Daesh attacks Embassy in Kabul amid wave of violence against Russians
By Lucas Leiroz | September 7, 2022
The recent attack on the Russian embassy in Kabul was another shocking episode in the current wave of assaults against Russian civilians around the world. Daesh claimed responsibility for the crime, which raises a number of suspicions about possible cooperation between anti-Russian groups abroad, considering the links between Islamic terrorists, Western intelligence and Ukrainian neo-Nazis.
On August 5, the Russian Embassy in Afghanistan was the target of a terrorist attack. A suicide bomber approached the entrance to the Embassy facility and operated the explosion, killing two Russian diplomatic staff’s employees, as well as at least six Afghan citizens who were nearby. The Embassy’s guards even shot down the terrorist, but the action was not fast enough to prevent self-detonation, which culminated in the tragedy. Several people remain hospitalized, and the number of deaths could increase in the coming days.
Although several hostilities against Russians have already taken place in Afghanistan in the past, this is the first time that such an attack has taken place since the Taliban took Kabul, after the American defeat in 2021. According to local sources, Daesh, which is an enemy of the Taliban and has acted intensively in the country to harm the new government, claimed responsibility for the attack. In fact, the incident was characterized by a number of similarities with Daesh’s praxis in other assaults, which would raise suspicions about the group’s involvement even if responsibility had not been assumed.
Russia is one of the few countries to maintain an embassy in Kabul after the Taliban took over the country. Although Moscow still does not officially recognize the Taliban government, Russian diplomats are talking to local authorities in order to advance bilateral negotiations, currently having plans to improve the supply of fuel and other commodities. The Russian government is working to overcome old rivalries with the Taliban and reach a positive agreement for all sides, as the Afghan situation currently appears to be between a stable government with the Taliban or the absolute chaos of the civil war operated by terrorist organizations, such as Daesh. The mere fact of maintaining bilateral dialogue with the de facto government of the Taliban seems to be reason enough for terrorists to target Russian citizens.
However, it would be naive to think that the reasons for this attack are limited to pragmatic Moscow-Kabul relations. If this were the only reason, certainly other episodes of terrorism would have already occurred at the Embassy at other times. There is undoubtedly something specific motivating this violence at this time. The main suspicion is that the attack is related to the publication by the Russian Embassy of a list of names of Afghan citizens who had applied to receive student visas in Russia. But it is possible that there are even more issues involved in this case.
One of the most neglected topics about the Ukrainian conflict is that since 2014 there has been vast cooperation between Kiev’s neo-Nazis and foreign terrorists, including members of Daesh. Many Daesh leaders and fighters migrated to Ukraine, especially after the defeat of terrorists in Syria with the Russian military intervention in 2015. More than that, saboteurs affiliated with the Islamic State and Ukrainian neo-Nazi militias allegedly had already conspired together to carry out terrorist attacks within Russian territory itself, according to FSB data published in 2017.
With the start of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, the situation may have become more serious. In June, the Syrian government provided Russia with intelligence data proving the collaboration of Western powers and Turkey to send Daesh fighters to Ukraine. There is no precise information on the number of fighters and their identities, but it seems quite evident that Daesh members have been in Ukraine over the last eight years and that they are now continuing there, fighting Russian forces. And that brings up a series of suspicions about what may have happened in Kabul.
Apparently, the attack on the Embassy was just another typical episode of the criminal cowardice that has been seen in the praxis of anti-Russian forces. Saboteurs have operated to kill Russian civilians in various parts of the world. The murder of Daria Dugina in the middle of the Moscow oblast was a clear example of this. In the same vein, what happened in Kabul, whether or not there was foreign participation, seems to be related to this wave of violence against Russian civilian targets.
Deeper investigations are needed to conclude what actually motivated the attack and whether there was participation or sponsorship by Western or Ukrainian groups. However, the main fact is that who attacked the Embassy was Daesh – and Daesh fights Russia in Ukraine.
Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.
UK: Births in England COLLAPSED and are NOT Coming Back Up, Births Declined by 14%
By Igor Chudov | September 3, 2022
A new UKHSA Sep 1, 2022 Vaccine Effectiveness Report is out. The report says that it “applies to England”.
And it has very bad news. Live births dropped in England by 14% as of May 2022, and the decline seems to be worsening and not recovering.
I highlighted the relevant data that we will look at:
This simple table shows year-on-year declines in births (comparing, for example, May 2022 to May 2021):
The chart is here:
Before I go further, I have to remind my readers: birth rates are always seasonal! Most parents prefer to make a “spring baby”, which often ends up with them making a “summer baby” because conception takes more time than expected. So, never compare adjacent months as they are guaranteed to have dramatic changes that are simply seasonality-driven, with differences very repeatable over the years. Only compare months of one year with same months of another year, please. I did just that, comparing May to May, etc.
The usual year-to-year variation in fertility is 1-2%. Here’s the ONS page about 2021 births (also noting ominous 10% increases in stillbirths in 2021):
So, you can see that in the prior years, nothing super exciting was happening. The year of 2022 is, therefore, a big and a very disturbing aberration.
A very important statement from that report need to be addressed. The report is missing 2,637 women.
2,637 women could not be matched with a NIMS record. Their vaccine status is therefore unknown and they are excluded from these coverage figures.
I am not sure which year — 2021 or 2022 — is missing those women and how many of those were missing in each of those respective years. However, please understand that 2,637 women is a small number compared to the 189,450 births reported in 2022. At most — if all missing women were related to only 2022 — that could change the outcome by 1.39% per every month. My guess is that they were actually missing in 2021, as the “vaccine tracking system” was being set up, although I have no proof of that.
If most missing women were related to 2021 instead, then the drop in births in 2022 would be even more pronounced. These missing women represent an unknown that muddies the waters, but does not change the fact that 2022 has a dramatic and unexplainable drop in births.
A couple that desires to have a child, and is unable to conceive or have a successful pregnancy, is called infertile. While infertility is complicated, the most basic fact that we see is that despite life going on as always in the UK, couples in 2021 could NOT conceive and complete in the first months of 2022, approximately 24 thousand pregnancies — due to infertility. That led to up to 14% declines in births this year. Whether this infertility is temporary, or permanent — is an open question. I hope that it is temporary.
We all know what was going on 9 months prior to January-May of 2022. The UK was busy vaccinating its fertile and pregnant women, claiming that “Covid vaccine is safe for pregnancy”.
And now, we know how that turned out, with the 14% decline in the birth rate.
Israel bombed both Syrian airports
Samizdat | September 2, 2022
Wednesday evening’s missile attack temporarily disabled the Aleppo international airport but also caused damage to the one in Damascus, the Syrian government said on Thursday. The attack, which Syria blamed on Israel, is the first known instance of targeting both civilian airports on the same day.
