The Ukraine crisis was largely triggered by NATO’s aggressive eastward expansion. The bloc is the culprit. Instead of reflecting on itself, NATO piles pressure on other countries to stand with it against Russia. This is unreasonable and quite sinister.
“China should join the rest of the world in condemning strongly the brutal invasion of Ukraine by Russia,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Tuesday, “The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a blatant violation of international law so we call on [China] to clearly condemn the invasion and of course not support Russia. And we are closely monitoring any signs of support from China to Russia.”
NATO is a puppet of the US, a Cold War military bloc manipulated by the US. The obsolete military organization has launched many ruthless military aggressions and triggered corresponding disasters in which local people underwent great suffering. NATO’s aerial bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999 during the Kosovo War is one example.
NATO’s hands are stained with blood and the bloc itself has been a major threat to global and local security. Is NATO qualified to criticize other countries? This organization should have been dismantled long ago.
“NATO is the most serious war machine that violates international law and endangers the sovereignty and territorial integrity of other countries since the end of the Cold War. Since when has the group become a defender of international law? If it is a defender of international law, could you please first apologize for their bombing of Yugoslavia? Could you first compensate for bombing the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia in 1999, which left three journalists dead, and more than 20 people injured? Stoltenberg is not qualified and has no right or moral basis to make such remarks,” Shen Yi, a professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs of Fudan University, told the Global Times.
The West has fallen into extreme insanity, and this is quite sick. This is also a symptom of the growing abnormality of the international community under the coercion of the US and its allies. Stoltenberg’s rhetoric sounds like he attempted to label China as Russia’s “accomplice.” In terms of tensions between Russia and Ukraine, there is no absolute right and wrong, as the geopolitics, history and culture between them are too complicated. Their tensions are a difficult problem to solve. In this context, portraying their military conflict as good versus evil is not rational and detrimental to address it.
The Chinese ambassador to US Qin Gang said in an opinion piece in The Washington Post that rumors like “Russia was seeking military assistance from China” are “purely disinformation.” All this is information war initiated by the US. NATO is trying to use this kind of information war to intimidate China, and to coordinate Washington, in an attempt to occupy the moral high ground over the Ukraine crisis.
“By making such statements, NATO is trying to distort the focus of the international community from criticizing its eastward expansion to China’s so-called coordination with Russia,” Zhang Tengjun, Deputy Director of the Department for Asia-Pacific Studies at the China Institute of International Studies, said. “NATO is deliberately circumventing its role and responsibility. It is trying to shift the blame and confuse the public. This is very sinister.”
March 17, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | China, NATO |
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The US flag at the US Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba on August 7, 2013 © AFP / Chantal Valery
The US Central Intelligence Agency used a detainee in Afghanistan as a ‘prop’ to teach interrogators how to torture prisoners, leaving the man with brain damage, newly declassified documents have revealed.
According to the 2008 report by the CIA’s inspector general, published by The Guardian, 44-year-old Ammar al-Baluchi was used to teach interrogators how to perform a torture technique called ‘walling’. As explained by the CIA, walling is where an interrogator “pulls the detainee towards him and then quickly slams the detainee against [a] false wall.”
The document states that Baluchi was subjected to walling for up to two hours at a time, and a former trainee claimed that “all the interrogation students lined up to ‘wall’ Ammar” so their instructor “could certify them on their ability to use the technique.”
“In the case of ‘walling’ in particular the [Office of the Inspector General] had difficulty determining whether the session was designed to elicit information from Ammar or to ensure that all interrogator trainees received their certification,” the declassified report said, noting that it appeared “certification was key” during the torture sessions.
Baluchi – who was captured by the CIA in 2003 before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay in 2006 – reportedly suffered from brain damage as a result of his detainment by the US intelligence agency.
The Kuwaiti-born man was detained for allegedly having a role in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and serving as a courier for Osama Bin Laden.
Baluchi remains in US custody at Guantanamo Bay, despite calls from the United Nations and human rights activists for his release.
A Saudi Arabian man was released from Guantanamo Bay to receive mental health treatment this month after nearly 20 years in custody. Mohammad Mani Ahmad al-Qahtani, 46, was freed after US officials deemed his imprisonment “no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the national security of the United States.”
Qahtani was reportedly diagnosed with schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder after he was subjected to beatings, sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation, and other forms of torture at Guantanamo Bay.
There are 38 detainees left in the military prison.
March 15, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Afghanistan, CIA, Guantanamo, Human rights, United States |
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At least 10 million people worldwide have died from pandemic, but not COVID infection
The subject of excess deaths during the pandemic, meaning deaths more than prior years, has received much attention. Now comes an analysis by medical establishment researchers, funded by Bill Gates and published in the premier establishment medical journal – The Lancet. An establishment publication commented positively on the article.
Before explaining what was intentionally omitted, here are the key findings.
The study covered the initial two years of the COVID pandemic, 2020 and 2021. It estimated excess mortality from the COVID-19 pandemic in 191 countries and territories, and 252 subnational units for selected countries. Global deaths directly attributed to COVID-19 reached 5.9 million, yet estimates put excess deaths during this period at a staggering 18.2 million. In other words, about 12 million people probably died from causes other than COVID infection. Something that the public health establishment should be held accountable for.
At the country level, the highest numbers of cumulative excess deaths due to the pandemic were estimated in India 4·07 million, the USA 1·13 million, Russia 1·07 million, Mexico 798 000, Brazil 792 000, Indonesia 736 000, and Pakistan 664 000. Note that the figure for the USA was about 300,000 greater than the CDC official number of deaths related to COVID infection through 2021.
Among countries, the excess mortality rate was highest in Russia 374·6 deaths per 100 000 and Mexico 325·1 per 100 000, and was similar in Brazil 186·9 per 100 000 and the USA 179·3 per 100 000. The highest estimated excess mortality rate from COVID infection was in Bolivia at 734.9 deaths per 100,000, followed by Bulgaria, Eswatini, North Macedonia, and Lesotho. Iceland had the lowest excess mortality rate 47.8 per 100,000. Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, and Taiwan had negative excess mortality rates, meaning fewer people died than in pre-pandemic years.
The study noted: “Our estimates of COVID-19 excess mortality suggest the mortality impact from the COVID-19 pandemic has been more devastating than the situation documented by official statistics. Official statistics on reported COVID-19 deaths provide only a partial picture of the true burden of mortality.” In other words, something other than the virus is to blame for millions of deaths.
An interesting finding was that studies from several countries including Sweden, Belgium and the Netherlands, suggest COVID-19 infection was the direct cause of most excess deaths, most likely because these nations maintained a more open society than other countries.
