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Ukraine Crisis Highlights Concerns About Whether OPCW Still Has Any Global Relevance, Observers Say

Samizdat | July 6, 2022

The executive council of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) kicked off its hundredth session at The Hague on Tuesday. Last month, the global watchdog assured that it was “monitoring the situation” in Ukraine closely as far as the potential use of chemical weapons is concerned.

The OPCW’s lack of a coherent, objective and fair-minded response to recent crises centered around Syria and Russia demonstrates its politicization and domination by Western interests, and the longer the watchdog stays out of Ukraine, the better, former diplomats, geopolitical observers, and international legal experts have told Sputnik.

“In Ukraine the OPCW has fortunately not been pressed into action. This, I suspect, is because the US is satisfied with the situation as it is, with no need for the US itself to be drawn in, as would no doubt be the case if a chemical attack was fabricated,” Peter Ford, Britain’s former ambassador to Syria, said.

The veteran diplomat, who warned the British government against the folly of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and stressed that Western powers’ campaign to topple the Syrian government in the 2010s could open a “Pandora’s box” of endless crises, said the Syria case demonstrated clearly that the OPCW is no longer an independent, impartial agency.

“The Syria crisis proved without a shadow of a doubt that the Western powers have bent the OPCW to their own will, destroying in the process the organization’s credibility, probably irretrievably. This is a tragedy for world peace,” Ford stressed, referring to documented OPCW efforts to censor and smear agency whistleblowers who revealed that the watchdog’s report on the April 2018 chemical attack in Douma, Syria was doctored to implicate the Assad government.

In Ukraine, Ford fears, the international community can now only depend on “self-interested restraint on the part of the Pentagon in controlling its proxies rather than the deterrent power of a genuinely impartial international watchdog.”

Chemical Weapons Danger in Ukraine

Since the escalation of the crisis in Ukraine in February, Russia has sent the OPCW and its technical secretariat over two dozen notes warning of possible staged provocations by Ukrainian forces or radical nationalists involving chemical weapons. Last month, the agency assured the international community that it was “closely monitoring the situation in Ukraine” for chemical weapons use.

On Wednesday, Russian military indicated that it had information on plans by Kiev to stage a provocation in the Donetsk People’s Republic using chlorine gas to accuse Moscow on indiscriminate attacks targeting chemically hazardous objects.

Alessandro Bruno, a Toronto-based geopolitical analyst and political observer at Lombardi Letter, says that while the OPCW’s official mission and goals are “certainly worth pursuing,” the problem is the watchdog’s control by Western interests seeking to obfuscate the truth and objectivity in favor of politicized objectives.

“They seem to have targeted only specific sides in specific wars to suit specific aims, which typically are those of Western powers. There have been many efforts to manipulate these organizations by the dominant powers, particularly in the West,” Bruno said.

The scholar recalled instances of claims by the US and its allies about Russia’s use of chemical weapons, from the allegation that Russia poisoned pro-Western Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko in the mid-2000s, to the 2018 Novichok scandal in Britain, which “many thoughtful journalists have debunked,” to the Alexei Navalny “poisoning” saga of 2020, which doctors treating the opposition vlogger have debunked.

“Yet the accusations of chemical weapons that Russia used have persisted, even though they defied all logic. That’s the biggest issue with these organizations. They must be more neutral. Their headquarters must be in more neutral locations, because the fact that many of these organizations operate from Western capitals makes them more prone to Western media misinformation,” Bruno said.

The geopolitical analyst still fears that the West could use the pretext of ‘Russian chemical weapons use’ in Ukraine “to get more directly involved into the conflict and potentially trigger a much wider physical war.”

“So far, I think, some of the powers came to understand that making an accusation like that in this conflict would be riskier than the accusations they made in Syria and Iraq, Navalny and Yushchenko and so on, that this would have much bigger implications, that this would blow back against the West,” Bruno stressed.

Tool of US Interests

Christopher C. Black, an international criminal and human rights lawyer with 20 years of experience covering war crimes and international relations, echoed Bruno’s sentiments about the OPCW’s noble stated aims and their stark contrast with the body’s actual history, which “shows that [the watchdog] acts to serve the interests of the United States and its NATO and other allies.”

“We saw strong evidence of this when the USA tried to get rid of the Director General Jose Bustani of Brazil in 2002, when the United States was preparing its invasion of Iraq and John Bolton went to The Hague and threatened his family if he did not resign,” Black recalled, pointing to Bustani’s 2018 interview with The Intercept in which the former OPCW chief detailed the threats made against his children living in the United States.

“In August 2020, it was revealed through leaks from Austrian government sources that the OPCW and British claims that Novichok had been found in the blood of the Skripals allegedly poisoned in the UK were false, that in fact no such agent had been found in their blood at all. But the findings were suppressed and a false report issued to back the UK claims,” the lawyer added. “Similar results were seen regarding the alleged poisoning of Mr. Navalny. We can quickly understand what goes on behind the scenes at the OPCW,” Black said.

Black finds it unlikely that the chemical weapons watchdog will change “without a change in the balance of power in the world,” which is taking place, but whose effects on international organizations will be slow to appear.

