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.
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.
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. . .
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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 Guardianreported 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Postpublished 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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;
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.
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.
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.
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 didleak 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.”
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 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.
. . . 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.
. . . 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Two months after COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out to the U.S. public, a statistically significant vaccine safety signal for myocarditis in males ages 8 to 21 appeared in the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) — but CDC officials waited another three months before alerting the public, according to a new study.
The study, “Delayed Vigilance: A Comment on Myocarditis in Association with the COVID-19 Injections,” by Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., and Brian Hooker, Ph.D., P.E., was published on Oct. 17 in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research.
In an interview with The Defender, Hooker, chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense, said:
“This important paper shows that a strong, statistically significant vaccine adverse event ‘signal’ for myocarditis in males 8 to 21 years of age was seen on the VAERS database as early as Feb. 19, 2021, just two months after the release of the COVID-19 vaccine to the U.S. public.
“Instead of sounding the alarm regarding this signal, CDC officials buried the connection between COVID-19 vaccination and myocarditis until May 27, 2021. By this date, over 50% of the eligible U.S. population had received at least one mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.
“Withholding this type of information is criminal.”
According to researchers at the National Organization for Rare Disorders, myocarditis can result from infections or may result directly from a toxic effect such as a toxin or a virus. “More commonly the myocarditis is a result of the body’s immune reaction to the initial heart damage,” researchers said.
Severe myocarditis can permanently damage the heart muscle, possibly causing heart failure.
In their study, Jablonowski and Hooker recorded and analyzed the increasing incidence of myocarditis as it progressively became a statistically significant “signal” in VAERS, the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S.
“It [myocarditis] became a discernible measure of harm over time, and here we show when it became statistically significant in the week of February 19, 2021,” the authors explained.
Only two months later, the VAERS data from the week of April 23, 2021, showed that the discerned level of myocarditis in young men following COVID-19 vaccination had increased to an extreme statistical level.
Generally, p-values less than .05 are considered to be statistically significant — meaning the observed result cannot reasonably be attributed to chance — and p-values less than .01 are considered to be very statistically significant.
By the week of April 23, 2021, Jablonowski and Hooker saw a p-value of less than 0.0001 (p<0.0001).
“At that p-level, a contrast as great as the one observed in the VAERS data would be expected to occur fewer than one time in 10,000 similar experimental drug trials,” they said.
“That statistic was obtained when 43.78% of the U.S. population had received at least one [COVID-19] injection — 31.20% had received all of those injections available to them or pressed upon them, and 12.58% had received one or more of the COVID-19 injections but not all of them.”
Despite this safety signal, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on May 10, 2021, expanded the Emergency Use Authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine to individuals as young as 12 years old, and the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted to recommend that all that persons age 12 or older get the vaccine.
Around the same time, the CDC’s V-safe post-vaccination data collection tool began accepting entries from adolescents ages 12-15 years. A few weeks later, the CDC finally acknowledged publicly that there may be an association between mRNA COVID-19 vaccination and myocarditis.
“On May 27, 2021, the CDC published on their website ‘Myocarditis and Pericarditis following mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination,’ (an announcement that is no longer available at the time of this writing; however, see Das et al., 2021),” the authors said.
“However, the important point we want to underscore here is that the general public was apparently coming to the realization of the particular life-threatening dangers of myocarditis at a time after 50.56% of the U.S. population had already received one or more up to the limit of all available COVID-19 injections — 42.25% had received the complete series of shots and 8.31% had received some but not all of them.”
“Why the irreversible delay in vigilance?” they asked.
The CDC’s choice — “whether by intention or neglect of the unfolding evidence” — to not warn the U.S. public of possible widespread harm from the mRNA COVID-19 until May 27, 2021, “when 50.56% of the U.S. population had already been injected, some of them multiple times” could be characterized as “criminal neglect.”
Jablonowski and Hooker concluded:
“From February 19, 2021, the signal in VAERS data was already loud and clear after only 14.23% of the U.S. population had been administered at least one of the injections. Subtracting that group from the 50.56% who had taken the risks associated with the shots by May 27, left 36.33% of the U.S. population (or roughly 120 million people) in the dark about the known adverse outcomes, including the irreversible damage of myocarditis, associated with the COVID-19 injections.”
VAERS data show 24,371 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis between Dec. 14, 2020, and Oct. 14, 2022. Of those cases, 1,333 reports occurred among 12- to 17-year-olds, 47 reports occurred among 5- to 11-year-olds and 5 reports occurred among 6-month-olds to 5-year-olds.
While reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed, the system has been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.
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.
In recent weeks, the Kiev regime has been accusing Russia of planning to destroy the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam on the Dnieper River, which would unleash a devastating flood across most of the Kherson oblast (region) and the surrounding areas.
The dam, which measures 30 meters in height and is approximately 3.2 km long, was built in 1956 on the Dnieper River as part of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant. It holds a massive 18 km³ water reservoir which also supplies water to Russia’s Crimean peninsula. The reservoir is also crucial for the functioning of the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant as it supplies water to the essential cooling systems. The volume of water in the reservoir is comparable to the Great Salt Lake.
Destroying the strategically important dam, which is now part of Russia, would have catastrophic consequences, as it would unleash a devastating flood downstream. Experts estimate this would create a giant wave of devastating floodwater up to five meters in height, almost immediately flooding an area of more than five kilometers around the dam. The wave would need only two hours to reach the city of Kherson. The destruction of the dam’s floodgates would also destroy the crossings used by the Russian military and possibly trap the large Russian contingent on the west bank of the Dnieper River. However, most alarmingly, this would also result in the total destruction of dozens of settlements in the region and possibly cause hundreds or even thousands of civilian casualties, as it would not be possible to evacuate everyone in time.