Israeli F-16s launched a total of 16 projectiles from outside Syrian airspace, said Major General Oleg Egorov, deputy chief of the Russian peacemaking mission in Damascus. Syrian air defenses shot down three of the incoming missiles, but the others struck the facilities in Aleppo and Damascus, he added.
According to the Syrian transportation ministry, the Aleppo runway was damaged but repairs are ongoing and the airport is expected to reopen for traffic by noon local time on Friday. As for the Damascus airport, the damage inflicted “did not affect” operations, the ministry said.
“Syria retains its full rights to hold the Israeli occupation authorities accountable and bear all legal, moral, political and financial responsibilities for deliberately targeting the international airports of Damascus and Aleppo and for endangering civilian facilities and lives,” the Syrian Foreign Ministry said in a letter to the UN secretary-general and the Security Council, according to the state news agency SANA.
Back in June, a series of Israeli strikes took the Damascus airport out of service for several weeks, with traffic being rerouted to Aleppo – which had only reopened in February 2020, after being damaged in the decade-long civil war. Wednesday’s strike is the first known instance of Israel attacking both of Syria’s active international airports.
The international airport in Latakia is adjacent to the Khmeimim airbase used by the Russian expeditionary force, and has so far not been a target of Israeli attacks.
Israel has repeatedly targeted Syria with missiles, usually fired from Lebanese airspace or the occupied Golan Heights, wary of air defense systems provided by Russia to Damascus. On the rare occasions Jerusalem has acknowledged the attacks, the Israeli government said it was exercising preemptive self-defense against Iran. Tehran has offered military aid to Damascus in recent years against both Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) terrorists and other radical militants.
The London-based Iran International claimed that Wednesday’s strike was aimed at preventing an Iranian cargo plane from landing, first in Aleppo and then in Damascus. The plane reportedly belongs to an airline the US has designated as affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and placed under sanctions.
It Was Birx. All Birx.
BY DEBBIE LERMAN | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | AUGUST 31, 2022
In two previous articles, I looked into the shady circumstances surrounding Deborah Birx’s appointment to the White House Coronavirus Response Task Force and the laughable lack of actual science behind the claims she used to justify her testing, masking, distancing and lockdown policies.
Considering all that, the questions arise: Who was actually in charge of Deborah Birx and whom was she working with?
But first: Who cares?
Here’s why I think it’s important: If we can show that Birx and the others who imposed totalitarian anti-scientific testing, masking, social distancing, and lockdown policies, knew from the get-go that these policies would not work against an airborne respiratory virus, and nevertheless they imposed them FOR REASONS OTHER THAN PUBLIC HEALTH, then there is no longer acceptable justification for any of those measures.
Furthermore, whatever mountains of post-facto bad science were concocted to rationalize these measures are also completely bunk. Instead of having to go through each ridiculous pseudo-study to demonstrate its scientific worthlessness, we can throw the whole steaming pile in the garbage heap of history, where it belongs, and move on with our lives.
In my admittedly somewhat naive optimism, I also hope that by exposing the non-scientific, anti-public-health origins of the Covid catastrophe, we may lower the chances of it happening again.
And now, back to Birx.
She did not work for or with Trump
We know Birx was definitely not working with President Trump, although she was on a task force ostensibly representing the White House. Trump did not appoint her, nor did the leaders of the Task Force, as Scott Atlas recounts in his revelatory book on White House pandemic lunacy, A Plague Upon Our House. When Atlas asked Task Force members how Birx was appointed, he was surprised to find that “no one seemed to know.” (Atlas, p. 82)
Yet, somehow, Deborah Birx – a former military AIDS researcher and government AIDS ambassador with no training, experience or publications in epidemiology or public health policy – found herself leading a White House Task Force on which she had the power to literally subvert the policy prescriptions of the President of the United States.
As she describes in The Silent Invasion, Birx was shocked when “at the halfway point of our 15 Days to Slow the Spread campaign, President Trump stated that he hoped to lift all restrictions by Easter Sunday.” (Birx, p. 142) She was even more dismayed when “mere days after the president had announced the thirty-day extension of the Slow the Spread campaign to the American public” he became enraged and told her “‘We will never shut down the country again. Never.’” (Birx, p. 152)
Clearly, Trump was not on board with the lockdowns, and every time he was forced to go along with them, he became enraged and lashed out at Birx – the person he believed was forcing him.
Birx laments that “from here on out, everything I worked toward would be harder—in some cases, impossible,” and goes on to say she would basically have to work behind the scenes against the President, having “to adapt to effectively protect the country from the virus that had already silently invaded it.” (Birx, pp. 153-4)
Which brings us back to the question: Where did Birx get the nerve and, more mysteriously, the authority to so blithely act in direct opposition to the President she was supposed to serve, on matters affecting the lives of the entire population of the United States?
Atlas regrets what he thinks was President Trump’s “massive error in judgment.” He argues that Trump acted “against his own gut feeling” and “delegated authority to medical bureaucrats, and then he failed to correct that mistake.” (Atlas, p. 308)
Although I believe massive errors in judgment were not unusual for President Trump, I disagree with Atlas on this one. In the case of the Coronavirus Response Task Force, I actually think there was something much more insidious at play.
Trump had no power over Birx or pandemic response
Dr. Paul Alexander, an epidemiologist and research methodology expert who was recruited to advise the Trump administration on pandemic policy, tells a shocking story in an interview with Jeffrey Tucker, in which bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and lawyers from the Justice Department told him to resign, despite direct orders from President Trump and the White House: “We want you to understand that President Trump has no power,” they reportedly told Alexander. “He cannot tell us what to do.”
Alexander believes these bureaucrats represented the “deep state” which, he was told repeatedly, had decided first not to hire or pay him, and then to get rid of him. Alexander also writes in an upcoming exposé that the entrenched government bureaucracy, particularly at the NIH, CDC, and WHO, used the pandemic response to doom President Trump’s chances for reelection.
Was the entire anti-scientific totalitarian pandemic response, all over the world, a political maneuver to get rid of Trump? It’s possible. I would contend, however, that the politics were only a sideshow to the main event: the engineered virus lab leak and coverup. I believe the “deep state” Alexander repeatedly butted up against was not just the entrenched bureaucracy, but something even deeper and more powerful.
Which brings us back to deep state frontwoman Deborah Birx.