In Ukraine, the lawyer fears, “We cannot expect any objective consideration of Kiev regime or NATO claims of Russia using chemical weapons in Ukraine for the reasons stated above, despite the fact that Russia has not used them, does not use them and will not use them. To the contrary we have a situation in which Kiev and NATO forces keep making false claims while themselves preparing chemical weapons attacks to be staged as false flag attacks to be blamed on Russia and when Russia asks the OPCW to investigate this, Russia is met with silence,” he said.

How OPCW Can Regain Credibility

Dr. Alfred De Zayas, a lawyer, writer and former independent expert on international order with the United Nations, similarly doubts the OPCW’s ability to reform in its current itteration, saying the agency “has long been instrumentalized to pursue the geopolitical interests of Western powers.”

The international legal expert is confident that agencies like the OPCW, the International Criminal Court and the Human Rights Council can regain their credibility by demonstrating impartiality. “This is possible if the BRICS countries become more vocal and more visible on the international scene. There is no reason why African, Asian and Latin American countries should dance to the tune of the ‘Washington consensus’,” De Zayas stressed.

In Ukraine, the OPCW’s assurance about “monitoring the situation” carries only a “purely propagandistic value,” and is “intended to charge and convict Russia even before there is any evidence of violations of the Chemical Weapons Convention,” the observer believes.

“If the OPCW investigates not only potential Russian war crimes, but also expands its investigation to potential chemical weapons violations and war crimes by Ukrainian forces and by foreign mercenaries, including US, UK, French, Georgian and others, then the OPCW might regain some credibility. That, however, would be ‘out of character’. It is not unlike the ICC, which in the eyes of many observers in the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Switzerland – has lost its little credibility and will have no authority unless and until it indicts Western politicians and bureaucrats including Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, Victoria Nuland, Barack Obama (the king of the drones), Donald Trump, Nikolas Sarkozy, etc.,” De Zayas concluded.

July 6, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Brazilian mercenaries die in Ukraine

By Lucas Leiroz | July 6, 2022

Two Brazilians were killed in Ukraine in the first week of July after a Russian drone operation in Kharkiv. In all, three Brazilian mercenaries have died in Ukraine since the beginning of the Russian special military operation on February 24th. In the South American country, the mainstrem media has a strong pro-Western ideological orientation, which is why it encourages “volunteers” to go to Eastern Europe. In their speech, the media outlets claim that it is “easy” to fight against Russians because Kiev is supposedly “winning” the conflict. However, upon arriving in Ukraine, the foreign mercenaries are faced with a different and much harsher reality.

Between the night of July 1 and the morning of July 2 Brazilian mercenaries Douglas Rodrigues Búrigo and Thalita do Valle died after a Russian attack in Khakiv. Douglas was a former soldier of the Brazilian Army and had been fighting in Ukraine since May. Thalita was a model, lawyer, and professional sniper, who had previously worked as a military volunteer and propaganda agent for the Kurdish women’s battalions in the Middle East. Apparently, she died of asphyxiation while trying to flee her accommodation in the face of a drone attack, while Douglas was reportedly hit by shrapnel from mortar shells on the outside.

In June, another Brazilian had already died in Ukraine. André Hack Bahi was fatally shot during Russian bombing raids in Severodonetsk. Bahi was a former fighter in the French Legion and had already participated in some missions in Africa, but he was not able to survive the intense reality of the fighting in Ukraine. It is also necessary to mention that not all the dead have been properly identified yet, which leads one to believe that there may be more Brazilians among the dead in Ukraine, since there is ample participation of mercenaries from the South American country in the region.

There is still no official report by the authorities indicating the precise number of Brazilian citizens who are fighting for Kiev’s side in the conflict, but the number is certainly greater than what was expected from a neutral country with good relations with Russia. Even Brazilian parliamentarians fought in favor of Kiev, such as former deputy Artur do Val, who had a quick and scandalous performance in Ukraine, where he committed acts of sexual harassment against Ukrainian women. It is also known that over the last eight years several Brazilians have tried to join the Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary troops to fight in Donbass, having been rejected due to the anti-Latin racism of these groups. Now these same militants are finding their way into the Ukrainian positions due to Kiev’s policy of accepting all foreign volunteers.

But it is absolutely impossible to analyze the situation without criticizing the destabilizing role that the Brazilian local media has played in its coverage of the events in Ukraine. Pro-Western media outlets report the conflict fallaciously, pointing to a non-existent “Ukrainian victory” and “ease” in fighting Moscow’s forces, portraying voluntary combat as a kind of “hunting safari” against Russians. Obviously, when the “volunteers” (almost all of them being paid private soldiers linked to mercenary companies) arrive on the battlefield, they are faced with situations very different from those reported by the journalists who encourage volunteering.

Agencies also have tried to publicize an image of “heroism” when talking about Brazilians fighting in Ukraine, ignoring important issues, such as the fact that they are cooperating with neo-Nazi militants and supporting a government that practices genocidal policies against the Russian population. Since the beginning of the Russian operation, Brazilian media agencies and Brazilian branches of foreign agencies have praised the “heroism” of the mercenaries who would be “helping to fight the invasion”, which also serves as propaganda and incentive for volunteering.

Brazilian media is not acting alone, but following the agenda imposed by the great world media agencies, which have increasingly bet on the narrative of “Ukrainian victory” as a way to raise the morale of the troops and justify the irresponsible military aid that the Western countries are sending to Kiev.