The study did recognize that there was likely underreporting in some places of direct deaths due to COVID infection.
The key goal in excess death studies is explaining deaths not resulting from COVID infection, and this usually means collateral or indirect deaths from how the pandemic was managed or, more correctly, mismanaged. So many people died from the many impacts of economic lockdowns, inability to get regular medical care, suicides and illegal drug use, for example.
Most interesting in this very detailed study was absolutely no consideration of deaths associated with COVID vaccines. Data from the US, UK and European Union indicate at least several hundred thousand deaths. Many more in other global locations could easily bring the total to several million, especially recognizing that millions of adverse health impacts from vaccines likely will keep explaining deaths for quite some time.
But the study had a very positive view of the benefits of COVID vaccines: “the development and deployment of SARS-COV-2 vaccines have considerably lowered mortality rates among people who contract the virus and among the general population. As a result, we expect trends in excess mortality due to COVID-19 to change over time as the coverage of vaccination increases among populations and as new variants emerge.” This, obviously, is an establishment view of the COVID vaccines despite a large medical literature with an opposite view.
Also interesting was the detailed analysis for states in India that totally ignored what is now widely known. Namely, that a number of states, especially Uttar Pradesh, used ivermectin to successfully wipe out the pandemic.
Death numbers in a number of other nations were also surely reduced by wide use of ivermectin. But this study had no interest in examining this.
US excess deaths
There are reasons to think that the excess death data for the US was an undercount. Various insurance industry officials have spoken about very high death rates not due to COVID infection in working age people. CDC data shows the Millennial generation suffered a “Vietnam War event,” with more than 61,000 excess deaths in that age group in the second half of 2021, according to an analysis by Edward Dowd a former Wall Street executive who made a career of crunching numbers to make big-dollar investment decisions. The Millennials, about ages 25 to 40, experienced an 84% increase in excess mortality in the fall, he said, describing it as the “worst-ever excess mortality, I think, in history.”
Along this same line is this: According to the CEO of OneAmerica, a national life insurance corporation headquartered in Indiana, deaths are up 40% in the third quarter of 2021. These deaths are primarily non-COVID deaths among workers aged 18 through 64. “We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” the company’s CEO Scott Davison said. The data is consistent across every player in that business. What the data is showing to us is that the deaths that are being reported as COVID deaths greatly understate the actual death losses among working-age people from the pandemic. It may not all be COVID on their death certificate, but deaths are up just huge, huge numbers.”
Conclusions
The massive number of all pandemic deaths shows how totally ineffective all actions by governments and public health groups, as well as the medical establishment, have been. It has all been one gigantic pandemic blunder.
Even if there was some undercounting of COVID infection deaths, there probably was at least 10 million pandemic deaths in the two years covered in this study that can and should be blamed on a number of ineffective and unnecessary public health actions. Where is the accountability for these non-infection deaths?
Considering the enormous number of COVID vaccine shots given globally there also should be no praise for them saving lives. In some countries like the US with high rates of vaccination there were still high COVID deaths. What must always be emphasized is that the use of ivermectin and various non-vaccine protocols could have prevented nearly all COVID infection deaths.
March 15, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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Documentary evidence of Washington’s aggressive plans for developing and manufacturing biological weapons in secret US biological laboratories in Ukraine, banned by international conventions, has been uncovered during the Russian special operation to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine, and it is frankly horrifying! Although suspicions of such US activities have already been repeatedly published by many media outlets and their verification and official confirmation of such criminal anti-human plans by Washington was one of the goals of Moscow’s special operation to demilitarize Ukraine.
In this regard, the former weak position in bringing clarity to the exposure and suppression of such forthcoming US crimes is highly surprising. First of all, the international community and international institutions should have long ago initiated an independent inspection of some 400 such secret Pentagon biological laboratories scattered around the world, whose location in specific countries is clearly linked to the theatres of future US military action against “adversaries.”
The unconditional involvement of Britain, which has long collaborated with the US in the development of chemical and biological weapons, has also surprisingly been ignored in relation to such criminal plans.
Thus, the US Federal Contractor Registry shows that the Pentagon has spent more than $70 billion in recent years alone on experiments with deadly viruses and nerve agents at the Porton Down military biological laboratory, which is located near Salisbury in Great Britain. The US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), led by the US Department of Defense, has funded a number of defense projects at this so-called “Defense Science and Technology Laboratory” (DSTL) at Porton Down. These include experimental infection of primates with anthrax, Ebola, Marburg, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, western and eastern equine encephalitis viruses, and poisoning of animals with mustard gas and phosgene. It is well known that experiments with LSD have been “incapacitating” British troops during exercises. The testing of chemicals on humans, however, was not out of the ordinary for Porton Down. According to El Pais, in 1963 Porton Down staff decided to test the vulnerability of public infrastructure to chemical and biological attacks by spreading a bacterium on the London Underground, which was initially thought to be harmless but turned out to be quite capable of causing septicemia.
The DTRA has full access to all scientific and technical developments at the Porton Down “laboratory.” Such experiments involving animals are considered secret in Great Britain and it is a criminal offence under Chapter 24 of the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act to reveal information about such experiments.
According to information received by the media, military experiments with chemical and biological weapons have increased at Porton Down in recent years. Thus, between 2005 and 2016, 122,000 animals were infected with deadly viruses or poisoned with chemicals. The “laboratory” uses mice, guinea pigs, rats, piglets, ferrets, sheep and monkeys in its research.
It is also known that British military “scientists” received funding from the DTRA to develop a chemical testing system from 2012 to 2017, with experiments on the effects of VX and VM poisoning agents being conducted at Porton Down in 2015.
In 2013, scientists from Porton Down sprayed gas on the London Underground, which the British government tried to keep quiet about and not tell its citizens. At the time, thousands of persons were gassed without their knowledge, and no one asked for their consent to take part in such barbaric “research” against their own people. Nevertheless, data about this is recorded in a British Home Office document, telling also about other programs conducted jointly by the United States and Britain.
Information about the UK’s Defense Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) testing of the chemical poison VX on guinea pigs was posted on the US National Center for Biotechnology Information website on August 9, 2018. And on September 1, 2018, a report emerged on behalf of 10 more researchers at the DSTL about testing Bioscavenger, which is an effective delayed therapeutic intervention for VX chemical weapons poisoning. The DSTL itself officially admitted in mid-2016 that they were producing the poisonous substance and testing it on animals. The DTRA is a major foreign client of the UK’s DSTL. Between 2012 and 2017, British military scientists received $39.7 million for the Pentagon’s chemical system testing program, and judging by the US Federal Procurement System, the DSTL and DTRA collaboration continues.