Last Tuesday, Russian Army General Sergei Surovikin, the newly appointed commander of all Russian forces engaged in the special military operation, stated that the relevant intelligence clearly indicates the Kiev regime forces are preparing a massive strike on the dam. He confirmed that the Neo-Nazi junta troops had already used the US-supplied HIMARS in a major strike during which the Russian military managed to intercept several precision-guided rockets. On October 21 alone, at least five separate rocket attacks were repelled by Russian air defenses.
“We have information on the possibility of the Kiev regime using prohibited methods of war in the area of the city of Kherson, on the preparation by Kiev of a massive rocket strike on the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam,” Surovikin warned.
The Kiev regime officials rejected the allegations and stated that “they were a clear sign” that Moscow supposedly planned to attack the dam and then blame the Neo-Nazi junta. On October 20, the Kiev regime frontman Volodymyr Zelensky said that Russia had allegedly placed explosives on the dam and was preparing to destroy it, a move he compared to the use of weapons of mass destruction.
“I informed the Europeans today, during the meeting of the European Council, about the next terrorist attack, which Russia is preparing for at the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant. Destroying the dam would mean a large-scale disaster,” Zelensky stated. He went on to claim that blowing up the dam would also destroy the water supply to Crimea and “thus show that Russia had accepted that it could not hold onto the peninsula.”
Kirill Stremousov, the Deputy Head of the Kherson oblast (region), stated that the Kiev regime’s allegations that Russia had placed explosives on the dam were false. The authorities of the Kherson oblast are working on evacuating as many civilians as possible, since the Kiev regime forces are escalating attacks on residential areas. On the evening of October 20, Neo-Nazi junta troops targeted civilians fleeing to the eastern bank of the Dnieper River. The ferry crossing near the Antonov bridge (damaged by the Kiev regime forces) was struck, resulting in at least 4 civilian casualties, while dozens of others were wounded. Local administration reports that the US-made HIMARS MLRS was used to destroy the ferry.
At least 12 cluster munition rockets were fired, most of which were intercepted by Russian air defenses, significantly reducing the number of casualties. Since HIMARS is a precision-guided system, the possibility of miscalculation on part of the Kiev regime forces is extremely unlikely. This leaves us with one conclusion – the civilians were the target.
Local authorities are working round the clock to evacuate everyone, as civilians living on the west bank of the Kherson oblast are exposed to direct attacks by the Kiev regime forces. As the Neo-Nazi junta troops are also shelling the Kakhovka power plant, located approximately five kilometers from the town of Novaya Kakhovka, the civilians are also directly exposed to the aforementioned flood which would be the inevitable result of the destruction of the dam.
All the while, the Kiev regime keeps insisting that Russia will destroy the dam, ignoring both logic and the situation on the ground. As Zelensky himself stated, destroying the dam would halt the water supply to Crimea. Although he stated that this means Russia gave up on Crimea, such claims are comically illogical, given that Russia had successfully been tackling the issue of water supplies to the peninsula for nearly a decade, as the Kiev regime cut the water supplies back in 2014.
In addition to trapping its own troops on the west bank of the Dnieper River, as the flooding would make it impossible to evacuate anyone, the destruction of the dam would also devastate the areas which are already under Russian control. Thus, the question remains, who actually benefits from blowing up the Kakhovka dam?
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
Russia has filed an official complaint over US-backed biological activities in Ukraine
Samizdat – October 25, 2022
Russia is calling on the UN Security Council to establish a commission to investigate alleged violations of the convention prohibiting the production or use of biological weapons by Ukraine and the United States.
“We requested a meeting in two days in line with Article VI of the Biological Weapons Convention,” the Russian mission to the United Nations said on Tuesday.
Moscow’s ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, circulated a draft resolution ahead of a meeting set for Thursday, along with “a variety of documents and evidence that shed light on the true nature of military biological activities of the US and Ukraine on the Ukrainian territory.”
Russia was forced to invoke Article VI of the convention to raise the issues with the Security Council after its repeated inquiries were largely ignored by Washington and Kiev, who “have not provided necessary explanations, nor have they taken immediate measures to remedy the situation,” Nebenzia explained.
Moscow has alleged that the two counties conducted secretive, joint biological research on Ukrainian soil, claiming it had obtained incriminating evidence of those activities during the ongoing military operation. The Russian Defense Ministry has gradually released said materials to the public in batches since March.
“The data analysis gives evidence of non-compliance by the American and Ukrainian sides with the provisions” of the BWC, Nebenzia said.
Last month, Russia convened a meeting of BCW member states in Geneva, which failed to provide any tangible result, with delegates from 35 out of 89 nations either dismissing the Russian claims or expressing support for the kind of research the US and Ukraine were conducting, according to the US State Department. Only seven nations expressed support for Russia: Belarus, China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Syria and Venezuela.
In the wake of the meeting, Moscow proposed amendments to the BWC, floating three ideas to reinforce the landmark international agreement and make it more legally binding for its parties. Namely, Russia called for negotiations on a “legally binding protocol,” an “effective verification mechanism” and a “scientific advisory committee” within the group.
Russia also proposed making the control mechanisms more transparent, with additional “confidence-building measures,” suggesting BWC participants must be obliged to declare their “activities in the biological sphere outside the national territory.”
The US and Ukraine have dismissed Russia’s bioweapons claims as disinformation and a conspiracy theory. Back in June, the Pentagon published the ‘Fact Sheet on WMD Threat Reduction Efforts with Ukraine, Russia and Other Former Soviet Union Countries’. The US military claimed that following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington has “worked collaboratively to improve Ukraine’s biological safety, security, and disease surveillance for both human and animal health,” by providing support to “46 peaceful Ukrainian laboratories, health facilities, and disease diagnostic sites over the last two decades.” These programs have allegedly focused on “improving public health and agricultural safety measures at the nexus of nonproliferation.”