Private security companies hired to help Kiev are the ones that profit most from the propagation of this fallacious narrative among the public opinion, as they manage to convince an increasing number of volunteers to go and fight in Ukraine. In fact, some of these volunteers are not designated for direct combat but remain in safe places taking photos and videos to publish on the internet, reproducing propaganda to encourage more men to go – always trying to convince that combats are “easy” and “safe”, so that more people enlist in the mercenary companies. The result is that of the deluded enlisted men only a few are directed to propaganda, while others die on the battlefield.

Obviously, for Western countries and for private companies, investing in this type of propaganda is strategic and profitable, but not for Brazil. As a member of the BRICS, not participating in anti-Russia sanctions and being Moscow’s partner in several areas, the Brazilian government should act more incisively to monitor the destabilizing role that its media agencies are playing, seeking to prevent foreign narratives from taking Brazilians to die on the battlefield. Furthermore, it is not at all beneficial to Brasilia’s international image that the country is known for having a large number of citizens volunteering to fight alongside neo-Nazi battalions.

It is important to remember that mercenaries and “volunteers are not considered prisoners of war, but common criminals, which means that Brazilian citizens can be tried by courts in the liberated parts of Ukraine if they are captured. This type of situation will certainly generate diplomatic discomfort and, as Brazil and Russia are members of the BRICS, this is not a favorable condition for either side.

The best thing for the Brazilian government to do is to ban its citizens from volunteering in wars that do not concern the national interest of Brazil.

Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.

July 6, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

US should pay compensation if Covid-19 claim confirmed – Russia

Samizdat | July 6, 2022

The US may owe the world huge compensation for the damage caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the Russian State Duma, said on Wednesday. He cited remarks made by the chair of The Lancet commission on the disease, who suggested the SARS-CoV-2 virus may have originated from an American research program.

Speaking in Madrid last month, economist Jeffrey Sachs called the current situation “a mess” and blamed diminishing American leadership for it, identifying the pandemic as one of the US failures. He said he was convinced that the virus “came out of US lab biotechnology” as opposed to evolving naturally, citing his experience with the authoritative British medical magazine.

Volodin asserted that the US government would not comment on Sachs’ remarks because President Joe Biden is “afraid that the world will know the truth about the true culprit of the pandemic.”

He added that the suffering of millions of people who contracted the virus, including the many who passed away, and the economic crisis caused by the pandemic were the US’ responsibility. “The US must compensate the damage to all nations affected,” he demanded.

The Russian official added that the US should “stop and declassify” its “military bioweapons research,” referring to the chain of biolabs scattered across the world that receive funding from the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency. The US says they are used to detect emerging pathogens, but some countries, including Russia and China, believe they may be used for clandestine military research.

Sachs himself called his remark “provocative” and lamented that the theory “is not being investigated, not in the United States, not anywhere,” despite evidence that warrants such a probe. “They don’t want to look underneath the rug too much,” he said.

The theory that Covid-19 started as a leak from a Chinese lab in Wuhan was popularized by the US government under President Donald Trump, who stated that Beijing should pay compensation for its supposed guilt. The Chinese government and Trump’s political opponents at home angrily rejected the idea. Major US tech companies even suppressed the lab leak theory as “disinformation” on their online platforms.

The censorship was reversed under President Joe Biden’s administration, which accused Beijing of failing to subject its microbiology research to international scrutiny. The outbreak was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan, which hosts a top biosecurity lab that has extensive records of doing research funded by American grants.

The World Health Organization conducted a probe into the origins of Covid-19 and concluded last February that the virus most likely came from an animal host.

July 6, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Internet Searches for “death after vaccine” Increased After Covid Injection Roll-out

By Ryan Matters | New Brave World | July 3, 2022

Google is the largest and most used search engine in the world with a desktop market share of over 85%!

Data from Google Trends shows a marked increase in people searching for “death after vaccine” immediately after Covid-19 injections were rolled out around the world.

Google Trends provides insights into the popularity of certain search terms within a given timeframe and locality. According to Google:

Google Trends provides access to a largely unfiltered sample of actual search requests made to Google. It’s anonymized (no one is personally identified), categorized (determining the topic for a search query) and aggregated (grouped together). This allows us to display interest in a particular topic from around the globe or down to city-level geography.

The Covid-19 injection roll out began in January 2021 (with trials being run for months before). Data from Google Trends suggests that searches for terms such as “death after vaccine”, “vaccine chest pains”, “vaccine side effects”, “vaccine pain” and “vaccine vomiting” increased at almost the exact same time.

An increase in searches for the term “death after vaccine” could be interpreted as being due to people looking specifically for that kind of data. However, it could also be due to people knowing someone who died shortly after getting injected and looking for more information.

VAERS (the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System) provides further corroboration for this hypothesis. The reporting system has received almost 30,000 reports of death following Covid injections since December 14, 2020. (And it is important to keep in mind that vaccine adverse events are not required to be reported. In fact, they are criminally underreported, and many physicians are uneducated on how to use the platform).

According to a recent article on Children’s Health Defense:

VAERS data released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show 1,314,594 reports of adverse events from all age groups following COVID-19 vaccines, including 29,162 deaths and 241,226 serious injuries between Dec. 14, 2020, and June 24, 2022.

