected with the Taliban, should be the principal target of some large military operation. If I’m wrong, tell me now.
BEARDEN: No, no, no. You’re not wrong, Dan. [What] I’m saying is—let me step back one step on this and say Osama bin Laden is an evil man and he’s a component of the terrorism that we’re dealing with across the board. All I’m saying is that I think Osama bin Laden has become the metaphor for the entire problem of terrorism involving Muslims with perceived grievances against the United States and I think it would be wrong to say this is a one-size-fits-all operation and to go after bin Laden because an operation as sophisticated as carried out yesterday was an operation that was concealed from us for months, probably, before it took place. It happened without, essentially, a hitch, except for one aircraft. And there is no reason to believe that these same people weren’t capable of covering their tracks somehow on the way out.
Now, I would go so far as to say that this group who was responsible for that, if they didn’t have an Osama bin Laden out there they’d invent one because he’s a terrific diversion for the rest of the world.
The death of Osama bin Laden may have ended one chapter in the War on Terror, but it was not the end of the story. In a key sense, that story would simply repeat, with the rise of Al Qaeda serving as a template that the terror war planners could draw upon as needed in their efforts to prolong their never-ending conflict indefinitely.
The alignment with radical Islamists to achieve short-term geostrategic goals—a strategy refined by the British Empire over centuries of practice in the “Great Game” of global geopolitics and reaching its apotheosis with the US operation to arm the Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s—was simply employed once again as the US led its NATO allies in a “humanitarian war” against Moammar Gaddafi in Libya. Former enemies in the war on terror, including veterans of the Iraq insurgency who had been killing American troops in Iraq, and even designated terrorists who had been rendered and tortured by the CIA, were now the good guys, helping to overthrow Gaddafi’s government in Tripoli.
That same story played out yet again in Syria, where the US and its regional allies once again made a deal with the devil, this time in the name of toppling the government of Bashar al-Assad. Arming the most radical elements of these terror groups with US-procured weapons and training them at a US joint operation base in Jordan, it was not long before the Bush-era “redirection” of the terror war was complete and Al Qaeda was now widely recognized as a convenient ally of the US in Syria.
In 2012, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Senior Fellow Ed Husain wrote of “Al-Qaeda’s Specter in Syria,” noting that “The Syrian rebels would be immeasurably weaker today without Al Qaeda in their ranks.”
In 2014, a trio of foreign policy “experts” published a piece for the CFR on “The Good and Bad of Ahrar al-Sham: An Al Qaeda–Linked Group Worth Befriending.”
And in 2015, Barak Mendelsohn—writing in the pages of the same Foreign Affairs magazine in which Philip Zelikow and his co-authors had “predicted” the terror war—penned “Accepting Al Qaeda: The Enemy of the United States’ Enemy,” in which he argued:
Since 9/11, Washington has considered Al Qaeda the greatest threat to the United States, one that must be eliminated regardless of cost or time. After Washington killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, it made Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s new leader, its next number one target. But the instability in the Middle East following the Arab revolutions and the meteoric rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) require that Washington rethink its policy toward Al Qaeda, particularly its targeting of Zawahiri. Destabilizing Al Qaeda at this time may in fact work against U.S. efforts to defeat ISIS.
In conclusion, Mendelson writes flatly: “It is certainly ironic that at this point, when the United States is the closest it has ever been to destroying Al Qaeda, its interests would be better served by keeping the terrorist organization afloat and Zawahiri alive.”
Such arguments, unthinkable during the bin Laden years, were suddenly not only thinkable but were being openly promoted in Beltway foreign policy think tank circles. That such a dramatic turnaround could even be considered, let alone advocated, so soon after the years-long propaganda campaign portraying Al Qaeda as an existential threat to the West is only surprising to those who were ignorant of the real history of Al Qaeda and the real origins of the terror war.
To those who did know this history, the fact that those in the State Department’s orbit were now openly calling for accommodation of and even alliance with Al Qaeda came as no surprise. And it similarly came as no surprise that this alliance led—exactly as it had in Afghanistan in the 1980s—to the rise of a new terror group: the Islamic State.
Rising from the ashes of the same Al Qaeda in Iraq that had been led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—the US military’s self-proclaimed “most successful information campaign to date”—the Islamic State rose to international prominence in 2014 when it captured Raqqa in Syria and began a campaign that saw it take over Mosul and Tikrit in northern Iraq before announcing the establishment of a caliphate.
As a convenient justification for reengaging the American military in Iraq and as another excuse for military intervention in Syria, it was only later that the truth began to emerge: not only had the US armed and trained these very ISIS fighters that they were now engaged in mortal struggle with and not only had the US’ own Defense Intelligence Agency precisely predicted the rise of an Islamic State in this area of Syria and Iraq two years before it happened, but US-led forces repeatedly stood down as ISIS convoys moved unimpeded, allowing them to take Ramadi in 2015 and allowing a convoy of stranded ISIS fighters to return home in 2017.