Since its experimental beginnings in the mid-1950s, organ transplantation has evolved into what the medical community now casually refers to as a “standard-of-care” procedure, albeit one with still substantial failure rates.
In one study, published in September in Transplant Infectious Disease, researchers cataloged acute organ rejection within a week or two of COVID-19 vaccination in five individuals who had received kidney, liver or heart transplants six to 18 months earlier.
In August, Japanese researchers reported rejection of corneal grafts in COVID-19 vaccine recipients, occurring from one day to six weeks post-vaccination.
The events caught the Japanese authors’ attention because corneal grafts ordinarily have a high success rate due to the cornea’s status as an organ with immune privilege.
Noting literature that documents transplant rejection in association with other vaccines such as influenza, hepatitis B, tetanus and yellow fever, the Japanese authors expressed worry about what “the projected societal shift towards a more frequent vaccination schedule” portends for transplant recipients.
Concerns about the impact of COVID-19 jabs on people with existing transplants are important, but another pressing-yet-unaddressed question lurks in the shadows: What happens if an unvaccinated person receives a transplanted organ from someone who got one or more COVID-19 jabs?
A record year
Although transplantation experienced a brief lull in the early days of the pandemic, by 2021, the U.S. saw a record-setting number of transplants performed — more than 40,000 kidneys, hearts, livers and other organs.
Although supply is never adequate to meet demand, transplant centers were able to achieve their 2021 milestone in part because of a 10% increase over 2020 in the number of “deceased organ donors” (as opposed to living donors), with 45 of 57 organ procurement organizations setting “all-time records for donors recovered in a single year.”
The surge in organ donation from deceased donors represents a decade-long trend, with “the rising number of deaths of young people due to the ongoing opioid epidemic” hypothesized to be a contributing factor prior to 2021. Still, in prior years, the increase averaged only 5%.
Thrilled with the increased availability of organs, transplant organizations have displayed no curiosity about whether fatalities linked to the rollout of experimental COVID-19 vaccines may be eclipsing or even replacing organs sourced from opioid-related deaths — even though there was a 30% increase (over 2020) in organ donation from individuals who died of cardiorespiratory failure, and a 15% increase in organs from deceased 50- to 64-year-olds.
The COVID-19 vaccine rollout has been linked to 2021’s explosive rise in all-cause mortality in the working-age population, including unprecedented heart-related fatalities in younger adult COVID-19 vaccine recipients.
Some observers believe these could be linked to COVID-19-vaccine-related loss of consciousness behind the wheel.
Damaged organs?
According to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), transplant rejection “is when the organ recipient’s immune system recognizes the donor organ as foreign and attempts to eliminate it.”
Rejection begins as an acute phenomenon but may proceed to the gradual loss of organ function defined as chronic rejection.
UNOS says, “Some degree of rejection occurs with every transplant,” which is why immunosuppressive medications, often for life, are a sine qua non following transplantation.
In August, the independent group of doctors and scientists known as Doctors for COVID Ethics outlined disturbing evidence from autopsies of persons deceased after COVID-19 vaccination about what is happening to the organs of mRNA vaccine recipients — organs potentially being offered to transplant recipients.
They noted that mRNA vaccines “travel throughout the body and accumulate in various organs” where they “induce long-lasting expression of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein” that in turn induces autoimmune-like inflammation — and the vaccine-induced inflammation “can cause grave organ damage, especially in vessels, sometimes with deadly outcome.”
Citing evidence from Pfizer’s animal experiments, they also underscored the particularly rapid accumulation of mRNA vaccine in the liver, and concluded that blood vessels, at the very least, “will be exposed and affected in every organ and in every tissue.”
Ironically, transplant programs commonly recommend that would-be organ recipients get “up-to-date” on a slew of vaccines — “typically hepatitis A and B, tetanus [diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus], pneumococcus, measles, human papillomavirus, influenza, and others dependent on geography and age.”
Given the manufacturer-documented potential for vaccines to cause organ-damaging adverse events, this advice was already questionable — but then many transplant centers made matters worse by adding stringent requirements for COVID-19 vaccination.
Even though researchers very quickly established that the immunosuppressive drugs taken by transplant recipients guarantee a “significantly blunt[ed]” COVID-19 vaccine response, prominent healthcare systems like Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Colorado’s UCHealth did not hesitate to coldly remove the unvaccinated from their transplant waiting lists.
The American Society of Transplant Surgeons’ COVID-19 Strike Force recommends COVID-19 vaccination not just for all transplant candidates but also for recipients, their family members and live donors.
They virtuously claim that decisions to deny transplants to the unvaccinated are based on a desire to “avoid futile transplants and wasting organs that could benefit other candidates.”
A University of Chicago physician who asserted a “legal right to discriminate against candidates who refuse the COVID-19 vaccine” nevertheless squeamishly labeled the discrimination “too severe,” asking, “one must ask how far the [transplant] community will go” and wondering, “will they mandate multiple boosters”?
Big bucks
Although organ transplantation is shrouded in noble lifesaving verbiage, it is also a major profit center for modern medicine.
Market analysts expect the growth to be fueled both by demand factors — such as the growing incidence of chronic diseases that cause “catastrophic damage to tissue and organs” — and increased supply — including a rise in celebrity-driven organ donation pledges.
Because access to organs remains the key barrier to transplantation, there has also been a push in recent years to allow donation from “suboptimal” or “extended criteria” donors — for example, the elderly, individuals with fatty liver disease, donors with malignancies or viral hepatitis or donations “after cardiac death.”
Will COVID-19-vaccine-contaminated organs become just another category of “suboptimal” donation?