Noteworthy is that “death after vaccine” wasn’t the only term that saw an increase in searches. So did “vaccine chest pains”, “vaccine side effects”, “vaccine pain” and “vaccine vomiting”.

July 5, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

15 years of failed experiments: Myths and facts about the Israeli siege on Gaza

By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | July 5, 2022

Fifteen years have passed since Israel imposed a total siege on the Gaza Strip, subjecting nearly two million Palestinians to one of the longest and most cruel politically-motivated blockades in history. Back then, the Israeli government justified its siege as the only way to protect Israel from Palestinian “terrorism and rocket attacks”. This is the occupation state’s official line to this day, and yet not many Israelis — certainly not in government, the media or even ordinary people — would argue that Israel today is safer than it was prior to June 2007.

It is widely understood that Israel imposed the siege as a response to the Hamas takeover of the Strip, following a brief, violent confrontation between the movement, which is the current de facto government in Gaza, and its main political rival Fatah, which dominates the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank. However, the isolation of Gaza was planned years before the Hamas-Fatah clash, or even the legislative election victory of Hamas in January 2006.

In fact, the late Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was determined to redeploy Israeli forces out of Gaza long before these dates, making the siege possible. Culminating in the Israeli disengagement from Gaza in August-September 2005, the plan was proposed by Sharon in 2003, approved by his government in 2004 and finally adopted by the Knesset in February 2005.

The “disengagement” was an Israeli tactic intended to remove a few thousand illegal Jewish settlers from occupied Gaza — to go to other illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank — while redeploying the Israeli army from crowded population centres in the Gaza Strip to the nominal border areas. This was the actual start of the Gaza siege.

The above assertion was even clear to James Wolfensohn, who was appointed by the Middle East Quartet as the Special Envoy for Gaza Disengagement. In 2010, he reached a similar conclusion: “Gaza had been effectively sealed off from the outside world since the Israeli disengagement… and the humanitarian and economic consequences for the Palestinian population were profound.”

The ultimate motive behind the “disengagement” was not Israel’s security, or even to starve the Palestinians in Gaza as a form of collective punishment. The latter was a natural outcome of a much more sinister political plot, as communicated by Sharon’s own senior advisor at the time, Dov Weisglass. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in October 2004, Weisglass put it plainly: “The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process.” How? “When you freeze [the peace] process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem.”

Not only was this Israel’s ultimate motive behind the disengagement and subsequent siege of Gaza, but also, according to the seasoned Israeli politician, it was all done “with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of [the US] Congress.” The US president at the time was none other than George W. Bush.

All of this took place before Palestine’s legislative election, Hamas’s victory and the Hamas-Fatah clash. The latter merely served as a convenient justification for what had already been discussed, “ratified” by Washington and implemented.

For Israel, the siege was a political ploy which acquired additional meaning and value as time passed. In response to the accusation that Israel was starving Palestinians in Gaza, Weisglass was very quick to reply: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

What was then understood as a facetious, albeit thoughtless statement, turned out to be actual Israeli policy, as revealed in a 2008 report which was made available in 2012. Thanks to the Israeli human rights organization Gisha, the “redlines [for] food consumption in the Gaza Strip” — composed by the Israeli Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories — were made known. It emerged that Israel was calculating the minimum number of calories necessary to keep Gaza’s population alive, a number that is “adjusted to culture and experience” in the Strip.

The rest is history. Gaza’s suffering is absolute, with 98 per cent of the Strip’s water undrinkable; hospitals lacking essential supplies and life-saving medications; and movement in and out of the territory more or less prohibited, with relatively few minor exceptions.

Even so, Israel has failed miserably, with none of its objectives achieved. Tel Aviv hoped that the “disengagement” would compel the international community to redefine the legal status of the Israeli occupation of Gaza. Despite pressure from Washington, that never happened. Gaza remains part of the Occupied Palestinian Territories as defined in international law.

Furthermore, Israel’s September 2007 designation of Gaza as an “enemy entity” and a “hostile territory” changed little, apart from allowing the Israeli government to carry out several devastating wars against the Palestinians in the enclave, starting in late 2008.

None of these wars have served a long-term Israeli strategy successfully. Instead, Gaza continues to fight back on a much larger scale than ever before, frustrating the calculations of Israeli leaders, a fact which became clear in the befuddled, disturbing language to which they resorted. During one of the deadliest Israeli wars on Gaza, in July 2014, right-wing Knesset member Ayelet Shaked wrote on Facebook that the war was “not a war against terror, and not a war against extremists, and not even a war against the Palestinian Authority.” Instead, according to Shaked, who a year later became Israel’s Minister of Justice, this was “a war between two people. Who is the enemy? The Palestinian people.”

In the final analysis, the governments of Sharon, Tzipi Livni, Ehud Olmert, Benjamin Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett all failed to isolate Gaza from the greater Palestinian body; break the will of the Palestinians in the Strip; or ensure Israeli security at the expense of the Palestinians.

Moreover, Israel has fallen victim to its own hubris. While prolonging the siege will achieve no short or long-term strategic value, lifting the siege, from Israel’s viewpoint, would be tantamount to an admission of defeat, and could empower Palestinians in the West Bank to emulate the Gaza model. This lack of certainty further accentuates the political crisis and lack of strategic vision that has defined all Israeli governments for nearly two decades.