The Porton Down secret laboratory has repeatedly been at the center of scandals involving human experimentation. Up to 20,000 people participated in litigation with the DSTL from 1949 to 1989. And in 2008, the UK Ministry of Defense paid 360 veterans £3 million without admitting responsibility.
According to The Guardian, in the late 2000s, the US and Britain experimented with biological weapons in Afghanistan, using a specially bred fungus called fusarium oxysporum and pleospora papaveracae to kill poppy crops. In 2000, the international NGO Sunshine Project published a report on the danger of this fungus infecting and killing not only coca, poppy and cannabis, but also other plants in environmentally sensitive areas of Asia and the New World. An indication of the dangers of such fungi is the fact that their use is banned in the US. According to the Sunshine Project report, genetically modified strains of the fungus have been bred in the US, which means that the deliverables can be classified as biological weapon.
Given this information alone, the extent of Britain’s involvement in the possible development with the US of biological weapons already needs to be investigated in detail.
March 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | UK |
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Washington should prove that the global network of biolabs funded by the Pentagon does not conduct nefarious research by subjecting the facilities to international scrutiny, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said during a daily briefing on Monday.
“If the US wants to prove their activity is benign, why not open those biolabs to independent examination by international experts?” he asked.
There are dozens of biolabs funded by the US through the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) scattered throughout the globe. The US insists they act as early warning outposts collecting data on potentially dangerous infections in various parts of the world.
Skeptical nations, including China and Russia, believe the labs may also serve darker purposes by conducting bioweapon studies on behalf of the US. The work is allegedly conducted on foreign soil for extra secrecy, and to circumvent Washington’s international commitments to refrain from this type of military research, critics claim.
The network was brought back into the spotlight this month amid Russia’s military attack against Ukraine. Moscow released documents allegedly proving that Washington ordered labs in Ukraine to destroy samples of highly dangerous pathogens and other materials. US officials offered an array of explanations in response.
US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland confirmed under oath that Washington gave instructions to Kiev to destroy lab materials, saying her government was concerned that the research could fall into Russia’s hands.
State Department spokesperson Ned Price rejected Russia’s suspicions that the US and Ukraine were violating the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), which bans bioweapons. He accused Russia of breaking the treaty itself by running active germ warfare research, without offering any evidence.
US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield told a UN Security Council meeting called by Russia on Friday that the US does not support bioweapons programs in Ukraine or anywhere else in the world.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki claimed on Wednesday that Russia may be preparing a “false flag” biological or chemical weapons attack in Ukraine to further escalate the armed conflict.
Zhao Lijian said that statements from US officials about biolabs have been “contradictory and confusing,” and the lack of clarity causes concern for Beijing. The US infamously opposed attempts in the 1990s to establish an international mechanism to verify compliance of individual nations with the BWC, he noted.
Meanwhile, the US has “for decades” been “pointing fingers at every turn, accusing other nations of failing to comply with their obligations [on non-development of weapons of mass destruction], demanding they accept verification missions and even imposing sanctions on them,” the Foreign Ministry spokesman said.
He added that Washington has double standards regarding international inspections when it denies transparency for its own research. He said the US should come clean about what the hundreds of millions of dollars – which it reportedly poured into Ukrainian biolabs – was spent on.
March 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | China, Ukraine, United States |
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This is normalized, monetized, and usually publicly-funded
Let’s talk about the big picture of Pharma’s war against humanity. It is happening throughout the developed world but for the purposes of this article I will focus on data from the U.S.
🚩 FDA-approved drugs, when used as directed, kill about 100,000 Americans every year. (Gøtzsche, 2013, p. 259).
🚩 Hospital errors kill another 100,000 to 150,000 Americans every year. (Makary & Daniel, 2016).
🚩 Opioid overdoses killed 75,693 Americans last year (CDC, 2021).
🚩 Coronavirus shots killed an estimated 150,000 Americans in 2021 (Kirsch, Rose, and Crawford, 2021).
🚩 A gain-of-function virus created in a bioweapons lab in Wuhan, China funded by Tony Fauci killed 350,831 Americans in 2020 and another 615,387 Americans since the introduction of Covid-19 shots in Dec. 2020. About 90% of those fatalities could have been prevented with early treatment. But the regulatory agencies and the medical establishment blocked access to early treatment in order to create the market for deadly Covid-19 shots.
To put this in perspective — in World War II, the Nazis, the Royal Italian Army, and the Imperial Japanese Army killed 405,399 Americans in the space of four years.
In the last two years, Pharma, the corrupt medical establishment, and the captured regulatory agencies are killing about twice that many Americans each year.
That’s what we are up against.
So the problem is not a few bad actors (although there are plenty of those). The problem is that the entire system is rotten:
🚩 The pharmaceutical industry makes terrible products. Political capture is more profitable than innovation, so that’s what they do. The captured regulatory agencies — FDA, CDC, NIAID, NIH — engage in data laundering to make pharmaceutical products appear better than they are. Iatrogenic fatalities are just the tip of the iceberg. Pharmaceutical products also cause cancer, disability, and chronic illness.
🚩 Profit-driven hospitals with their military hierarchy and cult-like work practices are dangerous places.
🚩 The pharmaceutical industry is committing genocide via opioids in economically depressed towns throughout the rust-belt and Appalachia — because it is profitable to do so and because they see poor people as undesirable and expendable.
🚩 The pharmaceutical industry has engaged in genocide via the childhood vaccination schedule since they received liability protection in 1986 — because creating chronic illness in kids is their core business model.
🚩 Under the guise of Covid, the pharmaceutical industry has expanded the genocide to all Americans and people throughout the developed world — by blocking access to effective treatments and injecting people with dangerous genetically modified substances.
🚩 All of bourgeois society — academia, the media, the medical and scientific establishment, government, and Wall Street — conspire to cover up these crimes that now impact nearly every American family in some way.
When we take power we must dismantle this system, prosecute those who created it, and build a decentralized alternative based on actual health.
March 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CDC, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA, NIAID, NIH, United States |
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I have avoided writing anything on recent events in Ukraine thus far, partly because I wanted to see how events were panning out, partly because I still don’t quite understand how this all fits in with the two year Globalist PsyOp that ended abruptly on 24th February – the same day as the Russian military operation started, as coincidence would have it – but mainly because the experience of trying to write rational analysis in the midst of propaganda that would have made the editors of Pravda blush is no easy task.