After lamenting Trump’s delegation of authority to “medical bureaucrats,” Scott Atlas also hints at forces beyond Trump’s control. “The Task Force was called ‘the White House Coronavirus Task Force,’” Atlas notes, “but it was not in sync with President Trump. It was directed by Vice President Pence.” (Atlas, p. 306) Yet, whenever Atlas tried to raise questions about Birx’s policies, he was directed to speak with Pence, who then failed to ever address anything with Birx:
“Given that the VP was in charge of the Task Force, shouldn’t the bottom-line advice emanating from it comport with the policies of the administration? But he would never speak with Dr. Birx at all. In fact, (Marc) Short [Pence’s chief of staff], clearly representing the VP’s interests above all else, would do the opposite, telephoning others in the West Wing, imploring friends of mine to tell me to avoid alienating Dr. Birx.” (Atlas, p. 165-6)
Recall that Pence replaced Alex Azar as Task Force director on February 26, 2020 and Birx’s appointment as coordinator, at the instigation of Asst. National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger, came on February 27th. Subsequent to those two appointments, it was Birx who was effectively in charge of United States coronavirus policy.
What was driving that policy, once she took over? As Birx writes, it was the NSC (National Security Council) that appointed her, through Pottinger, and it was her job to “reinforce their warnings” – which, I continue to speculate, were related to the accidental release of an enhanced pandemic potential pathogen from a US-funded lab in Wuhan.
Trump was probably made aware of this, as evidenced not just by his repeated mentions, but by what Time Magazine called his uncharacteristic refusal to explain why he believed it. The magazine quotes Trump saying “I can’t tell you that,” when asked about his belief in the lab leak. And he repeats, “I’m not allowed to tell you that.”
Why in the world was the President of the United States not allowed to override AIDS researcher/diplomat Birx on lockdown policies nor explain to the public why he believed there was a lab leak?
The answer, I believe, is that Trump was uncharacteristically holding back because he was told (by Birx, Pottinger and the military/intelligence/biosecurity interests for whom they worked) that if he did not go along with their policies and proclamations, millions of Americans would die. Why? Because SARS-CoV-2 was not just another zoonotic virus. It was an engineered virus that needed to be contained at all costs.
As Dr. Atlas repeatedly notes with great dismay: “the Task Force doctors were fixated on a single-minded view that all cases of COVID must be stopped or millions of Americans would die.” (Atlas, p. 155-6) [BOLDFACE ADDED]
That was the key message, wielded with great force and success against Trump, his administration, the press, the states, and the public, to suppress any opposition to lockdown policies. Yet the message makes no sense if you believe SARS-CoV-2 is a virus that jumped from a bat to a person in a wet market, severely affecting mostly people who are old and debilitated. It only makes sense if you think, or know, that the virus was engineered to be especially contagious or deadly (even if its behavior in the population at any given moment might not justify that level of alarm).
But, again, before indulging in more speculation, let’s get back to Birx. Who else did she (and her hidden handlers) bulldoze?
She dictated policy to the entire Trump administration
In his book, Atlas observes with puzzlement and consternation that, although Pence was the nominal director of the Task Force, Deborah Birx was the person in charge: “Birx’s policies were enacted throughout the country, in almost every single state, for the entire pandemic—this cannot be denied; it cannot be deflected.” (Atlas, p. 222)
Atlas is “dumbstruck at the lack of leadership in the White House,” in which, “the president was saying one thing while the White House Task Force representative was saying something entirely different, indeed contradictory” and, as he notes, “no one ever set her [Birx] straight on her role.” (Atlas, p. 222-223)
Not only that, but no matter how much Trump, or anyone in the administration, disagreed with Birx, “the White House was held hostage to the anticipated reaction of Dr. Birx” and she “was not to be touched, period.” (Atlas, p. 223)
One explanation for her untouchableness, Atlas suggests, is that Birx and her policies became so popular with the press and public that the administration did not want to “rock the boat” by replacing her before the election. This explanation, however, as Atlas himself realizes, crumbles in the face of what we know about Trump and the media’s hostility towards him:
“They [Trump’s advisors] had convinced him to do exactly the opposite of what he would naturally do in any other circumstance—to disregard his own common sense and allow grossly incorrect policy advice to prevail. … This president, widely known for his signature ‘You’re fired!’ declaration, was misled by his closest political intimates. All for fear of what was inevitable anyway—skewering from an already hostile media.” (Atlas, p. 300-301)
I would suggest, again, the reason for the seemingly inexplicable lack of gumption on Trump’s part to get rid of Birx was not politics, but behind-the-scenes machinations of the (to coin a moniker) lab leak cabal.
Who else was part of this cabal with its hidden agendas and oversized policy influence? Our attention naturally turns to the other members of the Task Force who were presumably co-engineering lockdown policies with Birx. Surprising revelations emerge.
There was no troika. No Birx-Fauci lockdown plan. It was all Birx.
It is universally assumed, by both those in favor and those opposed to the Task Force’s policy prescriptions, that Drs. Deborah Birx, Tony Fauci (head of NIAID at the time) and Bob Redfield (then director of the CDC) worked together to formulate those policies.
The stories told by Birx herself and Task Force infiltrator Scott Atlas suggest otherwise.
Like everyone else, at the onset of his book, Atlas asserts: “The architects of the American lockdown strategy were Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx. With Dr. Robert Redfield… they were the most influential medical members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.” (Atlas, p. 22)
But as Atlas’s story unfolds, he presents a more nuanced understanding of the power dynamics on the Task Force:
“Fauci’s role surprised me the most. Most of the country, indeed the entire world, assumed that Fauci occupied a directorial role in the Trump administration’s Task Force. I had also thought that from viewing the news,” Atlas admits. However, he continues, “The public presumption of Dr. Fauci’s leadership role on the Task Force itself… could not have been more incorrect. Fauci held massive sway with the public, but he was not in charge of anything specific on the Task Force. He served mainly as a channel for updates on the trials of vaccines and drugs.” (p. 98) [BOLDFACE ADDED]
By the end of the book, Atlas fully revises his initial assessment, strongly emphasizing that, in fact, it was primarily and predominantly Birx who designed and disseminated the lockdown policies:
“Dr. Fauci held court in the public eye on a daily basis, so frequently that many misconstrue his role as being in charge. However, it was really Dr. Birx who articulated Task Force policy. All the advice from the Task Force to the states came from Dr. Birx. All written recommendations about their on-the-ground policies were from Dr. Birx. Dr. Birx conducted almost all the visits to states on behalf of the Task Force.” (Atlas, p. 309-10) [BOLDFACE ADDED]
It may sound jarring and unlikely, given the public perception of Fauci, as Atlas notes. But in Birx’s book the same unexpected picture emerges.
Methinks the lady doth protest too much
As with her bizarrely self-contradictory statements about how she got hired, and her blatantly bogus scientific claims, Birx’s story about her mind-melded closeness with Fauci and Redfield falls apart upon closer examination.