Israel’s political experiment in Gaza has backfired, inevitably so. The only way out is for the siege of Gaza to be lifted completely. Not eased; lifted. Completely. And this time, for good.

July 5, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Crime and Punishment

Government officials must be held accountable

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • JULY 5, 2022

Quite likely a majority of Americans would agree that it is wrong for the government or police to torture someone, though some would surely accept the “ticking time bomb” exemption, where a detainee is withholding information that could save many lives. It is in fact illegal to torture someone as well as it being morally wrong. Indeed, it could constitute a crime against humanity or a war crime depending on circumstances. The United States, which has signed the United Nations Convention Against Torture and is bound by it, has thereby accepted legal sanctions to back up the view that torture is never permissible. Under US law, torture committed by “government officials and their collaborators upon a person restrained by the government is a felony punishable by up to 20 years in federal prison, and its fruits are inadmissible in all courts.” Given that background, one is astonished to learn that some in the government have not taken the obligation seriously. To be sure, the US has been quick to react when lower ranking officials, contractors and ordinary soldiers have reportedly been involved in torturing prisoners, as occurred with Abu Ghraib prior to 2004, but the higher one goes up the ladder of power the less do laws apply to even the most egregious misbehavior.

It has long been known that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in the wake of 9/11, resorted to torture in its overseas “black” prisons, but details of what took place and anything that would stand up in court as evidence has been difficult to discern as it has been easy for the Agency to shroud its more nefarious deeds through claims of protecting “states secrets.” But now some more details have emerged. The news that former Donald Trump appointed CIA Director Gina Haspel during her tour overseeing a prison in Thailand in 2002 personally observed at least one terrorist suspect being tortured by waterboarding, which simulates being drowned repeatedly until a confession is obtained. Waterboarding was used by the Japanese on prisoners of war in the Second World War and was subsequently considered to be torture, a war crime.

The new information came from one of the creators of the Agency’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” program, psychologist James E. Mitchell, who was testifying in a May pretrial hearing at Guantanamo Prison relating to the treatment of Saudi al-Qaeda linked terrorist suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who has been accused of being complicit in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 that killed 17 American sailors. Al-Nashiri, who was shipped to Gitmo in 2006 and who has been waiting sixteen years for his trial, could face the death penalty if he is convicted. His defense is seeking to demonstrate that the evidence against him was obtained by torture and should therefore be inadmissible.

Al-Nashiri was subjected to four months of waterboarding as well as to what have been described as “other coercive techniques” during his questioning in Thailand. According to testimony, the hooded interrogators repeatedly slammed al-Nashiri’s head into a wall and forced him naked into a small confinement box. When he briefly went on a hunger strike due to his treatment he was fed rectally. It is not known how frequently Gina Haspel, the senior officer in charge of the base, observed the torture, which she allegedly watched but did not participate in, but she drafted up the classified cables detailing what had occurred and what information had been developed. Oddly, al-Nashiri was freely answering the questions from the interrogators, who recommended that the extreme measures be stopped, but CIA Headquarters insisted that the torture continue in the belief that nothing is “true” until it is verified under torture. Rather than resigning to demonstrate her disagreement, Haspel allowed the process to continue, which is why in part some of her former Agency colleagues regularly refer to her as “Bloody Gina.”

Videotapes were made of the torture but they were subsequently destroyed. Haspel participated in the November 2005 destruction of hundreds of hours of recordings contained on 92 tapes showing at least two interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and al-Nashiri. She did so while serving as chief of staff to the Director of the National Collection Service Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. At her Senate confirmation hearing as Director in 2018, she said “I would also make clear that I did not appear on the tapes.” Rodriguez, who made the decision to destroy the tapes, also reportedly determined how to handle a suspected terrorist detainee Gul Rahman. Rahman was chained, nearly naked, to a concrete floor for an extended time and then froze to death. There was an internal CIA investigation but no officer on-site nor at the Agency headquarters was punished – let alone prosecuted. In fact, Rodriguez, who was in charge of the detention site, received a $2,500 bonus for his “consistently superior work.”

The Agency currently regards the existence of the black prisons and the procedures used to elicit information as a “state secret” even though the existence of the sites is widely known and has been reported on extensively. After serving as Director of Central Intelligence Haspel retired from CIA in January 2021. She currently works for a major Washington law firm King & Spalding L.L.P., a typical transition for senior officials who are able to exploit the revolving door between government and the private sector. She reportedly is part of the firm’s Government Matters practice where she “advise[s] clients on cybersecurity and information technology, among other issues.”

Every instance of torture by the federal government or its agents is by law a separate felony. Beyond that, what went on in the Agency’s black overseas prisons is shocking even in a Washington where no crime is too low to be contemplated by the governments we have unfortunately placed into power. Some might object that Gina’s actions amounted to oversight of a dreadful necessity, but there is something particularly loathsome about a powerful Administration intelligence officer finding time to watch the horrors performed on a suspect who undoubtedly was not afforded any due process before he arrived in his cell to be experimented on by a team of modern-day Torquemadas.