As a brief defence against those who will inevitably smear my attempts to analyse the context behind all this as somehow pro-Russian, let me ask them not to bother. I really don’t even understand the frame of reference, since I don’t view the world in the absurd black hat/white hat terms that lead to such jibes. And in any case, I am pro-God and pro-Truth, as well as being a patriotic Englishman who writes on such topics because he believes this once green and pleasant land is now run by terminally foolish clowns and Globalist ideologues who do not govern for the people but in the interests of others. I would also point out that I was writing about atrocities committed against Ukrainians years before it became fashionable to do so. However, unfortunately it seems I was supporting the wrong Ukrainians — the ones nobody cares about — in the Donbass, who have been killed, terrorised and forced to leave the country by their own brutal Government for eight years, with some even deliberately burned alive by the neo-Nazis formations that apparently don’t exist. Those caveats aside, let’s press on.
For most Westerners, it appears that the current conflict suddenly dropped from the sky one morning in February 2022. They woke up to hear about a Russian invasion, and without any prior knowledge or context, having been denied this for years by their so-called free press, simply accepted the narrative thrown at them that this invasion was utterly unprovoked — the brainchild of a madman who wishes to recreate Hammer and Sickle Land again.
None of this is remotely true. Whatever the actual reasons for invading at this particular time — and I don’t believe for one moment that we have the full picture yet — this conflict most certainly did not drop out of the sky or from the ravings of a lunatic on 24th February 2022. No, it is part of a sequence of events that was set off years ago, particularly in 2014, which were clearly destined to reshape the world. As I wrote back in September 2014:
“I believe this crisis to be the defining crisis of the 21st Century so far. … It is also something that may well define the shape of the planet for the rest of the century — whether we are left with a unipolar world … or whether we see a new multipolar world emerging … It is in a very real sense the key battle between globalisation and national sovereignty.”
That sequence of events has a long history, but behind it all is an ideological fanaticism that overtook certain elements of the Western powers – and I’m thinking here in particular of the cult known as neoconservatism (the name is a misnomer as they have their roots in Trotskyism, not conservatism) – who saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as an opportunity not for peace and stability, but for the establishing of a US-led Globalist hegemon, with “Full Spectrum Dominance”, as one of their number once put it.
It was this ideological fanaticism that led to the carpet bombing of Serbia, the invasion of Afghanistan, the war against Iraq, the dismemberment of Libya, and the arming of jihadists to destabilise Syria — wars which killed or displaced hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, yet which curiously attracted none of the sort of response we are seeing now.
It was this ideological fanaticism that also led to the continuance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), long after the ostensible reason for its existence ceased to exist. NATO was a military alliance against the Soviet Union, and since then it is a military alliance against Russia. This is undeniable, and it gives rise to two questions. Firstly, why was it deemed necessary to continue this alliance at a time when Russia itself quite obviously desired to be on good terms with the West (despite the pilfering of the country during the so-called Shock Therapy of the 1990s)? Secondly, since the alliance remained and was quite obviously aimed at Russia, isn’t it obvious and indeed reasonable that they would see it as a threat?
This should not be hard to understand. If, say, an anti-Russian military alliance crept up to its borders, in five successive waves, despite assurances given to the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 that this would not happen — all of which has come to pass — why on earth would anyone think that the Russians wouldn’t see this as a threat, and why on earth would anyone think that there would not be a major pushback at some point? This is not rocket science!
In 2007, Vladimir Putin warned very starkly at the Munich Security Conference of the long-term consequences of the continuance of this policy. Not only did the warnings go unheeded, the very next year NATO upped the ante significantly with the Bucharest Summit Declaration:
“NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.”
Again, it fails me to see how can any rational person can look at this and not see the clash that was inevitably on its way from such a policy, and how easily it could have been avoided. It’s not as if the consequences were unknown. Amongst other foreign policy realists, the great US diplomat, George Kennan, observed the following about NATO expansion towards Russia:
“I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.”
Indeed. And I’ll give you three guesses who agreed with that assessment back in 1997, calling out what the reaction might be should the Alliance move into the Baltic States, let alone Ukraine.
“The only thing that can provoke Russia into a hostile and vigorous response is the expansion of NATO to the Baltic states.”
Did you get it? Why, it was none other than Joe Biden, who apparently understood then what he pretends not to understand now.
It was therefore all extremely predictable what would eventually happen if this expansion occurred, and yet the expansion and promises of further expansion did continue nonetheless.
We then fast-forward to 2014, where we find what was perhaps the most blatant coup d’etat in history, when the US and EU conspired together to foment regime change in Ukraine. The coup itself relied heavily on neo-Nazi groups such as Pravy Sektor, whose leader at that time, Dmytro Yarosh, stood on the stage in Maidan Square in Kiev and, flanked by some sinister looking Nazi goons, informed the crowd that his organisation was rejecting the deal brokered by the French, Germans and Poles for a gradual and peaceful handover of power, and that if then President Viktor Yanukovych hadn’t vacated his premises by the following morning, they would depose him — violently. The rest is history. The coup took place, the French, Germans and Poles slunk away apparently forgetting the deal they had brokered, and Victoria Nuland at the State Department gleefully rubbed the cookie crumbs from her hands and set about realising her dream of what to do with that poor country, including the installation of biological weapons laboratories, it would seem. That’s her legacy: She came, she saw, she bought them Cookies and Plague.
One of the first things the new illegitimate regime did was announce a ban on Russian as an official language — despite the fact that it was the predominant language throughout most of the East and South East of the country, where the majority of people were historically, culturally, religiously, and linguistically Russian. Which explains why some of these regions rejected this new hostile, illegitimate government and decided to secede. Again, there is no rocket science here.
What then took place was eight years of conflict, in which the West turned a blind eye to continued atrocities — even blaming them on Russia, when it was the Western backed coup government that was carrying them out. For eight years, with varying degrees of intensity, that people were subjected to bombardment, and being terrorised both by the regular Ukrainian Army and the unashamedly Nazi Tornado, Azov, and Aidar Battalions, which the Western governments helped to train, whilst the Western media pretended it wasn’t happening. But it did happen, and here was the former Ukrainian President, Petro Poroshenko, boasting early on in the hostilities that the bombardment he authorised would see the children of Eastern Ukrainians cowering in basements. Even when a peace process was agreed, with the first and then second Minsk Accords, the shelling of those areas never ceased, over a million refugees fled to Russia, and the Western powers put absolutely no pressure on the Ukrainian Government to fulfil the obligations it had signed to seek a peaceful settlement with the two republics.