The career of the group’s new leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, followed the now-familiar terror bogeyman pattern. Like his predecessor Zarqawi, Baghdadi was pronounced dead, alive, arrested, dead and alive again so often that news of his actions quickly descended into farce. Detained by US forces at Camp Bucca in Iraq in 2004, he was reportedly arrested again in March 2007 and killed in May of that year before being arrested yet again in 2009 and killed yet again in 2010, at which point even The Times was forced to concede, “The arrest or death of Mr. Baghdadi, the insurgent fighter, has been reported so many times that it has become a macabre joke.”
But he was not done yet.
He was reported to have died in an Israeli hospital in April of 2015, then killed in an airstrike in October 2015 and killed again by the Russians in June 2017 before the Syrian Observatory For Human Rights released a statement insisting he “Really Is Dead This Time” in July 2017. Yet still he continued to reappear, reliably resurrected in the headlines of the establishment press to terrorize the public as needed until the final report of his death in 2019.
But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the announcement of this, the final death of this remarkably resilient terror mastermind, carefully staged to bring to mind Obama’s dramatic announcement of the death of Osama bin Laden and to rally the country around the flag once again . . .
DONALD TRUMP: Last night the United States brought the world’s number one terrorist leader to justice. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead.
SOURCE: President Trump Delivers Remarks
. . . is that few in the public seemed even to notice that it had taken place.
And, in 2022, when Biden took his turn as the conquering hero, announcing the death of Ayman Al-Zawahiri:
BIDEN: My fellow Americans, on Saturday, at my direction, the United States successfully concluded an air strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed the Emir of Al Qaeda, Ayman Zawahiri.
SOURCE: Biden Announces Death Of Al Qaeda Leader Ayman Al-Zawahri
. . . again it was greeted by a collective shrug. Few in the public even knew Zawahiri’s name, let alone gave him much thought.
For a world that had just lived through two decades of near daily assurances that Al Qaeda was so existential a threat to human civilization that it justified a worldwide, never-ending War on Terror of unlimited scope, this was nothing short of remarkable. The War of Terror, it seemed, might end not with a bang but a whimper.
For the families of Zemari Ahmadi and all the millions whose blood was spilled in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and all the other lands that have been torn apart by the senseless carnage of the past two decades, the growing apathy of the American public to the terror war narrative may come as cold comfort. But to those who have spent decades living under the shadow of the ever-present terror fearmongering, cynically wielded by politicians and governments to keep their populations cowering under the weight of colour-coded terror threats, the rejection of the terror war narrative is undeniably a turning point.
But, even if the public, having snapped out of the Al Qaeda delusion, is content to move on with their lives and to prepare to live in a post-terror world, the terror warriors have other plans.
What many in the public have failed to realize is that the War of Terror was never really about Osama bin Laden. It was never really about Al Qaeda. It wasn’t about radical Muslims. At base, it wasn’t even about geopolitical goals or reshaping the map of the Middle East.
It was about us.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: The Obama Administration’s internal legal justification for assassinating US citizens without charge has been revealed for the first time.
SOURCE: Kill List Exposed: Leaked Obama Memo Shows Assassination of U.S. Citizens “Has No Geographic Limit”
RAND PAUL: I don’t know. If the president’s going to kill these people, he needs to let them know. Some of the people [who] might be terrorists are people who are missing fingers. Some people have stains on their clothing. Some people have changed the color of their hair.
SOURCE: Senator Rand Paul exposes scary definition of ‘possible terrorist’
CHRIS CUOMO: This was no mere protest gone awry. It was what they used to care about on the right, the worst kind of planned violence: terorrism.
DONALD TRUMP: These are not acts of peaceful protest, but really domestic terror.
ELAINE QIUJANO: The Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division told Congress that the Bureau currently has 850 open domestic terror cases. Half of those are anti-government or anti-authority extremists.
REP. BOEBERT: And this was what DHS decided to put out in a bulletin that now, if you have COVID misinformation that they classify misinformation, you are a domestic terrorist.
SOURCE: ‘Covid Misinformation Is Now Domestic Terrorism’: Says Congresswoman Boebert Citing A DHS Bulletin
CHRYSTIA FREELAND: First, we are broadening the scope of Canada’s anti-money laundering and terrorist financing rules so that they cover crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use.
SOURCE: Trudeau invokes Emergencies Act for first time ever in response to protests
BUSH: There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit, and it is our continuing duty to confront them.
SOURCE: Bush calls out domestic terror threat at 9/11 ceremony
There, just below the surface of the War on Terror story that was sold to the public—the story of radical, freedom-hating Muslims and cowardly terror attacks and crusading Presidents flanked by their valiant Navy SEALs—is another story. As if written in invisible ink between the lines of the history of Al Qaeda is the story of the PATRIOT Act and the Department of Homeland Security, of the TSA and biometric screening and domestic terror watch lists. It is the story of the creation of an entire infrastructure of legal measures and emergency powers that have quietly transformed the face of the so-called free world.