The unfortunate fact is the Gina Haspel is not alone. She committed what are undeniably felonies and now enjoys a well-paid sinecure with a law firm that deals extensively with the government. One might recall similar trajectories relating to the former CIA Director George Tenet who lied America into a war with Iraq that is regarded as the greatest foreign policy failure since the Second World War. He was rewarded with a professorship at Georgetown. And then there is his partner in crime Paul Wolfowitz, he of the fabricated intelligence, who was named head of the World Bank only to subsequently step down after an unacceptable sexual relationship with a subordinate whom he rewarded with promotions was exposed. He is now a Senior Fellow at the neocon affiliated American Enterprise Institute think tank. George and Paul just might consider how the Nuremberg Trials regarded starting a war of aggression as “the ultimate war crime.” And they might suggest a bit of retrospection from their friends George Bush, Doug Feith, Scooter Libby, and Condi Rice, all of whom have been complicit in the same infamy. And then there is Donald Trump’s assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani based on a lie that he was seeking to kill Americans. They are all doing quite well, thank you, either still active or ensconced in highly respected retirement positions, shielded by their wealth and power.

As long as there is no accountability in Washington the farce of government “of the people, and for the people” will continue. That a government can use the “secrets privilege” to conceal and avoid any consequences when killing people without any due process is despicable. If you use government resources to murder someone, you should be tried and go to prison. If you start a war through deliberate lying, you should stay in prison forever. Those who make the decisions to commit crimes are wired into the system and are in a sense bullet-proof, while the public has been completely brainwashed and the beat goes on. Another recent story tells how the CIA was apparently planning to kill currently imprisoned journalist Julian Assange in London. It reportedly included scenarios for a possible shoot-out in the heart of the city, the ramming of Russian diplomatic vehicles and the disabling of any airplane that might be involved in an escape attempt. Who came up with that one? It dates back to 2010, when the noted constitutional lawyer Barack Obama was president. Didn’t he or his advisers know that murder is against the law?

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

July 5, 2022 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Russia says Ukraine ‘tortured’ captured soldiers

Press TV – July 5, 2022

Russia says its soldiers recently released as part of a prisoner swap with Ukraine were “beaten” and “tortured with electricity in captivity.”

The Russian Investigative Committee, which probes major crimes, said in a statement on Tuesday that it was “verifying facts of inhuman treatment of Russia soldier prisoners in Ukraine.”

Moscow and Kiev exchanged 144 prisoners of war each last week.

The investigative committee said the freed Russian soldiers had told investigators about “the violence they had suffered.”

One of the soldiers, according to the Russian statement, said Ukrainian medics had treated him without applying anesthetics and that he was “beaten, tortured with electricity in captivity.” He said he was left without food and water for days.

Another Russian soldier said he was badly beaten and had his wound irritated by Ukrainian medics.

The Russian committee said the testimonies of the freed soldiers were examples of “violations of the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war.”

July 5, 2022 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

ICC: International Federation of Journalists to be lawsuit partner against Israel

MEMO | July 4, 2022

The International Federation of Journalists will be a partner in a lawsuit against Israel at the International Criminal Court (ICC) following the murder of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by an Israeli sniper, Wafa news agency has reported.

“Palestinian journalists are fighters who face on a daily basis the aggression of the occupation in all fields as well as the main project of the occupation to expel the Palestinians from their land,” Ali Youssef, a member of the federation’s executive board, told Wafa. He added that the IFJ has succeeded in exposing Israel’s acts of aggression against media professionals and the Palestinian people.

Palestinians argue that the Israeli military deliberately targeted and killed Abu Akleh. Israel denies this, claiming that she may have been hit by errant army fire or by a bullet from one of the Palestinian gunmen who were clashing with its forces at the scene. According to eyewitnesses, however, there was no such clash at the time that the journalist was killed.

The ICC recognised in a February 2021 ruling that it has jurisdiction over the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This has paved the way for cases to be brought against Israel over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Last month, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Al-Maliki handed the ICC prosecutor the official outcome of the Palestinian investigation into the murder of Abu Akleh. He noted that it constitutes a turning point in the crimes committed by Israel against the Palestinian people.

During the meeting with ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan, Maliki demanded that the criminals responsible for targeting civilians, children, women, journalists, doctors and other protected groups be brought to international justice.

Moreover, a video message by Nasser Abu Bakr, President of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, urged Prosecutor Khan to hold Israel to account. “Fifty Palestinian journalists have been killed since 2000 alone,” he explained. “Seven thousand crimes against Palestinian journalists have been documented.”

A detailed account of Abu Akleh’s killing was given by her colleague, Walid Al-Omari. “Why would they target Shireen?” asked Al Jazeera’s Jerusalem Bureau Chief. He suggested that Israel was seeking to inflict a direct and powerful blow against the network. By killing Abu Akleh, he suggested, the colonial-occupation state hoped to silence one of the most powerful voices in the Arab world.

Al Jazeera described Abu Akleh’s killing as a “blatant murder” that violates “international laws and norms”. In its statement following her murder, the network pointed out that according to Article 8 of the ICC Charter, “Targeting war correspondents, or journalists working in war zones or occupied territories by killing or physically assaulting them, is a war crime.”

July 4, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Israel accused of withholding dead Palestinians in university labs

MEMO | July 4, 2022 

Palestinian Prime Minister, Mohammad Shtayyeh, has accused Israel of withholding the bodies of dead Palestinians in Israeli university labs, Anadolu News Agency reports.