Why was this allowed to happen, and why was there no international outcry as those children were holed up in basements and as innocent civilians lived under the constant threat of bombardment by their own Government? The simple reason is that despite their current fake bleeding heart blue and yellow social media profiles, Western governments and the media don’t give a stuff about the people of Ukraine, but have instead led them up the garden path with their phoney promises of Westernisation and NATO membership, when in fact their entire plan was and is very simply to use that country as a stick to poke the bear next door. Here’s a quote from a piece I linked to back in 2014, which very succinctly explains the strategy:
“The Eurasian-wide plan of strategic destabilization and state fracturing owes its genesis to Zbigniew Brzezinski and his Eurasian Balkans concept. The US is flexible in practicing this concept, and it does not meet a dead end if the destabilization encounters an obstacle and cannot be advanced. Should this occur, as it has in Ukraine, Syria and Iraq, and possibly soon in the South China Sea, the stratagem evolves into maximizing the chaos within the launch pad states that are positioned on the doorsteps of the Eurasian Powers. The idea is to create ‘black holes’ of absolute disorder in which Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran are ‘damned if they do, damned if they don’t’ intervene.”
Which is basically where we’re at. The pathetic drivel put forward by the Western powers, in which Ukraine is the Shire, full of nothing but peaceful Hobbit folk with nary a neo-Nazi to be seen, but who unfortunately live next door to Mordor and its Orc hordes, is tripe of the tripiest dimensions. They care nothing about the people of Ukraine, but have simply used it as their Globalist Plaything, bleeding it dry via shell schemes in which sons of US Presidents magically get paid whacking great salaries for jobs they’re not remotely equipped to do, and where they arm and fund some of the worst people imaginable — in this case neo-Nazi battalions, just as they did the Mujahideen back in the day, and al-Nusra Jihadists more recently — to create permanent chaos on Russia’s borders.
But as I said earlier, we certainly haven’t been told the whole reason for the current invasion, and I’m sure there’s much more to come. Because ultimately this is not really about Ukraine, but about an inevitable conflict between ideological fanatics and stone cold realists, with the poor Ukrainians sadly caught in the middle of it.
I want to finish this piece with seven very brief points, some of which I may return to in the future.
Firstly, the reaction to the Russian intervention has been on a level of hysteria that I’ve only ever seen once before in my life — last year, in fact, with the absurd reaction to an eminently treatable virus with a 99.9% Survivability Rate. The fact that we are witnessing a reaction that never occurred during the US/NATO wars of aggression throughout the last few decades, or indeed during the Russian intervention in Syria (although there was some) should alert thinking people to the following conclusion: this military operation is about something much bigger than the reasons that have been stated either by the Russians or the West.
Secondly, the Western media has entirely deceived people into what is really going on, with their heroic but fake tales of Ghost pilots, Snake Islands, and massive Ukrainian resistance. The fact is that the bulk of the action has been in the East, not in Kiev as the media leads people to believe, and the Ukrainian armed forces are now basically trapped there in a number of military cauldrons, where they will either lay down their weapons or die. For an ongoing analysis of the situation, I recommend the excellent videos put out by The Duran.
Thirdly, the ONLY solution to this crisis that has any hope of bringing lasting peace, is for Ukraine to declare itself a neutral country between the NATO alliance and Russia. However, the Neocon Globalist cult will never accept this solution, and so unless other more sensible heads in the West understand this simple point and are able to prevail, the conflict will inevitably continue and quite possibly escalate even further at some point, which is a very scary thought.
Fourthly, the economic sanctions that have been placed on Russia by the Western countries will rebound spectacularly, and end up hurting European countries especially, far harder than they will hurt Russia. Again, the analysis at The Duran is excellent for those who want to learn more.
Fifthly, when the monumentally ignorant MPs in the British Parliament stood up to applaud President Zelensky, did they have the remotest clue that his closing words — “Glory to Ukraine” — was the official slogan of Stepan Bandera’s OUN-B, the Ukrainian Nazi group that fought alongside the Waffen SS in World War II, and which horrifically massacred 100,000 Poles in Volhynia in 1943, or that this same slogan is used by the openly Nazi heirs of Bandera today? I somehow doubt it.
Sixthly, the existence of US funded Biological laboratories on the territory of Ukraine, which was yesterday’s conspiracy theory, is in fact true and was even confirmed by none other than the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs of the United States, Victoria “Cookies” Nuland, who is apparently very concerned that the contents of these places might escape or fall into the hands of the Russians. Why is she so concerned, and why has the US tried to delete or burn the records of these places? For those interested in finding out, I recommend the work of a very brave proper journalist (remember them), George Webb who can be found on Twitter at @RealGeorgeWebb1. Should all this turn out to be as bad as it looks, it might just put a very different perspective on things and explain the unhinged reaction we’ve seen in the Western media. It would also be mighty ironic: many of the Western leaders and media that still justify the invasion of Iraq, even though it turned out not to have the Bioweapons that were claimed as the pretext, are now howling with outrage at a conflict in an area where they do exist.
Seventhly and lastly, why do I get the feeling that Klaus Schwab is one of the few people who is enjoying the economic repercussions of this war?
March 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | NATO, Russia, Ukraine, United States |
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An El Salvador court has ordered the arrest of ex-president Alfredo Cristiani in connection with the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests.
The six clergymen – five Spaniards and a Salvadorian, along with their housekeeper and her 16-year-old daughter – were killed on the campus of the Jesuit Central American University on November 16, 1989. It was carried out by an elite commando unit known as the Atlacatl Battalion during the country’s civil war, which was a counter-insurgency unit created in 1980 at the Panama-based US Army’s School of the Americas.
Prosecutors believe that Cristiani, who held the country’s top post between 1989 and 1994, knew of the murder plans but chose not to prevent the tragedy.
According to a statement by El Salvador’s attorney general’s office, the court ordered Cristiani and former lawmaker Rodolfo Parker, along with several former military officers, to be put “under provisional detention” pending further investigation.
Charges against Cristiani and others were filed on February 25, with Attorney General Rodolfo Delgado saying his office was “determined to go after those accused of ordering this regrettable and tragic event.”
The former president, whose whereabouts are currently unknown, denies any involvement or knowledge of the military’s murder plan.
“The truth is I never knew of the plans they had to commit those killings,” Cristiani said in a statement.
“They never informed me nor asked for my authorization because they knew that I would never have authorized that Father [Ignacio] Ellacuria or his brothers were harmed,” Cristiani said.
The murder was staged to make it look as though it was committed by leftist guerillas. Out of nine military officers who had been initially put on trial, seven were freed by the court, and two served short sentences before being released in 1993 under an amnesty. Later, the amnesty was found to have been unconstitutional and one of these two officers – Colonel Guillermo Benavides – was jailed again and currently remains in prison. Another colonel, Inocente Orlando Montano, was sentenced to 133 years in prison by a Spanish court in 2020.