In her book, Birx repeatedly claims she trusts Redfield and Fauci “implicitly to help shape America’s response to the novel coronavirus.” (Birx, p. 31) She says she has “every confidence, based on past performance, that whatever path the virus took, the United States and the CDC would be on top of the situation.” (Birx, p. 32)
Then, almost immediately, she undermines the credibility of those she supposedly trusts, quoting Matt Pottinger as saying she “‘should take over Azar, Fauci, and Redfield’s jobs, because you’re such a better leader than they are.’” (Birx, p. 38-9)
Perhaps she was just giving herself a little pat on the back, one might innocently suggest. But wait. There’s so much more.
Birx claims that in a meeting on January 31 “everything Drs. Fauci and Redfield said about their approach made sense based on the information available to me at that point,” even though “neither of them spoke” about the two issues she was most obsessed with: “asymptomatic silent spread [and] the role testing should play in the response.” (Birx, p. 39)
Then, although she says she “didn’t read too much into this omission,” (p. 39) just two weeks later, “as early as February 13” Birx again mentions “a lack of leadership and direction in the CDC and the White House Coronavirus Task Force.” (p. 54)
So does Debi trust Tony and Bob’s leadership or does she not? The only answer is more self-contradictory obfuscation.
Birx is horrified that nobody is taking the virus as seriously as they should: “then I saw Tony and Bob repeating that the risk to Americans was low,” she reports. “On February 8, Tony said that the chances of contracting the virus were ‘minuscule.’” And, “on February 29, he said, ‘Right now, at this moment, there is no need to change anything you’re doing on a day-to-day basis.’” (Birx, p. 57)
This does not seem like the kind of leader Birx can trust. She half-heartedly tries to excuse Redfield and Fauci, saying “I now believe that Bob and Tony’s words had spoken to the limited data they had access to from the CDC,” and then, in another whiplash moment, “maybe they had data in the United States that I did not.”
Did Tony and Bob provide less dire warnings because they had insufficient data or because they had more data than Birx did? She never clarifies, but regardless, she assures us that she “trusted them” and “felt reassured every day with them on the task force.” (Birx, p. 57)
If I was worried that the virus was not being taken seriously enough, Birx’s reports on Bob and Tony would not be very reassuring, to say the least.
Apparently, Birx herself felt that way too. “I was somewhat disappointed that Bob and Tony weren’t seeing the situation as I was,” she says, when they disagreed with her alarmist assessments of asymptomatic spread. But, she adds, “at least their number supported my belief that this new disease was far more asymptomatic than the flu. I wouldn’t have to push them as far as I needed to push the CDC.” (Birx, p. 78)
Is someone who disagrees with your assessment to the point that you need to push them in your direction also someone you “implicitly trust” to lead the US through the pandemic?
Apparently, not so much.
Although she supposedly trusts Redfield and sleeps well at night knowing he’s on the Task Force, Birx has nothing but disdain and criticism for the CDC – the organization Redfield leads.
“On aggressive testing I planned to have Tom Frieden [CDC director under Obama] help bring the CDC along,” she recounts. “Like me, the CDC wanted to do everything to stop the virus, but the agency needed to align with us on aggressive testing and silent spread.” (p. 122) Which makes one wonder: If she was so closely aligned with Redfield, the head of the CDC, why did Birx need to bring in a former director – in a direct challenge to the sitting one – to “bring the CDC along?” Who is “us” if not Birx, Fauci and Redfield?
Masks were another issue of apparent contention. Birx is frustrated because the CDC, led by her “we’ve-got-each-other’s-back” bestie, Bob Redfield (Birx, p. 31), will not issue strict enough masking guidelines. In fact, she repeatedly throws Bob’s organization under the bus, basically accusing them of causing American deaths: “For many weeks and months to come,” she writes, “I fretted over how many lives could have been saved if the CDC had trusted the public to understand that …masks would do no harm and could potentially do a great deal of good.” (Birx, p. 86)
Apparently, Fauci was not on board with the masking either, as Birx says that “getting the doctors, including Tom [Frieden] and Tony, to be in complete agreement with me about asymptomatic spread was slightly less of a priority. As with masks, I knew I could return to that issue as soon as I got their buy-in on our recommendations.” (Birx, p. 123)
Who is making “our recommendations” if not Birx, Fauci and Redfield?
The myth of the troika
Whether or not she trusted them (and it’s hard to believe, based on her own accounts, that she did), it was apparently very important to Birx that she, Fauci and Redfield appear as a single entity with no disagreements whatsoever.
When Scott Atlas, an outsider not privy to whatever power plays were happening on the Task Force, came in, his presence apparently rattled Birx (Atlas, p. 83-4), and for good reason. Atlas immediately noticed strange goings-on. In his book, he repeatedly uses words like “bizarre,” “odd” and “uncanny” to describe how Fauci, Redfield and Birx behaved. Most notably, they never ever questioned or disagreed with one another in Task Force meetings. Not ever.
“They shared thought processes and views to an uncanny level,” Atlas writes, then reiterates that “there was virtually no disagreement among them.” What he saw “was an amazing consistency, as though there were an agreed-upon complicity” (Atlas, pp. 99-100). They “virtually always agreed, literally never challenging one another.” (p. 101) [BOLDFACE ADDED]
An agreed-upon complicity? Uncanny agreement? Based on all of the disagreements reported by Birx and her repeated questioning and undermining of Bob and Tony’s authority, how can this be explained?
I would contend that in order to obscure the extent to which Birx alone was in charge of Task Force policy, the other doctors were compelled to present a facade of complete agreement. Otherwise, as with any opposition to, or even discussion of, potential harms of lockdown policies, “millions of Amercans would die.”
This assessment is strengthened by Atlas’s ongoing bafflement and distress at how the Task Force – and particularly the doctors/scientists who were presumably formulating policy based on data and research – functioned:
“I never saw them act like scientists, digging into the numbers to verify the very trends that formed the basis of their reactive policy pronouncements. They did not act like researchers, using critical thinking to dissect the published science or differentiate a correlation from a cause. They certainly did not show a physician’s clinical perspective. With their single-minded focus, they did not even act like public health experts.” (Atlas, p. 176)
Atlas was surprised, indeed stunned, that “No one on the Task Force presented any data” to justify lockdowns or to contradict the evidence on lockdown harms that Atlas presented. (Atlas, p. 206) More specifically, no data or research was ever presented (except by Atlas) to contradict or question anything Birx said. “Until I arrived,” Atlas observes, “no one had challenged anything she said during her six months as the Task Force Coordinator.” (Atlas, p. 234) [BOLDFACE ADDED]
Atlas cannot explain what he’s witnessing. “That was all part of the puzzle of the Task Force doctors,” he states. “There was a lack of scientific rigor in meetings I attended. I never saw them question the data. The striking uniformity of opinion by Birx, Redfield, Fauci, and (Brett) Giroir [former Admiral and Task Force “testing czar”] was not anything like what I had seen in my career in academic medicine.” (Atlas, p. 244)
How can we explain the puzzle of this uncanny apparent complicity by the Task Force troika?