Recent studies of COVID-19 vaccine recipients’ blood suggest that worries about a contaminated blood supply likely also extend to the organ supply and could place transplant recipients’ lives at risk.
Unfortunately, when problems arise, they will probably be chalked up to ordinary transplant rejection, with no one the wiser about the insidious role of newfangled COVID-19 or future mRNA vaccines.
In the more than eight years of bombing the civilians of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, Ukraine has committed untold numbers of war crimes. These include bombing residential areas, markets, hospitals, schools, parks—including with prohibited heavy weapons and banned cluster munitions—and, since late July, raining banned “Petal” mines down on populated civilian areas, including the very center of Donetsk, including as recently as September 7.
A lesser-known war crime is Ukraine’s routine targeting of ambulances, fire trucks, medics and rescuers, and their headquarters and stations. Many of the times Ukraine bombs such heroic rescuers, it is when they are on the way, or already on site, to help civilians often themselves just bombed by Ukraine.
The day prior, Ukrainian shelling targeted an ambulance station in the LPR’s Lysychansk, wounding several and damaging some of the ambulances.
On June 23, the Kievskiy District of Donetsk came under repeated shelling over the course of the two hours I was visiting the Emergency Services headquarters there. On the grounds, I saw the remnants of a “Hurricane” missile from a previous Ukrainian attack.
The previous day, Ukrainian forces targeted an Emergency Services fire truck on call, leaving the driver hospitalized in critical condition. According to his colleagues, they saw a drone above them just prior to Ukraine’s strike. The targeting was unquestionably deliberate.
On June 18, Ukraine targeted a central Donetsk district after Emergency Services had arrived, killing a firefighter and the driver, and injuring three more rescuers.
In early June, heavy Ukrainian shelling of Kuibyshevsky District, Donetsk, destroyed an ambulance and seriously injured the driver.
Ukraine’s attacks on emergency workers is not new; Ukraine has been doing so for years.
In June 2021, during a humanitarian cease-fire, Ukrainian forces targeted an ambulance which had arrived to evacuate three injured DPR soldiers.
In October 2019, Ukrainian forces fired an anti-tank guided missile at a DPR military ambulance en route to help a child, wounding the driver and a paramedic.
In August 2018, Ukrainian forces fired a missile at a DPR ambulance, killing the driver and two female paramedics.
When I first visited the DPR in September 2019, going to hard-hit areas around Gorlovka, I was told by Zaitsevo administration that ambulances could not reach the villagers.
“The paramedics don’t go farther than this building; it’s too dangerous. If somebody needs medical care near the front lines, someone has to go in their own car and take them to a point where medics can then take them to Gorlovka. The soldiers also help civilians who are injured.”
This is something I was very familiar with in Gaza, occupied Palestine, where Israeli soldiers routinely fire at Palestinian farmers and other laborers on agricultural land, a policy of harassment to drive Palestinians off their land. In most cases, ambulances likewise could not reach the injured due to Israel’s policy of targeting ambulances. Consequently, seriously injured Palestinians bleed to death.
In Zaitsevo, I was told this had happened there, too. “A woman died due to huge blood loss because no one could reach her house to take her away in time. She was injured in the shelling and bled to death.”
Targeting medics and other rescuers ensures those in need of help are deprived of it, and increases the likelihood that people who might have lived instead die of their injuries.
The intentional targeting of ambulances and medics, as well as fire trucks and other emergency services vehicles and workers, is against international law.
Speaking to DPR Rescuers
During my last two visits to the DPR, in June and August 2022, I interviewed a number of Emergency Services workers and medics.
According to Konstantin Zhukov, the Chief Medical Officer of Donetsk Ambulance Services, the ambulance services workers face shelling daily, constantly, and many employees have been wounded while working. One of the ambulance stations was completely destroyed by Ukrainian shelling.
Outside, I spoke with Tatyana Golota, an emergency physician, and Alena Kondrasheva, a paramedic.
Both reiterated that it is normal coming under repeated Ukrainian fire. They spoke of Ukraine shelling after medics and emergency services workers had arrived to help civilians.
They showed me an ambulance completely destroyed by Ukrainian shelling. It was new and had only been operational a few months before being destroyed.
“That day we were at work and heard about the brigade coming under fire. The doctor had gone to help people, and the driver, by chance, walked away to try to get a mobile signal. At that moment, there was a direct hit on the vehicle.”
Also in Donetsk, I spoke with Sergei Neka, Director of the Department of Fire and Rescue Forces of the Ministry of Emergency Situations.
He likewise said rescuers increasingly come under fire when they go out on a call, sometimes making it impossible to reach the people in need.
According to him, from February 24, 2022, to when I spoke with him in August, four people were killed and 40 injured, as well as significant damage to equipment and buildings.
“Our units arrive at the scene of the accident and Ukraine begins to shell it. A lot of equipment has been damaged and destroyed.”
I asked about the impact of the “Petal” mines Ukraine has been dropping on the city, and was told a 21-year-old employee was injured by a PFM-1S mine after a region was cleared, the mine falling from the building and the unsuspecting rescuer stepping on it, losing his foot.
In Makeevka, just east of Donetsk, I went to an orphanage that had been shelled with the mines. Most of the clean-up was completed by the time I arrived on the second day of de-mining, but one remained. I watched a sapper find and detonate it, and although I had previously seen a group of eight mines detonated, creating a massive blast, the force of the single mine was still quite powerful.
According to Dmitry Chamota, Head of Donetsk Emergency Services Deminers, they found 26 PFM-1 mines scattered around the grounds of the orphanage, including on the playground.
In June, I met Andrey Levchenko, Chief of Kievskiy District Emergency Ministry. Over the course of the two hours at his station, Ukraine was intensively shelling the district, leading us to take cover inside the building lest the property be targeted again.