March 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | El Salvador, Latin America |
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Recently, western political leaders and mainstream media have begun injecting a new talking point into their anti-Russian and wartime discourse: that Russia is planning an endless series of ‘false flag attacks.’
Never mind the fact that, historically speaking, Russia has no visible track record of false flag operations.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for either the US and Britain – both have an extremely long list of military and political deceptions which they’ve used to start and prolong various wars around the world.
Currently, in the Donbass region, formerly in eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are firing indiscriminately into civilian towns and villages – and then attempting to blame their own violent actions on Russia. The shelling of civilian areas has been going on continuous there since the civil war began in 2014. This is extremely worrying, because in the current anti-Russian western media ecosystem, any accusations leveled at Russia are never questioned, before being beamed across all western global news networks. And that is exactly what is happening right now with mainstream media coverage in Ukraine.
Independent journalist Patrick Lancaster is on the ground in Donbass region in the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics, and has recently interviewed local witnesses who have confirmed these very war crimes, carried out by NATO-backed Ukrainian Army and their Nazi-Azov Battalions.
Watch his stunning reportage here:
March 12, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Ukraine |
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According to a speech made by Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi on March 9th, Ukrainian refugees arriving in Italy will be forced to “either agree to have a swab every 48 hours or agree to be vaccinated“ against the coronavirus. A transcript of the speech has been published by the Italian daily Il Tempo. Some Italians have complained that Italian citizens have not been given the swab option, saying that the country’s citizens either get vaccinated or are suspended from work without a salary.
In Iceland, where all Covid-related restrictions have been abandoned, both internally and at the border, the refugees are still required to be tested for COVID-19 infection, according to the General Manager of the Primary Care of the Capital Area. As other travellers are not subject to this requirement, this is clear discrimination against Ukrainian refugees. While no plans of forced vaccination have yet been confirmed nor denied, according to the General Manager, “an emphasis is put on vaccinating them”.
As it has already become clear the vaccination does not protect against the Omicron variant now prevalent, and that the protection against infection may even be negative, there is no medical justification for forcing refugees to get vaccinated, as in Italy, or for cajoling them into it, as seems to be the intention in Iceland.
Only 35% of the Ukrainian population are vaccinated against COVID-19. Scepticism towards the vaccines is high in Ukraine and in August 2021, 56% of the population said they would not get vaccinated against the disease. Being forced to leave your war-torn homeland is bad enough. Being forced or pushed to accept a useless medication you do not trust when you finally arrive at your destination could hardly be described as kind hospitality, or free consent.
Thorsteinn Siglaugsson is an economist who lives in Iceland. Find him on his blog.
March 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, European Union, Human rights, Italy |
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Overview
On March 5, “A Midwestern Doctor” (who I will abbreviate as “AMD”) published a long Substack article that meticulously chronicled his/her observations of adverse events (AEs) associated with the COVID vaccine. This is very rare as most doctors are too busy to do such an analysis. Based on the observation of this one doctor alone, the critical event rates are high enough to justify that the vaccines should be immediately halted based on safety concerns.
Background
AMD has to hide his/her identity or he/she will be fired. That’s how the medical system is designed: if you speak against the system, you lose your job. Period.
So to make things easier, I’ll assume AMD is a man.
The AEs documented by AMD were partly from his own patients, but mostly related by people who AMD directly knows. So no more than one step removed: a direct friend of a direct friend.
The results of his analysis (from the Conclusion section of the article):
- Critical Injuries: 41
- Severe Injuries: 39
- Significant Reactions: 32
In AMD’s history, there were no critical injuries for all other vaccines combined. Zero.
But the important part was this statement:
Typically when a drug has between 10-100 critical injuries reported to the FDA, they strongly look at pulling it from the market or giving it a blackbox warning. I thus feel these vaccines are not being held to the adverse reporting standard we expect.
In other words, based on just the data AMD directly collected, the vaccine exceeds the stopping condition.
The numerator and denominator
AMD used more than his own patients: he also used friends of his friends.
AMD’s cases were split: 60% reached out to him with stories and 40% was due to his outreach.
How confident is he that every single case was vaccine related? For half of these cases, there was an extremely strong time correlation or other factors, so he’s extremely confident of a causality link. For the other half of the cases, the causality is extremely likely.
Because his sample includes only the direct friends of his friends, he estimates that the “denominator” in his case is less than 100,000 to be conservative (the average person has around 150 to 250 friends so this is quite conservative). There will be fewer than this due to overlap, but again, we aren’t trying to get to an exact number, just a rough engineering estimate.
AMD’s extended friend pool consists of a mix of vaxxed and unvaxxed people in our calculation. Since he’s a doctor, his mix of vaxxed patients will be higher than others so this may skew our extrapolation to be on the high side, but we are just trying to do a ballpark estimate of what the national rates might look like.
Let’s extrapolate that out to a population of 200M people who are over 18 years old and vax eligible. We’d have to multiply his numbers by 2,000 to get a lower bound on the number of events expected. This isn’t strictly accurate since AMD’s friend base is older and the AEs in the older group would not occur at the same rate as the younger group. So again, not trying to get a a super precise estimate since it isn’t needed as we’ll soon see.
So we have 41*2000 = a minimum of 82,000 estimated critical events caused by the vaccine in our crude estimate.
This is within a factor of 2 of the minimum of 150,000 deaths I’ve previously estimated for the vaccine (using over a dozen different methods). So it appears we were right in that our estimate was conservative. And our crude extrapolation also is well within numbers previously determined so it serves as a crude sanity check that the numbers reported by AMD were “reasonable.”
Comparing with our 10 to 100 critical event stopping condition, we find:
82,000 >> 10 to 100
The stopping condition for the vaccine is met not only from AMD’s direct observations alone (even adjusting a factor of 2 for causality doubts), but also for our conservative (and very crude) estimate of the total number of critical events in the US. QED.
Finally, let’s be clear: I am not claiming that we can extrapolate a single anecdote to an entire population to get an accurate rate estimate. I am only claiming that AMD’s observations alone justify halting the vaccines and that any extrapolation of that number to the entire population based on any reasonable assumptions shows that the stopping condition is exceeded by a large margin.
What other doctors are seeing
AMD polled his colleagues to see if they were seeing the same thing.
- 30% confirmed they were
- 70% said they either saw nothing at all and/or didn’t want to talk about it
He attributes the 70% seeing nothing as them not being aware of the possibility that the vaccines could be unsafe so any adverse reactions are immediately discounted and discarded; they don’t register.
Therefore, even if we further discount our calculation of 82,000 by 70% in the belief that these rates seen by AMD are inflated, the number critically harmed (24,600) is still way over our stopping threshold and that’s really the only thing I wanted to show.
The Pfizer Phase 3 clinical trial
AMD noted that when the shots were administered, people quickly discovered a high rate of anaphylaxis.
He asked, “How could the clinical trial not have found that?”
Indeed. Anaphylaxis wasn’t mentioned at all in the Phase 3 trial report despite the fact that it is life threatening.
It wasn’t mentioned in the 6 month follow up study either. That study would have included reactions of the placebo cohort who got the vaccine.
Anaphylaxis occurs at 2.47 events per 10,000 doses so there should have been around 10 events observed for the full-vaccinated treatment group (44,000 doses) and a similar number of events when the placebo group was vaccinated.
So we should have seen 21 anaphylaxis events on average yet there were none reported. This is extremely unlikely to happen by chance.
How does Pfizer explain that? This is, of course, a rhetorical question as nobody is going to ask them that question and they don’t have to answer it. That’s just the way it works in medicine. You are not allowed to ask questions like this. It’s “science.” We are teaching our kids to believe whatever the drug companies tell them and not ask questions.
One other “highlight”
This comment at the very end of AMD’s article deserves special mention:
Or as another commenter here wrote: I was a Midwestern nurse last year after the gene therapy roll out. Was a case mgr did discharge planning. Saw 10-12 side effects Daily. Everything you shared and more. 2 cases of amnesia ( one was a healthy anesthesiologist). 1 girl in her twenties with blood in her tears. Had to leave that job.
A girl with blood in her tears?!?! When was the last time you saw that?
Notes
In his writeup, AMD made the case write ups deliberately vague in order to protect patient confidentiality.
Reader feedback
Check out this comment on what is happening in Melbourne, Australia mirrors what was described in this article. She explains “doctors are very worried about what they’re seeing from the jabs but keeping quiet to save their jobs.” Makes perfect sense. A doctor’s first duty is to his/her family. I see this all the time. This is why the doctors I talk to stay quiet. I don’t blame them.
Another reader wrote this:
Steve,
I love your work. The physician in the Midwest is right. I am a practicing ophthalmologist in the southeast and have come across multiple catastrophic side effects from the shots. I have been sounding the alarm to my friends and colleagues for over a year. Most of these think I am crazy.
It started last year in roughly March when I walked into a patient’s preposition room to have a mom sign a consent. She apologises to me that she had trouble writing for she had just recently had a stroke. I told her I was glad she was here then asked if she knew what the cause was. “It was that shot” she said. She was in the hospital that night. I then went to the OR and told my CRNA the story. She proceeded to tell me her friends daughter died (39) died with a pulmonary embolus 1 month after getting one. I told this to one of my partners who said his friend was in the hospital with myocarditis after having a shot.
I also know of a physician in a nearby practice dropping dead at 52 with a heart attack. He had recently been vaccinated according to his front desk.
I also know of 3 breast cancer diagnosis after vaccinations as well as a transverse myelitis and a brain stem glioma. All of these had been vaccinated but I cannot say that these were caused by the shots.
One of my parent’s good friend’s son in law died suddenly from a heart attack at 39. He was also recently vaccinated.
In my own practice, I have 3 patients with side effects. 1 with increased intracranial pressure . Almost immediately after the second Pfizer dose the patient started experiencing headaches. I saw the child about a week after and she had swollen optic nerves.
A second had uveitis roughly 2 weeks after the first dose.
A third patient had a “spontaneous “ vitreous hemorrhage within 2 weeks of a dose.
There are some others I know of too…
If I mention these to most doctors, they just look at me with blank stares. I have been ridiculed, reprimanded and threatened for just telling physicians my observations.
These need to be stopped yesterday.
Summary
Based on the number of just this one physician’s observations, the vaccines should be immediately halted.
AMD is not an isolated data point. He discovered that 30% of his colleagues are seeing similar things.
I can also personally confirm that speaking confidentially with other physicians (who fear retribution such as loss of medical licenses if they speak out), that AMD is hardly alone. The doctors I know have never before needed to report an event to VAERS in the past and this year have had 20 and 1,000 case reports to make. They won’t talk to the FDA about what they see because they don’t want to have their licenses revoked.
As AMD’s case shows, the medical community makes it impossible for these doctors to speak freely and tell what they know. Doctors are forced to hide in the shadows to tell their story or simply remain silent.
The days of colleagues having open friendly discussions to resolve conflicts are gone. The medical community now uses fear and intimidation techniques to silence any scientific dissent. For example, in Canada, an entire university ganged up on Dr. Byram Bridle to discredit him for speaking out. Would any of the University of Guelph faculty debate him? Of course not! No chance. Some faculty members even signed the joint faculty letter denigrating him without even reading the document he wrote. In their mind, Professor Bridle was wrong and they didn’t even have to bother to take the time to understand his position.
In California today, the legislature is seeking to further empower the medical boards to remove the license of any physician who speaks out against the vaccines. It is a top down dictatorship with the Medical Boards holding all the cards. They are not accountable to anyone. They will not be questioned. In many cases, the doctors who are having their license revoked don’t even know who is examining them and are not allowed to question the authorities on the record. So the boards cannot be held accountable for their actions.
Even though the evidence is clear that these vaccines are harmful and should be stopped, we, as a society, are doing the opposite today with vaccine mandates requiring people to be boosted or be fired. We are requiring doctors like AMD to keep their mouths shut.
There is even a US government form now so you can turn in any doctor who challenges the official narrative. Basically, the government is asking us to be spies to help them eliminate people who disagree with the narrative.
Someone isn’t telling you the truth here, and it isn’t A Midwestern Doctor.
You should be upset. Very upset. This is unconscionable.
Unfortunately, no public health official in America wants to talk about it, and the mainstream press isn’t going to cover it either.
March 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Canada, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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Unless either Ukraine or the US can prove otherwise, the available evidence points to Kiev operating biological laboratories which may have violated the Biological and Toxins Weapons Convention.
Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland appeared before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on March 8, testifying on the US and international response to Russia’s attack on Ukraine. After delivering her opening remarks, the veteran US diplomat took questions from the committee members. One question, asked by Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican from the state of Florida, stood out. “Does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons?” he asked.
Nuland answered the question very deliberately. “Ukraine has biological research facilities which, in fact, we’re now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of, so we are working with the Ukrainians on how we can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach,” she said.