Speaking at a Cabinet meeting on Monday, Shtayyeh termed the Israeli action as “a grave violation of human rights and ethics of science.”

He urged educational institutions worldwide to boycott the Israeli universities involved in withholding Palestinian corpses and called for piling pressure on the Israeli government to release the bodies of dead Palestinians.

According to a local Palestinian committee on the retrieval of dead Palestinians, Israel withholds 104 Palestinian corpses since 2015, in addition to 256 others buried in special graves known as numbered graves.

July 4, 2022 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Warning: many people will die because of these COVID injections, many healthy children WILL die due to these shots…

“FDA, CDC, NIH, Moderna, & Pfizer secretly told me this”

By Dr. Paul Alexander | June 30, 2022

They said, follow the $CIENCE. Fauci said he is the $CIENCE.

I have been trying to warn. I have written on this here in stack. I try again.

Everything you have been told by government, by CDC, by NIH, by Fauci, by Birx, by Bourla, by Pfizer, by all your government officials, were lies, distortions, exaggerations, meant to mislead you. All pure lies on everything about lockdowns and these failed COVID gene injections. All, every single part was a lie. A deception. This entire COVID pandemic, was a lie! Yes, we had an emergency, but everything done to us the last over 2 years was a fraud hoax, a lie. Every single COVID policy failed. Canada, US, UK, everywhere.

The entire lockdown lunacy failed! All school closures failed, just killed children. Everything was a lie! They knew it would never work but knew one thing, that you as people, as the population, crazily thought, that they as health officials and medical doctors, wanted to do good by them and they could ‘trust’ you. You would do them no harm.

Little did they know. Little did we know the corruptible malfeasants we were dealing with. I include many medical doctors in this.

Trump was right when he early on said it was hoax. He did not mean the virus was a fraud or hoax. He meant the repose. The response was, and he saw what the deepstate and media, and CDC and NIH and Fauci and Birx were doing to him. But he could not stop them. He could, he could have, but he was weak. He then did the unthinkable. He allowed Fauci and Birx to lead a crazy lockdown lunatic policy that harmed and killed thousands of Americans. None of it worked! Not one!

You will come to learn, that 2.5 years of your life was taken away, for a lie! A greed, power drunk lie! By sick malfeasant people. Their motives. That must all be investigated and if it is shown they did this deliberately and caused deaths, we jail them all! Yes, 2.5 years lost to these malfeasants. The COVID injection is a failed ineffective dangerous injection.

I am no anti-vaxxer, but I am against these injections.

I was told by these officials (FDA, CDC, NIH, Moderna, & Pfizer), in confidential secret discussions, that in about 6 to 6.5 years from roll-out, in those who take the injections, they feared mass auto-immune disease and deaths, they feared viral immune escape and very problematic variants, and they anticipated constant deaths from the injections but a major number of deaths to emerge. I could not even understand exactly what they did for it was so haphazard, but these were officials. And they wanted to talk to me. To tell me ‘their truths’.

They said based on all they knew, that the COVID injections could never work, especially the mRNA platform. It never worked in the animal model and was pathological. They told me that in about 6 to 6.5 years, there will be a surge in deaths in persons who take the injections (then about 1 year ago). This was their projection. They advised me they nor their families will never (especially their children) take any of the COVID injections.

The key is the injection works for some people and I argue we do not know how long and what the effects are and this is what I was told. But you understand that too. You cannot take a 15 year process and boil it down to a few months and declare it is safe. They were never safety tested to exclude harms and deaths longer term. We do not know exactly what is coming. But it certainly does not work for a whole bunch of people. Look around, you know people who have been harmed by these injections and died. Do you not? Something is very wrong with these injections. Very wrong and they just will not stop.

I am being open with you to inform you. I am sick and tired, years now, of the lies and fraud and disaster put out by the media, the alphabet health agencies etc. You trusted your public health officials, you think ‘they care about you’, well, they never cared about you, your family, or the truth. It is to them about the $CIENCE.

I think I shared prior that my office was on the 6th floor of the HHS building in DC, Operation warp speed and Moderna were stationed on the 7th floor. FDA, CDC etc. have sub-satellite offices at HHS. At least when I was there and Hahn, Redfield etc. came there daily after congress or White House to see their staff, various persons, persons in various offices.

These people I talked with, came to me out of anger and fear too, they knew who I was and wanted to tell me their stories and how worried they were for the population, and fearful for their lives and own careers as to the COVID injections (and other issues). If they spoke out openly so had to talk secretly.

They were very very dismayed and angered and worried as to why the agencies they worked for e.g. FDA and NIH and CDC etc. and the pharmaceuticals were not properly regulating and conducting the proper safety studies, proper durations of follow-up. They felt the COVID injection program was a pure disaster and should be stopped back then. This is 6 months or so before roll-out. They felt no healthy children should ever be given the very injections they were working on. They were that concerned.

I want to be clear again, based on all I know today, based on what I was told, many many children will die due to these injections. Healthy children will die, not ‘if’, but ‘will die. Healthy children, healthy people, normal people never needed and do not need these injections. I have told you before that (strong research and scholarship by Geert) we will be in a pandemic for 100 years if we continue these injections. It is the COVID injection itself that is driving the variants and these CDC, NIH, Moderna, and Pfizer officials are malfeasants IMO who are continuing this. There is no sound justification. These malfeasants know that they are vaccinating with the Wuhan strain (legacy strain) that has been gone many months now and omicron dominates. The vaccinal antibodies are to the original Wuhan strain and will not hit the omicron spike antigen (original antigenic sin (OAS)).