We did venture outside between bouts of shelling, where Levchenko pointed out damage to the buildings and the shell of the Ukrainian-fired Hurricane MLRS which struck the premises.
The building has blown out windows, sandbagged windows to attempt to protect the workers; some days prior, the chief’s office had been damaged by shrapnel from the shelling. Thankfully, he had just stepped out a minute before the blast.
He showed me the fire truck damaged on June 22, pointing out the many shrapnel holes and noting one of the rear tires had been blown out.
Two of the employees who had been out on that call spoke to me about that day, saying that, after Ukrainian shelling of the district, they received a call that people were trapped inside a building with the door blocked after the shelling. A fire was spreading to the second and third floors, and that people were unable to escape. As the rescuers assessed the situation, a shell hit a wall near the truck and wounded the driver.
They said that, prior to the shelling, they saw a drone overhead. This, combined with the facts that they were uniformed and the fire truck was clearly marked and in a civilian area where people were calling for help, makes it credible to believe Ukraine deliberately targeted the rescuers.
Of Ukraine’s heightened shelling over the past many months, Levchenko said it was constant and daily. “Before, if we speak about 2014-2015, twenty minutes, one hour maximum. Now six-seven hours non-stop, every day.”
He said that the Ukrainian forces shell, wait until rescuers arrive and then shell again. “They wait for 30 minutes for us to arrive. We arrive there, start assisting people, and the shelling resumes.”
This is something I witnessed for myself when, on August 4, Ukraine bombed the hotel in which I was staying, the fourth and fifth shells landing 50 meters away and then directly beside the hotel, respectively. When the fifth struck, shattering inwards the lobby glass doors, I had fortunately just stepped out of the lobby where 30 seconds earlier I had been speaking to journalists who had run in from the street.
When it seemed the shelling had stopped, journalists went outside to document the damage. Sadly, a young woman outside the hotel had been killed by the shelling. Five others just two streets away were also torn apart by the bombs, including a promising 12-year-old ballerina, her grandmother, and her world famous former ballerina ballet teacher.
Galina Vasilyevna Volodina (left), and twelve-year-old Katya Kutubaeva, the ballerina killed by Ukraine. [Source: slippedisc.com]
Emergency Services arrived and, not long after, Ukraine resumed its shelling. Fortunately, they were able to get inside, but this is just one example of Ukraine’s double strikes.
According to Levchenko, Ukraine does not only shell two times, but that they sometimes shell three times: “They wait again, our guys hide in the shelters, as soon as we go out, put out the fire, help people, there could be people under the debris, doors stuck, people can’t get out and get to the basement…then shelling resumes.”
He described the people engaging in this sort of warfare against civilians and rescuers as “Shameless. Scumbags. Terrorists.”
He is not wrong.
Targeting Rescuers: A Terrorist Tactic Adopted by U.S. Allies in Ukraine, Israel and Syria
As the DPR Emergency Services chief pointed out damage to the fire truck, I was reminded of Israel’s attacks on Palestinian medics and fire brigades in Gaza, including during the December 27, 2008-January 18, 2009, Israeli war on Gaza, where I was living at the time.
During those three weeks, I rode in the medics’ ambulances, documenting the destruction and the victims of Israel’s war crimes, but also in a sense as a human shield, in the hope that Israel would not strike ambulances in which a handful of internationals and I were riding.
As it turned out, by the end of the Israeli massacre of Gaza, Israeli forces killed 16 medical rescuers, four in one day alone. Another 57 were injured. At least 16 ambulances were damaged, with at least nine completely destroyed.
One of the murdered was a 35-year-old paramedic, Arafa Abd al-Dayem, who I had accompanied the night prior to his murder. As I wrote of that evening, “The dead, a 24-year-old night watchman, had no warning of the at least 2 missiles which leveled the school and tore him apart. The medics work to load the corpse, first having to replace the flat tire. Working frantically, still fearful of potential strikes, they crowd the ambulance, hoist the van, replace the flat. A missile hits 50 meters away. Surely, undoubtedly, those warplanes above us know—from the markings of the ambulance, the clothes of the medics, the crystal clear photos their drones can take—that we are civilians and medics below. Yet they fire.”
Arafa was killed later that day, when Israeli forces fired a flechette shell directly at his ambulance, shredding him with the dart-like flechettes, causing massive internal bleeding in his abdomen, blood in his lung, shock, and death.
A surgeon I interviewed later when writing about Israel’s widespread use of flechettes in Gaza told me that flechettes cause more injuries than other small munitions precisely because they spread in a larger area. And while the darts appear innocuously small, their velocity and design enable them to bore through cement and bones and “cut everything internal.” Accordingly, the prime cause of death is severe internal bleeding from slashed organs, particularly the heart, liver and brain.
One of the injured, Hassan al-Attal, 35, was a medic whose ambulance I was in when he and another medic came under Israeli sniper fire while attempting to retrieve a corpse from the street just beyond the ambulance. The sniper fire reached the ambulance itself. Hassan was wounded in the leg. This was during a few hours of supposed cease-fire. But in any case, the medics never should have been targeted.
As I wrote, “Although the Geneva Conventions explicitly state that ‘medical personnel searching, collecting, transporting or treating the wounded should be protected and respected in all circumstances,’ throughout Israel’s invasion this was not the case. Indeed, as the injured and emergency workers testify, Israeli forces targeted and prevented medical workers from reaching the wounded.
Without coordination, many ambulances did not dare risk Israeli gunfire and shelling, meaning hundreds of calls went unanswered, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. Denied medical care, many victims succumbed to their wounds.”
Israeli forces killed 13 Civil Defense workers and injured 31, also destroyed six civil defense stations and damaging four.
From that same article, “Civil Defense workers, like medics, are protected under international law. The Fourth Geneva Convention states not only that emergency workers must be respected and allowed to do their work, but that their buildings, equipment and vehicles must not be targeted.