Methinks the intelligence agent also doth protest too much
An interesting hint comes from the string of anecdotes comprising Matthew Lawrence’s New Yorker article “The Plague Year.” Lawrence writes that Matt Pottinger (the NSC liaison to Birx) tried to convince Task Force members that masking could stop the virus “‘dead in its tracks’” but his views “stirred up surprisingly rigid responses from the public-health contingent.” Lawrence continues to report that “In Pottinger’s opinion, when Redfield, Fauci, Birx, and (Stephen) Hahn spoke, it could sound like groupthink,” implying that those were the members of the “public-health contingent” who did not agree with Pottinger’s masking ideas.
But wait. We just noted Birx’s frustration, indeed deep regret, that the CDC led by Redfield, as well as Fauci (and even Frieden) did not agree with her ideas on asymptomatic spread and masking. So why does Pottinger imply that she and the “public-health contingent” of the Task Force were group-thinking this issue, against him?
I would suggest that the only way to make sense of these contradictions within Birx’s narrative and between her, Atlas and Pottinger’s stories, is if we understand “align with us” and “our recommendations” to refer not to the perceived Birx-Fauci-Redfield troika, but to the Birx-Pottinger-lab leak cabal that was actually running the show.
In fact, Birx and Pottinger put so much effort into insisting on the solidarity of the troika, even when it contradicts their own statements, that the question inevitably arises: what do they have to gain from it? The benefit of insisting that Birx was allied with Fauci, Redfield and the “public-health contingent” on the Task Force, I would argue, is that this deflects attention from the Birx-Pottinger-cabal non-public-health alliance.
The explanation of Atlas’s perceived “puzzle of the Task Force doctors” that makes the most sense to me is that Deborah Birx, in contrast and often in opposition to the other doctors on the Task Force, represented the interests of what I’m calling the lab leak cabal: those not just in the US but in the international intelligence/biosecurity community who needed to cover up a potentially devastating lab leak and who wanted to impose draconian lockdown measures such as the world had never known.
Who exactly they were and why they needed lockdowns are subjects of ongoing investigations.
In the meantime, once we separate Birx from Trump, from the rest of the administration, and from the others on the Task Force, we can see clearly that her single-minded and scientifically nonsensical emphasis on silent spread and asymptomatic testing was geared toward a single goal: to scare everyone so much that lockdowns would appear to be a sensible policy. This is the same strategy that was, uncannily in my opinion, implemented almost to the letter in nearly every other country around the world. But that’s for the next article.
I’ll close this chapter of the Birx riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, with Scott Atlas’s report of his parting conversation with President Trump:
“‘You were right about everything, all along the way,’” Trump said to Atlas. “‘And you know what? You were also right about something else. Fauci wasn’t the biggest problem of all of them. It really wasn’t him. You were right about that.’ I found myself nodding as I held the phone in my hand,” Atlas says. “I knew exactly whom he was talking about.” (Atlas, p. 300)
And now, so do we.
Debbie Lerman has a degree in English from Harvard. She is a retired science writer and a practicing artist in Philadelphia, PA.
Why the COVID Jab Should Be Banned for Pregnant Women
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | August 30, 2022
Since the rollout of the experimental COVID shots, U.S. health officials have adamantly claimed the shots are safe for pregnant women, and have been urging all pregnant women to get the jab “to protect themselves and their babies.” To this day, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends the COVID shot for:1
“… people who are pregnant, breastfeeding, trying to get pregnant now, or might become pregnant in the future.”
The CDC further recommends:2
“People who are pregnant should stay up to date with their COVID-19 vaccines, including getting a COVID-19 booster when it’s time to get one.”
And claims:3
“Evidence continues to build showing that:
- COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy is safe and effective.
- There is currently no evidence that any vaccines, including COVID-19 vaccines, cause fertility problems in women or men.”
All the while, they’ve had Pfizer data showing the shots cause shocking rates of miscarriage which, adding insult to injury, have been blatantly miscategorized as a “recovered/resolved” adverse effect.4 Who in their right mind would consider DEATH a resolved side effect unless they had a depopulation agenda in mind all along?
I don’t see how this could be described as anything but a criminal cover-up. The only reason we know any of this is because U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman ordered the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to release Pfizer documents at a rate of 55,000 pages per month. The FDA and Pfizer had asked to release the documents at a pace of 500 pages per month, which meant it would take 75 years to disclose them all.5
Criminal Cover-Up
Dr. Naomi Wolf recently reported that an analysis of Pfizer data revealed 44% of the women in the trial suffered miscarriages.6 That statistic turns out to have been the result of a miscalculation,7 as Pfizer listed the miscarriages in two separate columns, resulting in them being counted twice.
We’ve repeatedly found Pfizer’s data collection and reporting to be all over the place, and seemingly on purpose, to make hazards more difficult to ascertain. Wolf admitted the error and took down the original report. However, while fact checkers are gloating over the perceived victory, there’s plenty of other evidence in the Pfizer material to demonstrate these shots should be banned for all time.
In an August 20, 2022, Substack article, Dr. Pierre Kory addressed other, “absolutely horrifying,” findings on miscarriages found in the Pfizer data dumps:8
“… let’s do a dive on just one page of the many thousands. See below, Section 5.3.6, Page 12 of the document called ‘Cumulative Analysis of Post-Authorization Adverse Event Reports.’
Looking at the first bullet under the header: Pregnancy cases: 274 cases including:
In this paragraph, at first read, it is just a list of adverse events and numbers, detailed in a way that is confusing at best, and obfuscating at worst. I think it is the latter because, if you do some simple arithmetic trying to parse that paragraph, you end up with this:
270 pregnancies were reported in vaccinated women during the first 12 weeks of the vaccine campaign. In 238 of them, ‘no outcome was provided.’ So, they only knew the outcome of 32 pregnancies reported. What happened in those 32 pregnancies they followed up on?
My hands are literally trembling as I write this, but here goes. In these 32 pregnancies, there were:
•23 spontaneous abortions
•2 spontaneous abortions with intra-uterine death
◦So, 25 of the 32 pregnancies with known outcomes resulted in a miscarriage, a rate of 78%. Note that miscarriage normally occurs in only 12-15% of pregnancies
•2 premature births with neonatal death
•1 spontaneous abortion with neonatal death
•1 normal outcome
Note that this only adds up to 29 known outcomes, but then they note that ‘two different outcomes were reported for each twin’ and then they talk about ‘fetus/baby cases as separate from mother cases.’ I have no idea how to interpret this explanation of outcomes, so it may have been one or two less (or more) deaths then.