It is the COVID injection (and consequent non-neutralizing antibodies pressuring the spike antigen) that is causing the vaccinated to become infected, hospitalized, and die. The data is clear. Massive antibody-dependent enhancement, some refer to this as antibody mediated viral enhancement. Some pathogenic priming. All IMO the very same. The recall antibodies are to something that does not exist today. The key is to reduce viral pressure, infectious pressure on the population, so that the sub-optimal injections have less virus to put under pressure. We have effective chemoprophylaxis, we can do this. We have early treatment. This can worked effectively and this can thus help reduce viral transmission. At the same time, the best step is to stop these filed injections.

I want all of these people investigated in proper public and legal inquiries, and if it is shown they did wrong, in proper inquiries, I want them arrested. I want all who made policy decisions that costed lives, to be jailed! All their monies taken!

Dr. Rogers looked at the FDA June 28th meeting and his takeaway is bang on and what we have been saying here for near a year now here:

‘‘Yesterday, the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee approved a bivalent Covid-19 shot with the Wuhan strain and the Omicron variant.

The vote was:

19 yes.
2 no.

A few thoughts:

The Wuhan strain is no longer in circulation. So they are vaccinating against a strain that no longer exists.

The Omicron variant that they are going to put into this shot is Omicron BA.4/BA.5:

1. By the time it gets to market in the fall, Omicron BA.4/BA.5 will likely no longer be in circulation.

2. There is no efficacy data whatsoever on vaccines against Omicron BA.4/5.

3. There is no safety data whatsoever on vaccines against Omicron BA.4/5.

4. They do not intend to gather any efficacy or safety data between now and when these shots will be released in the fall:

At the meeting, the manufacturers (Moderna, Pfizer, and Novavax) were asked what their production timelines are… and they said out loud, “So long as we don’t have to provide any clinical data, we’ll have them ready by fall.”

Dr. Rogers is a smart guy.

His work:

Source

July 4, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Ukraine fires ballistic missiles at Russian city – MoD

Samizdat | July 3, 2022

Ukraine launched three Tochka-U ballistic missiles loaded with cluster munitions at the Russian city of Belgorod, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday. It added that all three had been intercepted mid-air, but that parts of one of the missiles had hit a house.

Regional Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said that three people were killed and four injured overnight. He added that 11 apartment buildings and at least 39 smaller houses were damaged.

Gladkov later said that the death toll had grown to four. Three of the victims are Ukrainian nationals and one is a Russian citizen, he added.

Russian news outlet Baza later reported that two more bodies were recovered from under the rubble, raising the death toll to five. This has not yet been confirmed by officials.

Belgorod is located around 40 kilometers from the Russia-Ukraine border.

Defense Ministry spokesman Lieutenant General Igor Konashenkov said that Ukraine had also sent two Tu-143 Reys drones, “loaded with explosives,” towards Kursk, another Russian city close to the border. He said both drones were destroyed by air defenses before reaching the city.

Konashenkov said that Ukraine targeted residential areas, which had “no military sites.”

The Russian authorities have repeatedly accused Ukraine of shelling cities and villages close to the border. Moscow previously warned that it would hit Ukrainian “decision-making centers, including Kiev” if attacks on Russian territory did not stop.

Kiev accused Russian troops of attacking residential areas and killing civilians throughout Ukraine. Moscow insists its forces are only striking military targets.

July 3, 2022 Posted by | War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Covid shots for little kids are DOA

The fawning media coverage notwithstanding, uptake has been pitifully low

By Alex Berenson | Unreported Truths | July 2, 2022

Despite a massive media and government pressure campaign, American parents are overwhelmingly rejecting Covid vaccines for their young children.

About one week after the shots became available, barely 1 percent of children under 5 have received mRNA jabs for Covid, data from several states show.

Ohio:

Even in California, among the bluest states, only about 2 percent of kids under 5 have been jabbed.

Demand is likely to be near zero going forward. The recent history of Covid shots shows that the increasingly tiny minority of mRNA fanatics get themselves or their children jabbed or boosted quickly after regulators okay new doses. So pent-up desire for new shots is likely nonexistent.

As usual, elite media outlets have largely refused to acknowledge this reality, instead running endless articles that seek to normalize and encourage the shots.

(CNN gonna CNN:)

But at this point many parents have seen and experienced the side effects of the vaccines for themselves. They also know firsthand that the shots do little if anything to stop Omicron infections (though they may not be aware how terrible the data truly are). And they know that Covid is a minuscule risk for children who are not already seriously ill, and that most kids have already been exposed.

(All the Sesame Street ads in the world can’t change reality. Congrats, Elmo. You’re in the 1 percent. Cute Band-Aid, though.)

But as it becomes clear just how few little kids have gotten the shots, any future media and public health pressure campaigns will look embarrassingly out-of-touch.

Someone may want to tell the Biden Administration: the less said about the pathetic decision to make these shots available for kids under 5, the better.

Oh, wait, too late.

Uncle Joe wins again!

July 2, 2022 Posted by | War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment