So Russian President Vladimir Putin is a “thug and a murderous dictator.” That is the judgement of President of the United States Joe Biden, delivered directly to Putin during a phone conversation, and it is backed up by a unanimous vote in the US Senate endorsing Biden’s more recently expressed view that Putin is also a “war criminal.” And if anyone doubted the sheer malignancy of America’s legislators, the viewing of a televised appeal by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinskyy calling for US intervention in his war was met with cheers, shouts of approval and a standing ovation not seen in this hemisphere since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited a Joint Congressional session in 2015. Unfortunately, in spite of all the euphoria, these comments, gestures and allegations are completely gratuitous, whether they are wholly or partly true or not, and they guarantee that a normal relationship between Russia and the United States is not likely to be reestablished no matter what the outcome to the current fighting in Ukraine.
If that is what diplomacy looks like in 2022 America then we are in serious trouble. The fact is that the US record for committing what are potentially war crimes dwarfs that of Russia or any other country with the sole exception of Israel. One only has to go through the list starting with Vietnam and continuing with Serbia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen to appreciate the places that have been on the receiving end of either covert actions or direct intervention by US armed forces or those of its close allies. Along the way, civilians have literally died in their millions as the Pax Americana has proven to be elusive in spite of a sprinkling of more than 1,000 United States military bases worldwide. Russia is a parvenu in comparison.
It is widely understood that the United States in the post-World War 2 world, shaped the new so-called international rules-based order to benefit itself, with the designation of the dollar as the world reserve currency for energy purchases, benefitting only Washington through the Treasury Department’s ability to print money without any commodity having real value to back it up. Combine that with de facto control over the international banking system and the US has been able to render itself bullet proof when it starts wars or commits other crimes. It does not accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, has even blocked the travel of ICC investigators to the US, and has never been held accountable for any of its questionable activities.
The end of the cold war brought about some adjustments in the international order, but, for the US, it meant an initial drive to loot the resources of Russia under Boris Yeltsin followed by Bill Clinton’s breaking the promise made to Mikhail Gorbachev not to take advantage of the changed circumstances to expand NATO to include the former Warsaw Pact nations in Eastern Europe. The current situation with Ukraine is a consequence of that continuous interference in Russia’s legitimate sphere of influence, which culminated with the regime change engineered by Washington in Kiev in 2014.
The United States is often regarded by other countries as a rogue nation, precisely because it shows little respect for the vital interests of others and is willing to manipulate international institutions in support of political and social objectives that have little or nothing to do with actual national security. Its sanctions frequently bring suffering to ordinary people in the countries targeted without affecting decisions made by the leadership. And the sanctions themselves are often poorly conceived while also being factually challengeable. The US governing elite invariably covers its misbehavior with self-serving aphorisms like the rubbish peddled by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, when she enthused how “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.” Yes indeed, she actually said that.
Worse still, the sustained flood of government inspired propaganda used to justify questionable actions has had the regrettable consequence of turning inward, leading to charges of “treason” directed against the few journalists and politicians who dare to challenge conventional wisdom. In the current Ukraine crisis, journalists like Tucker Carlson are under fire, as are former politicians like Tulsi Gabbard, for having committed the crime of opposing America’s deepening involvement in the fight against Russia. Indeed, the blacklisting of Russian music and books as well as foods and even vodka represent something pathological in the mainstream response to the fighting. Reliably left-wing Move-On has launched its own in-house “Creative Lab” (sic) to produce its own propaganda videos. It describes as a “debunked conspiracy theory” the Carlson claim, originally surfaced from the US government itself, that the “Biden administration was funding secret biolabs in Ukraine.” It is seeking to discredit Carlson’s “lies” which “are now fueling Putin’s relentless campaign of death and destruction in Ukraine.” It is “freedom fries” all over again.
A recent story illustrating just how deep the rot has penetrated the core of United States government and its institutions has predictably been given little coverage by the US mainstream media, but it is a tale that is appalling in its implications. The story involves a March 3rdSupreme Court ruling on a motion filed by accused terrorist Abu Zubaydah, who is currently a prisoner held in Guantanamo, though he has never actually been convicted of anything and is being nevertheless held “incommunicado for the rest of his life.” Abu Zubaydah maintained that he was tortured extensively by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at a secret prison in Poland as well as in Thailand and Cuba.
The CIA captured a wounded Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian radical, in 2002 in Pakistan, and immediately acted on the belief that he was a leader of al-Qaeda. He was tortured for several years. The CIA “waterboarded Zubaydah at least 80 times, simulated live burials in coffins for hundreds of hours,” and brutalized him through sleep deprival. They also hung him by his wrists on hooks, beat him physically and he, as a result, lost one eye. A heavily redacted CIA 683 page torture report to the Senate released in 2014, which included some details of the standard practices in place at that time, mentioned Abu Zubaydah over 1,000 times.