Of note was the fact that none of this was mentioned in the entirety of her opening speech. The purpose of Rubio’s question wasn’t to pin Nuland into a corner, but rather set up the follow-on question, designed to deflect a very discomforting issue into a propaganda opportunity for the US government.
“I’m sure you’re aware,” Rubio said, “that the Russian propaganda groups are already putting out there all kinds of information about how they have uncovered a plot by the Ukrainians to unleash biological weapons in the country, and with NATO’s coordination.” The senator paused before asking his question. “If there is a biological or chemical weapon incident or attack inside Ukraine, is there any doubt in your mind that 100% it would be the Russians behind it?”
Nuland answered this question with more authority: “There is no doubt in my mind, Senator. And, in fact, it is a classic Russian technique to blame the other guy for what they are planning to do themselves.”
Rubio was right about one thing – the Russians were having a field day about the “biological research facilities” Nuland was so reticent about discussing. Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, announced that “We [Russia] confirm that, during the special military operation in Ukraine, the Kiev regime was found to have been concealing traces of a military biological program implemented with funding from the United States Department of Defense.”
According to Zakharova, the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, on February 24 – the first day of the Russian offensive – had ordered all the Ukrainian biological laboratories to “urgently” eradicate the stored reserves of “highly hazardous pathogens of plague, anthrax, rabbit fever, cholera and other lethal diseases.” She said the documentation on the “urgent eradication” of the pathogens was “received from employees of Ukrainian laboratories.”
While noting that more work was being done by the Russian Ministry of Defense to fully assess the documents in question, Zakharova said Russia was able to conclude “that components of biological weapons were being developed in Ukrainian laboratories in direct proximity to Russian territory.”
“The urgent eradication of highly hazardous pathogens on February 24 was ordered to prevent exposing a violation of Article I of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) by Ukraine and the United States,” she added.
Article I of the BTWC states that “Each State Party to this Convention undertakes never in any circumstances to develop, produce, stockpile, or otherwise acquire or retain:
- microbial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes;
- weapons, equipment or means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict.”
Earlier, the US Embassy in Kiev published information relating to what it described as a “Biological Threat Reduction Program,” a collaboration between the US Department of Defense and the Ukrainian government. According to this data, “The [biological threat reduction] program accomplishes its bio-threat reduction mission through development of a bio-risk management culture; international research partnerships; and partner capacity for enhanced bio-security, bio-safety, and bio-surveillance measures.” According to the US Embassy, “the Biological Threat Reduction Program’s priorities in Ukraine are to consolidate and secure pathogens and toxins of security concern and to continue to ensure Ukraine can detect and report outbreaks caused by dangerous pathogens before they pose security or stability threats.”
This all sounds innocuous enough and, if true, seems to meet the criterion set forth in Article 1 of the BTWC regarding “prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes.”
There is suspicion, however, that the Defense Threat Reduction Agency-led biological programs may have a more nefarious purpose. The Bulgarian investigative journalist, Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, has conducted extensive research into this issue. “The US Army regularly produces deadly viruses, bacteria and toxins in direct violation of the UN Convention on the prohibition of Biological Weapons. Hundreds of thousands of unwitting people are systematically exposed to dangerous pathogens and other incurable diseases. Bio-warfare scientists using diplomatic cover test man-made viruses at Pentagon bio laboratories in 25 countries across the world,” she claimed.
Gaytandzhieva’s work has been dismissed by the US as ‘pro-Russian propaganda.’ But the inescapable fact is that the US does not have a clean record when it comes to compliance with the BTWC. So-called “bio-defense” has been used by the US to circumvent, if not outright violate, the provisions of the BTWC in the past. The most flagrant example of this was the CIA-led “Project Clear Vision,” which from 1997 until 2000 sought to reverse-engineer and subsequently test a Soviet-era “bomblet” designed to disperse biological agents, including anthrax. There was a debate within the Clinton administration as to whether “Clear Vision” violated the BTWC, which led to the program being halted in 2000.
There is no need to worry about any such malfeasance at the biolabs in Ukraine, however, the director of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, Robert Pope, recently told reporters. “What we have today… are small amounts of various pathogens that by and large are things that are collected out of their environment that they need for research to be able to legitimately surveil disease and develop vaccines against.”
According to Pope, the Ukrainians had “more pathogens in more places than we recommend,” adding that his organization had been helping Ukrainian researchers organize their frozen pathogen collections with an eye on preserving genetic information via sequencing before destroying the live samples. “All of that, obviously, has been derailed here with the recent events,” he said.
Pope’s biggest concern was that if these biolabs lost electrical power for any extended time, then the frozen samples would thaw out. “If the ventilation system is damaged, or the building itself is damaged, and these now ambient-temperature pathogens are able to escape the facility, then they can be potentially infectious in the region around the facility,” he said.
He expressed hope that the facilities would not be deliberately attacked. “I think the Russians know enough about the kinds of pathogens that are stored in biological research laboratories that I don’t think they would deliberately target a laboratory. But what I do have concerns about is that they would… be accidentally damaged during this Russian invasion.”
While Pope had been painting a relatively benign picture of the types of pathogens stored at the facilities he supervised, he left a clue about the potential for something far more worrisome. While noting that many of the biolabs in Ukraine were of new construction, “others date back to the Soviet-era and the country’s bioweapons program.” Some of these older laboratories, Pope said, could hold pathogen strains dating back to the Soviet biowarfare programs. “Scientists being scientists, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of these strain collections in some of these laboratories still have pathogen strains that go all the way back to the origins of that program.”
If this is the case, then the Ukrainian labs could very well be the repository of Anthrax 836, an extremely deadly strain of that disease specifically developed to be delivered in warheads mounted on SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missiles operating from Ukraine.
This, it would seem, would put the labs in direct violation of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, which prohibits the acquisition or retention of pathogens “that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes.”
Anthrax 836, and other similar Soviet-era biological weapons, no longer exist. As such, there is no need to conduct research designed to defend from any potential exposure to such agents. The only possible explanation for retention of Soviet-era biological warfare pathogens would be to keep them for some future biological warfare program, or as a source for covert operations seeking to falsely link a target nation, such as Russia, to illegal activity.
If Marco Rubio had been doing his job, instead of promoting anti-Russian propaganda, he could have – indeed, should have – held Victoria Nuland’s feet to the fire regarding what was really going on at the biological labs in Ukraine. There might be an innocuous answer out there. But until it is provided, it appears that Russia did in Ukraine what the US was unable to in Iraq – launched an attack on a nation which was in possession of prohibited biological weapons.
Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.
March 10, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, War Crimes | Ukraine, United States |
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