The terror myth has always served primarily as a tool of domestic control. It is a blank check for every government to enact whatever controls it desires over its population in the name of “security.” And the public, convinced of the need for that security by the terror war myth itself, clamours for more government controls. The problem feeds upon itself.
There is only one way to break out of such a vicious circle. The underlying premise of the entire terror war has to be called out for what it is: a lie.
In the end, perhaps this is how the War of Terror really ends. Not with the toppling of the Taliban or a “Mission Accomplished” photo op on the deck of an aircraft carrier or the announcement of the death of the arch terror mastermind or even by presidential declaration. Not by these or any of the other illusory endpoints that the terror warriors dangle in front of the public from time to time only to snatch away when grasped at.
No. The War of Terror ends when the public, having learnt the secret history of Al Qaeda, decide to consign the real terror threat, the myth of Al Qaeda, to the dustbin of history.
FALSE FLAGS: THE SECRET HISTORY OF AL QAEDA
written, directed and narrated by JAMES CORBETT
video editing and graphic design by BROC WEST
transcript and sources: CORBETTREPORT.COM/ALQAEDA
Dedicated to all those who lost their lives in the war of terror and all those who have sought to expose the truth about that war
October 27, 2022 Posted by aletho | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Middle East, Syria, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment
Featured Video
House Resolution Calls for Tech Companies to Censor Speech
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Book Review
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
Blog Roll
-
Join 2,459 other subscribers
Visits Since December 2009
- 7,490,626 hits
Looking for something?
Archives
Calendar
Categories
Aletho News Civil Liberties Corruption Deception Economics Environmentalism Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism Fake News False Flag Terrorism Full Spectrum Dominance Illegal Occupation Mainstream Media, Warmongering Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity Militarism Progressive Hypocrite Russophobia Science and Pseudo-Science Solidarity and Activism Subjugation - Torture Supremacism, Social Darwinism Timeless or most popular Video War Crimes Wars for IsraelTags
9/11 Afghanistan Africa al-Qaeda Australia BBC Benjamin Netanyahu Brazil Canada CDC Central Intelligence Agency China CIA CNN Covid-19 COVID-19 Vaccine Donald Trump Egypt European Union Facebook FBI FDA France Gaza Germany Google Hamas Hebron Hezbollah Hillary Clinton Human rights Hungary India Iran Iraq ISIS Israel Israeli settlement Japan Jerusalem Joe Biden Korea Latin America Lebanon Libya Middle East National Security Agency NATO New York Times North Korea NSA Obama Pakistan Palestine Poland Qatar Russia Sanctions against Iran Saudi Arabia Syria The Guardian Turkey Twitter UAE UK Ukraine United Nations United States USA Venezuela Washington Post West Bank WHO Yemen Zionism
Aletho News- Iran unveils new control measures over Strait of Hormuz transit
- House Resolution Calls for Tech Companies to Censor Speech
- Ceasefire no longer viable after 200 days of Israeli violations: Hamas
- Israeli strikes intensify across southern Lebanon, casualties reported
- Left in Disbelief: Israel in Panic over Hezbollah FPV Drone Nightmare
- Trump Taps Israel Lobbyist From Mossad Cutout FDD To Join Iran Negotiations
- Trump’s Blockade Snatches Defeat from the Jaws of Victory
- Geopolitics and Geoeconomics of the Strait of Hormuz
- Mali: a new front in the Western war on multipolarism
- CHD Scientist: CDC, FDA COVID Vaccine Safety Monitoring ‘Insulting, and Many People Are Injured’
- If Americans Knew
- Israel’s New Ambassador to the ‘Christian World’ Served as Envoy to Azerbaijan During the Ethnic Cleansing of Christians from Nagorno-Karabakh
- US set to sell $1B “Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System” to Israel – Daily Update
- Israeli Strikes Kill at Least 32 Across S Lebanon, Including Children – Amid “Ceasefire”
- Israel to pour $730m into propaganda arm amid reputational crisis
- Real Cost of Iran War Likely Double the $25 Billion Figure the Pentagon Gave to Congress
- Israel conducts farthest-ever strike in long history of attacks on Gaza humanitarian aid flotillas
- In Gaza, Israel commits 10+ ceasefire violations a day – Daily Update
- US ships 6,500 tons of munitions, equipment to Israel in 24 hours
- A New Library in Gaza Rises From the Ashes of Destruction
- Israel’s top Jewish religious body ‘refuses to condemn’ smashing of Jesus statue
- No Tricks Zone
- Wind Energy Is Toxic, Hazardous To Human Health, Scientific Review Shows
- Oversupply Of Volatile Solar Energy Leads To Record NEGATIVE Prices!
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
Contact:
atheonews (at) gmail.com
Disclaimer
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
Aletho News 