So, of the 32 pregnancies they knew the outcome of, 87.5% resulted in the death of the fetus or neonate. Burying this data in the way and not alerting the world to what they found, is criminal activity …”
To be perfectly clear, the failure to record and report the outcomes of 238 out of 274 pregnancies during a drug trial is simply unheard of. It’s shockingly unethical. And the fact that both the Food and Drug Administration and the CDC accepted this, and claim there’s “no evidence” of harm to pregnant women and their babies is proof positive of reprehensible maleficence.
There’s no fixing what’s gone wrong at the FDA and CDC. Their credibility with the public is ruined beyond any possible recovery. The CDC can review and reorganize itself all it wants, but it changes nothing. They are, to this day, urging pregnant women to take a shot that they KNOW will cause babies to die. Calling it a dystopia of epic proportions is a profoundly serious understatement.
CDC-Sponsored Study Also Tried to Hide Data
Need more evidence? How about the fact that the CDC-sponsored study9 published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in April 2021 — which was widely used to support the U.S. recommendation for pregnant women to get injected — also obfuscated data to hide a shockingly elevated miscarriage rate.
According to this paper, the miscarriage rate within the first 20 weeks of pregnancy was 12.5%, which is only slightly above the normal average of 10%. (Looking at statistical data, the risk of miscarriage drops from an overall, average risk rate of 21.3% for the duration of the pregnancy as a whole, to just 5% between Weeks 6 and 7, all the way down to 1% between Weeks 14 and 20.10)
However, there’s a distinct problem with this calculation, as highlighted by Drs. Ira Bernstein, Sanja Jovanovic and Deann McLeod, HBSc, of Toronto. In a May 28, 2021, letter to the editor, they pointed out that:11
“In table 4, the authors report a rate of spontaneous abortions <20 weeks (SA) of 12.5% (104 abortions/827 completed pregnancies). However, this rate should be based on the number of women who were at risk of an SA due to vaccine receipt and should exclude the 700 women who were vaccinated in their third-trimester (104/127 = 82%).”
In other words, when you exclude women who got the shot in their third trimester (since the third trimester is after week 20 and therefore should not be counted when determining miscarriage rate among those injected before week 20), the miscarriage rate is 82%. (The errors in that NEJM article were also reviewed in a Science, Public Health Policy and the Law paper12 published in November 2021.)
Of those 104 miscarriages, 96 of them occurred before 13 weeks of gestation, which strongly suggests that getting a COVID shot during the first trimester is an absolute recipe for disaster. So, here was yet another attempt to hide the fact that more than 8 in 10 pregnancies may be terminated as a result of the jab.
As of August 12, 2022, the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting (VAERS) database listed 4,941 miscarriages post-COVID jab.13 For comparison, the fetal death reports for all other vaccines reported to VAERS in the last 30 years is 2,239.14
Birth Rates Are Suddenly Plummeting Worldwide
In addition to miscarriages, we’re also looking at abruptly plummeting birth rates, suggesting the COVID jabs are having an adverse impact on future fertility as well.
“They are large drops, and they are occurring, almost like clockwork, approximately 9 months after pregnant women around the world started to be vaccinated,” Kory notes.15
For example, Germany recently released data showing a 10% decline in birth rate during the first quarter of 2022.16
The live birth rate graph for Sweden looks much the same, with a 14% drop:17,18 According to Gunnar Anderson, a Swedish professor in demographics at Stockholm University, “We have never seen anything like this before, that the bottom just falls out in just one quarter.”19
Between January and April 2022, Switzerland’s birth rate was 15% lower than expected, the U.K.’s was down by 10% and Taiwan’s was down 23%.20,21,22 In Hungary, MP Dúró Dóra has expressed concern about a 20% drop in birth rate during January 2022, compared to January 2021.23
The U.S. is also showing signs of a drop in live births. Provisional data from North Dakota show a 10% decline in February 2022, 13% reduction in March and an 11% reduction in April, compared to the corresponding months in 2021.24
In a July 5, 2022, Counter Signal article, Mike Campbell reported that in the five countries with the highest COVID jab uptake, fertility has dropped by an average of 15.2%, whereas the five countries with the lowest COVID jab uptake have seen an average reduction of just 4.66%. Below is a chart from Birth Gauge25 on Twitter comparing live birth data for 2021 and 2022 in a large number of countries.
Many Women Report Menstrual Irregularities Post-Jab
High rates of menstrual irregularities post-jab are also a warning sign that reproductive capacity may be impacted. As of August 12, 2022, there were 31,443 VAERS reports of menstrual disorders.26
Changes include heavier and more painful periods27 and changes in menses length, as well as unexpected breakthrough bleeding or spotting among women on long-acting contraception or those who are postmenopausal and haven’t had a period in years or even decades.28
Health officials have tried to brush off the reports, but a study published in Obstetrics & Gynecology — funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Research on Women’s Health — confirmed an association between menstrual cycle length and COVID-19 shots.29
According to the authors, it’s possible that the immune response created by the mRNA shots affect the hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian axis, which plays a well-known role in the timing of a woman’s cycle:30
“Our findings for individuals who received two doses in a single cycle supports this hypothesis. Given the dosing schedule of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines in the United States (21 days for Pfizer and 28 days for Moderna), an individual receiving two doses in a single cycle would have received the first dose in the early follicular phase.
Cycle length variability results from events leading to the recruitment and maturation of the dominant follicle during the follicular phase …”
Other Disturbing Evidence
A Japanese biodistribution study for Pfizer’s jab also showed the COVID spike protein from the shots accumulate in female ovaries and male testes,31,32 and there’s credible concern that the COVID jabs will cross-react with syncytin (a retroviral envelope protein) and reproductive genes in sperm, ova and placenta in ways that may impair fertility and reproductive outcomes.
A Pfizer-BioNTech rat study33 revealed the injection more than doubled the incidence of preimplantation loss (i.e., the risk of infertility), and led to mouth/jaw malformations, gastroschisis (a birth defect of the abdominal wall) and abnormalities in the right-sided aortic arch and cervical vertebrae.34,35 As noted by The Exposé :
“With this being the case, how on earth have medicine regulators around the world managed to state in their official guidance that ‘Animal studies do not indicate direct or indirect harmful effects with respect to pregnancy’? And how have they managed to state ‘It is unknown whether the Pfizer vaccine has an impact on fertility’?
The truth of the matter is that they actively chose to cover it up. We know this thanks to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request36 made to the Australian Government Department of Health Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA).”