Yousef al-Zahar, director-general of Civil Defense in Gaza, told me at the time, ‘Targeting the Civil Defense centers and teams is an obvious indicator that the Israeli forces intended to paralyze Civil Defense activities in the Gaza Strip to raise civilian victims’ numbers in the casualties.’”
According to statistics from the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Health and the PRCS, from the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000 to when I wrote the 2010 article, Israeli Forces have killed at least 56 medical rescuers, including paramedics, drivers, doctors and volunteers—an average of one rescuer every two months—and have injured at least another 500 medical rescuers.
Likewise, British journalist Vanessa Beeley has written at length about Syrian rescuers targeted by terrorist factions in Syria, their equipment stolen. In one of her articles, she cited a Commanding Officer of the Real Syria Civil Defense in an Aleppo district describing a scenario which Donbas and Palestinian rescuers would recognize:
“They (terrorists) targeted us deliberately in order to destroy our equipment & structures. They wanted to prevent us being able to work for our people. They would target our crew with sniper fire and explosive bullets. Their main mission was to kill the crew and destroy our base so we couldn’t care for the people of Aleppo.”
In that same article, she noted that “terrorist groups systematically carried out double-tap attacks” on the rescuers, just as Israel does to Palestinian rescuers and Ukraine to Donbas rescuers.
Ukraine Continues Killing Donbas Rescuers
On September 1, 13 DPR Emergency workers were killed and 9 injured from Ukrainian shelling. According to a representative of the Emergency Situations, the shelling was intentional.
“The missiles exactly hit residential buildings. The vehicle was outside and it was hit with shrapnel and pieces of the destroyed building. But again, you can see it’s an emergency vehicle—a fire vehicle. This is a war crime.”
The following day, two more Emergency Services workers were killed and two injured by Ukrainian shelling of their fire truck, in Makeevka. They were en route to put out a fire. Images accompanying the news show a mangled bright red fire truck, unmistakably a rescue services vehicle.
When in August I spoke with the Director of the Donetsk Department of Fire and Rescue of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, he told me that, at that time, four Emergency Services workers had been killed and 40 injured by Ukrainian shelling.
With Ukraine’s targeting of Emergency Services in September, the number of rescuers Ukraine has killed is now at least 19, with another 51 injured.
I had the chance to speak with the mother of a young firefighter, Pavel (“Pasha”) Legonkiy, killed by Ukrainian shelling on June 18, 2022. He and other Emergency Services personnel had gone to the site of a Ukrainian shelling, in central Donetsk. A Ukrainian double-tap strike killed Pasha and the driver, injuring three others.
Svetlana spoke proudly of her courageous, compassionate son.
“He loved his work very much. He lived for this work. It was his duty to help people. My son dreamed of starting a family, dreamed of having children, dreamed of working! And one shell that you sent here ended his life.”
These men and women know very well the threats they face when going out on a call, but go anyway, to help their citizens under Ukrainian attacks.
The two women I spoke to at Donetsk Ambulance Services replied to my question about whether they considered stopping their work.
“I’m really scared, everyone is scared. But what can we do? How about the patients? They are people like me, they hurt and are even more scared. They are waiting for our help. While you are driving you feel fear, but as soon as you get to the place of the tragedy, the fear goes away and you just start doing your job and forget about this fear.”
The Kievskiy Emergency Ministry Chief, Andrey Levchenko, said of the rescuers, “They are all heroes. If it were possible, I would give a medal to every one of them, to honor their work, to support them. But they don’t do that for the medals, no way. Nobody ever said, ‘we’re not going, we don’t want to,’” he said, referring to when rescuers go out on calls.
He is right. These rescuers are heroes, putting their lives on the line every time they go out to help a person in need, knowing full well Ukraine frequently strikes an area a second and a third time, specifically to target rescuers. While they might not receive or want medals, they should be afforded their right under international law to rescue people without fear of being shelled by Ukraine.
RESEARCHERS at Boston University have developed a deadly new strain of Covid, which kills 80 per cent of animal subjects. The research was funded by the US government and approved by Anthony Fauci. I don’t need to tell you how risky such experiments are, or how stupid. This is just one biotechnology experiment among thousands currently being carried out around the world which pose similar kinds of threat. Each additional experiment adds to the danger and brings another lab escape a bit closer.
Biotechnology and medical science is already a long way down a well-worn path which leads to the normalisation of risk. This has involved gradual acclimatisation to high rates of severe injury and death imposed on an unwitting public. The psychology of this process is well known. Repeatedly turning a blind eye to suffering coarsens individual attitudes.
A past true-crime Forensic Files episode illustrates how far we have come. A young female doctor died unexpectedly of a heart attack. In those pre-pandemic times sudden death was a red flag necessitating the close attention of pathologists and police. In the episode, the presence of an unusual toxin was found and the culprit apprehended. By contrast, in the post-pandemic world sudden death has been normalised. No investigation required. Legislation is being changed to allow ‘cause unknown’ on death certificates.
High rates of excess all-cause death, pregnancy irregularities, cardiac events, cancers at lower ages and low birth rates have not just failed to raise eyebrows, but have been dismissed by ‘experts’ and MSM alike on flimsy pretexts without adequate investigation. Blaming Covid infection for every increase in illness has become the norm. This indicates detachment from sound science and the rational mind. Questions are off the table.
Last week New Zealand’s top vaccinologist Dr Helen Petousis-Harris sounded a public note of alarm, saying she wasn’t having any more boosters and advising the public to follow her example. Her advice was based on evolving scientific findings. This was a step too far for the MSM. The NZ Herald decided to switch experts, stoke the fear factor and cancel Dr Petousis-Harris.
The Herald quoted a University of Auckland computational biologist David Welch, who is not an expert on vaccines but begged to differ from Petousis-Harris saying: ‘I think we should be regularly having boosters. At the moment a booster twice a year looks like it would be very sensible because we’re getting waves more frequently than that.’ The long article failed to mention adverse effects of mRNA vaccination and its near-total lack of effectiveness.
Such buffoonery is not just uninformed, it increasingly appears to be part of a deliberate attempt to whitewash medical harm on a scale that dwarfs any previous example. An article in the Epoch Times headed ‘How Cancer Deaths From the COVID Jabs Are Being Hidden’ outlines just one way this is being accomplished, saying:
Analysis of US Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) data suggests that some cancer deaths have been redesignated as Covid deaths since April 2021. This has hidden the cancer signal.
Before it was manipulated to eliminate the safety signal, data from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) showed cancer rates among military personnel and their families tripled after the rollout of the shots
After the rollout of the Covid jabs in 2021, cancer patients have got younger, with the largest increase occurring among 30-to-50-year-olds. Tumour sizes are dramatically larger, multiple tumours in multiple organs are becoming more common, and recurrence and metastasis are increasing.
Why is this not front-page news? The controlling conservative elements of the medical profession and the profitable pharmaceutical industry consider vaccine adverse effects to be a sort of unspeakable heresy. Yet ask someone who has been working in the gene therapy field for years and a tsunami of cancers is not unexpected.
Look at it this way. Cancers result from mutated genetic instructions. These can result from a number of causes including oxidative stress, inherited weakness, environmental or ingested toxins. Inside every one of trillions of human cells every day microbiological immune processes make 70,000 DNA repairs. These ward off potential cancers.
These internal cellular immune processes are sealed off and protected behind the cell wall. The mRNA vaccines are Trojan horses designed to breach the cell wall and reprogram cellular activity. It doesn’t take a genius to appreciate that there are risks involved. These risks include cancers. Cancers normally take years to develop. The surge in cancers among US Department of Defense personnel should be a red flag. Instead medical administrators are apparently busy burying it.
In New Zealand the burying has involved withholding data from public scrutiny, making misleading comparisons, cancelling those asking questions, saturation government advertising promising safety, and indiscriminate use of the ‘conspiracy theory’ label. We have written about these for a year now. Given recent Covid scientific publishing, we are all hoping that the penny will drop. Perhaps those awake enough to study journal papers carefully will, like Dr Petousis-Harris, begin to realise that there is no point in endangering their own health for the sake of a biotechnology dream.
Even though we are approaching the end game of one mRNA biotech dream, there are thousands of others in the pipeline. The psychology of biotech dreaming allows proponents to segue effortlessly from one dream segment to another without a pause. As long as you believe in the ultimate good of human genetic manipulation, there is no real worry if a few people die along the way.
As things have progressed from a few dying, to thousands, to hundreds of thousands around the world and millions injured, coarsened attitudes have hardened. The progress of biotechnology has gradually come to be regarded by the medical elite and giant commercial interests as ‘a necessary task’. A task that requires toughness and determination to arrive eventually at a ‘laudable’ and inevitable goal. The echoes from history are obvious.
But what if the whole enterprise of biotechnology is misguided? Like the discovery of the atomic bomb, literally a dead end? Where the next available step is only a bigger bomb or a more invasive and deadly toxin or pathogen? There are good reasons to suppose this is the case. Millions of years of evolutionary interaction with the wider global epigenetic bionetwork, underpinned by the immutable laws of physics, just might be more reliable than the ideas of a mad scientist.
Is the complexity of human physiology beyond human comprehension and calculation? Yes. Our knowledge of it remains primitive. Moreover there are inherent limitations to our understanding. The full intricacies of in vivo genetic processes are not open to scrutiny. The computational solution of genetic processes and intercellular interactions is beyond the reach of even the most powerful supercomputers. Combinative processes between genes performing multiple tasks requires multidimensional mathematics involving unsolvable equations. Adverse effects of gene editing are known to be inevitable and incalculable.
Governments have poured billions of dollars into biotechnology training and research programmes. The false rationale for this has been created by vast public relations efforts funded by a great variety of global commercial interests. It has all the hallmarks of a Ponzi scheme or an unsustainable investment bubble. There are no beneficial or bankable outcomes appearing at the end of the pipeline. More alarmingly, the deficits in human health are taking their toll and making their presence felt.
Scientific American reported this week that ‘the U.S. Just Lost 26 Years’ Worth of Progress on Life Expectancy’. How low are our medical czars prepared to go before admitting that something is rotten in the state of Denmark? The ‘it’s not me’ and ‘look the other way’ cultures are in full flood to protect the mRNA PR mirage. Against all scientific logic and evidence, biotech CEOs, paid scientists and government experts, floundering politicians and funded media are still talking up the wondrously protective achievements of pandemic responses as if they have saved the public rather than endangered them, from the Wuhan lab to the Covid jab.
It is time to ask some serious questions. The truth is that we are not just in danger of losing progress on life expectancy, but also four centuries of progress with scientific method.
We can’t escape the fact that commercial biotechnology involves an incredibly risky and inherently mutagenic worldwide programme of experimentation. This requires a proportionate response with a global reach. For this reason and many others, this Sunday the Hatchard Report will be launching a Campaign for Global Legislation Outlawing Biotechnology Experimentation known as GLOBE. Watch this space for more details and visit my webinar with Voices For Freedom for the launch.
The U.K. regulator may decide on whether Covid vaccines should be approved for British babies before Christmas. The Mail has the story.
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which polices the safety of drugs used in the U.K., told MailOnline it is currently reviewing data on Moderna’s vaccine.
The pharmaceutical firm has submitted evidence in the hope of getting its jab approved for children aged six months and older, as it is in the EU and U.S. Only over-fives can currently get Covid vaccines in the U.K.