You can read more about that in The Exposé’s July 19, 2022, article, “FOIA Reveals Pfizer & Medicine Regulators Hid Dangers of COVID Vaccination During Pregnancy After Study Found It Increases Risk of Birth Defects & Infertility.”37
We’re also seeing a sudden uptick in infant mortality. The Exposé 38 highlighted data from Scotland, showing neonatal deaths were 119% higher above the annual norm in March 2022.
COVID Jab Affects Male Fertility Too
Male fertility is also under attack by these bioweapons. Israeli research39,40 published in the journal Andrology found the Pfizer COVID jab temporarily but significantly impairs male fertility, dropping sperm concentration by 15.4% and total motile count by 22.1%, compared to baseline pre-jab.
Both eventually recovered, some three months after the last jab, but if you destroy a man’s sperm for three months every time he gets a COVID shot, you’re significantly reducing the probability of him fathering a child for a good part of any given year and the stats reviewed above support this.
Remember, the mRNA shots are recommended at three-month intervals for the original series, and boosters are now being recommended at varying intervals thereafter. In the video above, Amy Kelly, project director for the Daily Clout’s Pfizer document analysis team, reviews this study and other post-jab male fertility concerns.41
End the COVID Shots Now, Before It’s Too Late to Recover
In October 2021, when the FDA was voting on whether to authorize the COVID jab for children aged 5 through 11, Dr. Eric Rubin, an FDA advisory panel member, Harvard professor and editor-in-chief of the NEJM, stated:42
“We’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes … And I do think we should vote to approve it.”
So, in this and other instances, they’ve openly admitted that anyone who takes the jab is part of an experiment. Yet at the same time, the FDA and CDC have insisted that the jabs are perfectly safe — all while in possession of data showing they’re anything but! In conclusion, I agree with Kory, who writes:43
“… when a new medicine or device is introduced, you must first assume any adverse effects or deaths reported to be related to the intervention until proven otherwise. That is what I am doing here.
We must assume the vaccines are impacting fertility unless some other provable or credible explanations for a sudden drop in month to month birth rates. So stop the shots until you can prove they are not …
Too many young people dying,44 too many becoming disabled, too many pregnancies resulting in fetal or neonatal death as above, and now we find out that if we continue with this vaccine obsession, they will not be replaced. This is a humanitarian catastrophe heaped atop the one caused by dangerous gain-of-function research.
When will the world wake up to this rapidly unfolding horror? For those of us who know what is going on, it is hard not to feel helpless as we are forced to watch increasingly apparent and widespread needless death. But we will continue to try to get these truths out despite the massive censorship and propaganda overwhelming the globe.
We have a moral and ethical obligation and take that responsibility seriously no matter what befalls us. Stop the vaccines, now. And if we can’t stop them, we must try to convince everyone we know to no longer agree to get vaccinated. Their lives and our future depend on it.”
Sources and References
- 1, 2, 3 CDC.gov Updated July 14, 2022
- 4, 6 Clark County Today August 18, 2022
- 5 Bloomberg Law January 18, 2022
- 7 Twitter Phil Kerpen August 17, 2022
- 8, 15, 19, 43 Pierre Kory Substack August 20, 2022
- 9 N Engl J Med 2021; 384:2273-2282
- 10 Medical News Today January 12, 2020
- 11 Wayback NEJM Letter to the Editor June 27, 2021
- 12 Science, Public Health Policy, and the Law November 2021; 4: 130-143
- 13, 26 OpenVAERS Reproductive Health Reports as of August 12, 2022
- 14, 35, 38, 44 The Expose August 7, 2022
- 16 Expose News July 18, 2022
- 17, 20, 23 The Counter Signal July 5, 2022
- 18 Twitter Havard Skjaervik June 27, 2022
- 21, 24 Igor Chudov Substack June 25, 2022
- 22 SWPRS June 2022
- 25 Twitter Birth Gauge June 3, 2022
- 27 Boston University September 9, 2021
- 28 NPR August 9, 2021
- 29 Obstetrics & Gynecology: January 5, 2022 – Volume – Issue – 10.1097
- 30 Obstetrics & Gynecology: January 5, 2022 – Volume – Issue – 10.1097, Discussion
- 31 Children’s Health Defense June 3, 2021
- 32 Rights and Freedoms, Confidential Pfizer Research Document
- 33 Reproductive Toxicology August 2021; 103: 28-35
- 34 Science, Public Health Policy, and the Law November 2021; 4:130-143, page 135
- 36, 37 The Expose July 19, 2022
- 39 Andrology June 17, 2022 DOI: 10.111/andr.13209
- 40 Expose June 26, 2022
- 41 Daily Clout August 16, 2022
- 42 Townhall October 26, 2021
A Death in Moscow
Was the car bomb intended to send a message or to escalate the conflict?
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • AUGUST 30, 2022
The horrific car bombing in Moscow that killed twenty-nine year old Darya Dugina last week raises many questions about the motives of the Ukrainian regime and its supporters that sent an assassin to murder a prominent Russian civilian who has no overt role in the government of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. It should be assumed that the target of the attack was Darya’s father, the philosopher and sociologist Aleksandr Dugin, who has been predictably denigrated by western media outlets like the Washington Post, which refers to Dugin as “Putin’s brain” or “Putin’s Rasputin” while the New York Times lamely calls him a “Russian ultranationalist.”
Dugin, to be sure, is a powerful media figure well known in Europe who is a strong supporter of the Kremlin’s military initiative against Ukraine which is currently playing out. It appears that he has never even met Putin, which means that I have met Putin more than he has, let alone advised him, and he is generally viewed as a marginal figure in his own country. To be sure, he is known for his fiery rhetoric and hawkish anti-Western and anti-American stance, envisioning as he does Russia serving “as a serious bulwark against the ubiquitous spread of the Western liberal model on the planet.” President Vladimir Putin’s August 16th speech to foreign dignitaries at the Moscow Conference on International Security would seem to confirm that the Russian leader generally at least shares Dugin’s perspective. Putin said that “The situation in the world is changing dynamically and the outlines of a multipolar world order are taking shape. An increasing number of countries and peoples are choosing a path of free and sovereign development based on their own distinct identity, traditions and values.”
Dugin, like Putin, is a genuine conservative in cultural terms and would reasonably be described as a Russian nationalist, believing as he does that Russia and its traditional values should be cherished rather that cast away in pursuit of the currently fashionable globalism. He, also like Putin, is protective of the Russian Orthodox Church, which makes him an anachronism or worse from the viewpoint of the cancel culture currently rampaging in the west.