Any approval of jabs for babies would cause huge controversy. British authorities have so far held out on approving jabs for infants despite massive pressure, due to concerns that the benefits do not outweigh any potential risks. Children rarely get seriously ill with Covid and the majority are thought to have already been infected.
Experts said today that, even if approved, the jab must not be rolled out “en masse” to healthy infants.
Dr. Laura Squire, the MHRA’s Chief Healthcare Quality and Access Officer, revealed the regulator was processing an application from Moderna. But she added the mRNA jab, which works in a similar way to Pfizer’s, would only be approved if it met strict safety and efficacy standards.
She said: “We have received an application from the company to extend the approval of Moderna to those aged six months to five years. No extension to the vaccine will be approved unless it meets our stringent standards of safety, quality and effectiveness.”
Moderna’s jab application was submitted in mid-September, meaning it has already gone through weeks of analysis. The MHRA declined to detail the timeframe for its expected decision. But it took health chiefs two months to consider the evidence before approving the first Covid jab in December 2020. Moderna’s application is for its existing jab to be rolled out to other groups, rather than for a new drug. Dr. Squire also confirmed rival vaccine maker Pfizer has not yet applied to have its jab approved for use in the youngest children.
Professor David Livermore, a microbiologist at East Anglia University, said giving the jab to the very limited numbers of children with specific conditions might be wise.
He said: “The tiny minorities of children with severe underlying health problems may benefit from vaccination against Covid.”
But he added that a large-scale jab campaign for children should be off the cards. “There should be absolutely no question of mass vaccination of healthy children, for whom the benefits don’t outweigh the risks,” the professor said. “Over 80% of children have now had Covid and have developed natural immunity. This lasts longer than vaccine-induced immunity and is broader in respect of covering variants. Vaccines offer nothing useful to this very large majority.”
Professor Livermore said the risks of vaccine-related harm, while tiny, do not clearly outweigh the very minor benefits for the vast majority of children.
“This is acceptable for elderly vulnerable populations at risk from severe Covid,’ he said. “It’s not acceptable for healthy children, who are at minuscule risk of developing severe Covid.”
He added that he would like Britain to follow Denmark’s lead and stop vaccinating children against Covid unless recommended by a specialist paediatrician.
Moderna has now published the results of its trial in the under-fives. The study population was very small – too small to get meaningful efficacy results and efficacy was “inferred” from “neutralising antibody concentrations”:
The efficacy of mRNA-1273 was inferred on the basis of having met prespecified criteria for immunobridging, the approach used for authorisation and approval in COVID-19 vaccine studies involving adolescents and older children.
In the supplementary appendix (Table S28 and S29) vaccine effectiveness estimates are given which, while the confidence intervals are wide, are all below 51% and one is even negative.
Among children 6-23 months of age, eight serious adverse events occurred in the vaccine group and none in the placebo group. The data in the supplementary appendix consistently show the vaccinated with adverse events of grade 3 (prevents carrying out daily tasks) and grade 4 (hospitalisation) many times higher than either a placebo or lower dose cohort.
Medically attended unsolicited adverse events (Table S26) were two to three times higher in the vaccine cohort than the placebo:
1% vaccinated vs 0.3% placebo in 2-5 years
1.5% vaccinated vs 0.8% placebo in 6-23 months
1.2% vaccinated vs 0.5% placebo in 6 months-5 years
This indicates that 0.7% of the vaccinated or 1 in 143 had an unsolicited side-effect of the vaccine that required medical attention.
Alex Berenson spotted that in the appendix Moderna disclosed a case of new-onset Type 1 diabetes in a one-year-old girl that its investigators found was vaccine-related. This is Moderna admitting that its vaccine can give children diabetes. El Gato Malo points out that this does not appear to have been disclosed ahead of the approval of the vaccine in the U.S.
A German retrospective study found a hospitalisation rate from the (lower dose) Pfizer vaccine in under-fives of around one in 500.
Why are regulators even considering approving these vaccines for small children?
The Gates Foundation named Von der Leyen as one of the four winners of the so-called Goalkeepers Global Goals Awards. The other winners are Radhika Batra, co-founder of Every Infant Matters; Zahra Joya, a journalist from Afghanistan; and Vanessa Nakate, a climate activist from Uganda.
Until recently, the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset was called a conspiracy theory. This week, the EU Commission president received an award for her commitment to the same Great Reset.
The award ceremony, presented by Bill Gates and his ex-wife Melinda French Gates, was not supposed to be satire: Von der Leyen was praised for her role in the purchase and distribution of Corona vaccines. Her husband Heiko, is the director of Orgenesis, which is owned by Pfizer – the same company that Ursula signed a secret 71 billion euro contract with.
“It is a great honour to receive this award,” the EU boss said. She dedicated the award to the millions of Europeans who “helped us all get through the pandemic”. “From the scientists, who developed the life-saving vaccines, to the healthcare workers on the frontline. This award is also for them.”
Meanwhile the European Public Prosecutor’s Office has launched an investigation into the EU’s procurement of Corona vaccines. There has long been criticism of the secrecy surrounding the European Commission’s billion-dollar contracts with vaccine maker Pfizer.
And Von der Leyen has refused to clarify her negotiations with Pfizer boss Albert Bourla.
Beirut – During his visit with US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, Lebanese President Michael Aoun reportedly received a US-Israeli document detailing plans for creating a civil war in Lebanon with covert false flag operations and possible Israeli invasion.
Although the source of the document is Israeli and created in partnership with Washington, no one knows who presented it to Aoun. The Lebanese TV station, Al-Jadeed, initially reported the document on Lebanese TV and a video on its website. Geopolitics Alert translated the report for this article. … continue
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