I had the privilege of participating in a conference in 2018 in the Iranian city of Mashhad with Dugin and got to know him somewhat. He is a distinguished intellectual, a prolific writer and speaker, and a true son of Holy Russia. That he looks backwards at Russian history to select the cultural trends and tendencies to inspire him should be a positive example of a possible course to pursue for the many conservatives worldwide who have been appalled at what is being done to western civilization at the hands of the wreckers who are now in control of so many nations.
The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) has used surveillance camera footage and other resources to reconstruct what likely took place in the car bombing. First of all, the Dugins had no special security. Aleksandr Dugin led a life in the open, as did his daughter. They would both go to cultural and folk events and speak, often freely meeting with supporters, which is what they were doing on the day of the bombing as honored guests at a “Tradition” festival near Moscow. Aleksandr had no reason to believe that some government might seriously want to assassinate him, even though it is known that he was on the Ukrainian government’s notorious Myrotvorets Enemies of Ukraine “hit list” for alleged supporters of the Russian intervention, which even includes prominent antiwar “Pink Floyd” musician Roger Waters. The names on the list are blocked on the actual group website, but there are reportedly more than 200,000 entries on it, including many prominent Americans. Curiously, the Myrotvorets site has on the home page upper right-hand corner the addresses of the originators of the site, which are Langley Virginia, home of the CIA, and Warsaw Poland. Dugin was clearly wrong if he assumed the list was all just a bit of political theater.
According to the Russian police, a 42-year-old woman named Natalya Vovk, who also uses the surname Shaban, reportedly a member of the Ukrainian National Guard’s Azov Battalion, departed Ukraine on July 23rd in a vehicle with false Donbas plates, the region currently under Russian control. She drove into Russia together with her 12 year-old daughter Sophia Shaban as cover, changed the plates to those of Kremlin ally Kazakhstan, and then proceeded to rent an apartment in the building in Moscow where Darya lived. According to one report, Darya would often drive her father to meetings as he did not like to drive, but in this case, he switched to another car. Vovk, who may have had an accomplice who helped her obtain a fake Kazakh passport and may have aided in constructing the bomb, planted the device under the Dugin car and detonated it by remote control before fleeing to Estonia after again changing her car license plates to Ukrainian. It is to be presumed that Vovk was on a mission planned and authorized by Ukrainian intelligence (SBU).
No western government has denounced the assassination. The Ukrainian government has denied being behind the attack, though there have been reported celebrations in Kiev and elsewhere. Dugina was reportedly declared “liquidated” on the Myrotvorets site. The Washington Post has predictably editorialized its view that no one should believe anything that the Russians are reporting about the assassination, though one might more reasonably trust the Kremlin than the US Capital’s leading source of media disinformation. Likewise, the British media quickly jumped into the fray, suggesting that it was the Russians themselves, either a dissident group or agents sent by Putin, who did the foul deed. Even the Pope was on the receiving end after he described Darya Dugina as an “innocent victim.” Andrii Yurash, Ukraine’s ambassador to the Holy See, tweeted that the Pope’s words were “disappointing…how (is it) possible to mention one of ideologists of (Russian) imperialism as innocent victim? She was killed by Russians.” But, to be sure, unless additional information appears, there is nothing in the Russian government reconstruction of events that appears to be a fabrication as it is largely supported by surveillance camera video clips and photos of those involved.
There remain, however, two major questions that have not been answered or even addressed at this point. The first is motive and the second relates to which other countries might have been involved in the planning and execution of the bombing. And there is a back story that might contribute to a better understanding of what exactly took place and why. Dugin, for all his brilliant academic credentials and lack of any Russian government position, is regarded as actively hostile to the interests of the United States, possibly because of his support of the attack on Ukraine, and has been both sanctioned and become a person of interest for American law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Darya was also sanctioned.
By “person of interest” I mean that the national security agencies have applied their information collection resources to monitor where Dugin goes, whom he is in contact with, and to learn what are the various groups that he is involved with. That information would all by itself be suggestive in terms of the apparent plan to assassinate Dugin by car bomb, but it also fits in neatly with several other connections. First of all, the actual capabilities of the Ukrainian intelligence services are not clearly understood, but it is well known within the US intelligence community that the CIA, MI-6 and Mossad are all in Ukraine actively engaged in training and advising their local counterparts. The bombing in Moscow required considerable sophistication as it used prior intelligence, multiple license plates and presumably also identity documents when borders were crossed, something the Ukrainians acting alone might not have been able to accomplish.
So did the United States, Britain, and/or the Israelis know what their Ukrainian counterparts were planning? More than that, did they collude in the operation or provide intelligence that made it possible? NATO member Estonia’s apparent cooperation in aiding the exfiltration of Vovk rather suggests a broadly based intelligence operation. The Israelis in particular are adept at that type of cross border targeted assassination operation, having used similar tactics to kill Iranian scientists and technicians. And they might have also had a secondary motive in targeting Dugin over his criticisms of the Jewish role in the terror that followed the Bolshevik revolution as well as its enormous overrepresentation both in the current Russian oligarchy as well as in the new American and globalist elite. Interestingly, Putin has also angered the Israeli government by his criticism of the recent lethal attacks on the Palestinians and by his closure of the Jewish Agency for Israel which arranges the emigration of Jews from Russia to the Jewish state.
If foreign intelligence services were involved, that also would imply that the respective governments might have approved of the assassination attempt, which could suggest a motive beyond just warning Russia that its apologists could be killed even in Moscow at any time. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has pressured his “allies” to get more involved in the fighting in his country, beyond the provision of billions of dollars and weapons. The killing of Dugin might have been seen as a possible provocative move to encourage Moscow to over-react in response, leading to still more western involvement, perhaps to include NATO and other allied troops appearing on the battlefields to confront Putin directly. To be sure, one is not encouraged by statements coming out of the mouths of western leaders and NATO revealing that the real objective of the fighting is to weaken Russia and possibly bring about regime change, which increases the likelihood that Moscow will take a hard line in its reaction. Nor was it exactly encouraging to hear a befuddled President Joe Biden’s calling Putin a “war criminal” and Moscow’s intervention a “genocide” while also committing the US to endure whatever it takes for as long as it takes to make sure that Ukraine “wins” the war, which is a virtual promise to escalate the conflict.
It is also ironic that the US Congress is toying with the idea of declaring Russia a “state sponsor of terrorism” when it is Washington-ally Ukraine that is in fact using terror. It might seem inconceivable that anyone would plot to assassinate a prominent Russian in order to further escalate a conflict that is already edging perilously close to a nuclear exchange, but there you have it. If Zelensky and his neocon advisers set the trap to deepen the involvement of Washington in their war, Biden should have recognized the folly and backed completely out of the conflict. But there is little chance of that, unfortunately. When it comes to Russia, the hawks are both bipartisan and firmly in control.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
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