Abu Zubaydah was seeking release from Guantanamo based on the fact that the United States, in torturing him, had committed a war crime. His lawyers were seeking to subpoena and interview former CIA contractors to determine what exactly occurred in Poland. The US is, by the way, a signatory on the UN Convention Against Torture. The Abu Zubaydah suit may initially have appeared to be a slam-dunk given what was already known about CIA torture. The brutality was incredible. For example, newly declassified documents that surfaced last week revealed how a prisoner at an Agency “black site” in Afghanistan was used as a training prop to teach inexperienced operatives how to torture other prisoners, leaving him with serious brain damage.
Even given that and much other evidence of both illegal activity and crimes against humanity, the Supreme Court case was instead derailed by what is referred to as the “state secrets privilege.” The court’s 6–3 ruling, written by Justice Stephen Breyer included “To assert the [state secrets] privilege, the Government must submit to the court a ‘formal claim of privilege, lodged by the head of the department which has control over the matter.’” That done, the court “should exercise its traditional reluctance to intrude upon the authority of the Executive in military and national security affairs.”
The court’s ruling thereby upheld a “state secrets” claim based on the fact that the Agency has never admitted that it had secret prisons in Poland to prevent Abu Zubaydah’s lawyers from seeking subpoenas on the two psychologists who created the CIA torture program or to use those insights to learn the details of the interrogations. The court also ruled against any attempt by Polish investigators to seek to obtain US government information about the possible crimes committed at the CIA “black site” in Poland.
So welcome to the land of the free and the home of the brave…where you can be tortured at the whim of a government official, imprisoned without ever being convicted of anything, and, when you seek redress from a court, you can be told that “Too bad, it’s a state secret even though the government has already admitted having engaged in a criminal practice.” And one should not ignore in passing a related issue, the savage persecution of journalist Julian Assange for having exposed US government crimes.
An article on the case in the Los Angeles Times, one of the few to appear, puts it this way: “the government may invoke the ‘state secrets’ privilege to block former US contractors from testifying about the now well-known waterboarding and torture of prisoners held at CIA sites in Poland. By a 6-3 vote, the justices said the US government can claim a privilege of secrecy even if there is no secret.” An American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who observed the process added that “US courts are the only place in the world where everyone must pretend not to know basic facts about the CIA’s torture program. It is long past time to stop letting the CIA hide its crimes behind absurd claims of secrecy and national security harm.” Or one might observe that it’s called in the vernacular “Getting Away with Murder.”
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.
By launching information warfare and sanctions against undesirable countries and politicians, the United States clearly did not consider that these same weapons could very well punish the US, its American “stability”, as well as knock many politicians of this “empire of lies” off pedestal.
So, once Moscow, in response to the White House’s insinuations, blacklisted 13 US politicians on March 15, including President Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki, and Hillary Clinton, approval of the move and strident criticism of the current US political establishment swept the US public.
From Breitbart and its readers, Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State who is now trying to reserve her place as the future mistress of the White House, got what they call “what she deserved.” After all, it was she who indirectly benefited when her husband, former President Bill Clinton, received a corrupt fee of $500,000 from a Russian investment bank for a lecture he gave in Moscow in 2010, which even the New York Timeswrote about at the time. Moreover, Hillary was also recalled for paying her campaign staff to prepare a fake “dossier” of compromising material concerning the then-candidate, Donald Trump. It is therefore not surprising to see very harsh comments on this article from American readers, in particular IdriveAPontiac: “The same list of wanted persons is posted in the offices of sheriffs all over the country. Lol,” or cylde: “Putin is doing the job for our DOJ.”
The satirical website The Babylon Bee also took a swipe at Hillary, describing Putin’s alleged frustration at “her refusal to cooperate” and the Clinton family’s intention to acquire all disinformation and fake news from domestic sources like The Washington Post.
As for the “first person of the US”, it has completely lost its face and its mind after being blacklisted by Moscow. In particular, he has publicly demonstrated this by speaking at a White House event recently where he called Vice-President Kamala Harris’s husband “the first person of state.”
And a week earlier Joe Biden confused Russia and Ukraine altogether, commenting on the Russian military special operation, and said: “How do we get to the place where, you know, Putin decided he is gonna just invade Russia? Nothing like this has happened since World War II.”
So the stormy reaction to this by users of the Internet and the general shame of Americans for such a “leader” is understandable to all…
Already after the inauguration, having become a laughing stock in the US and beyond, Joe Biden became a “talking head” who too often started to talk a lot of gibberish and voice (probably without proper awareness!) the words of “political prompters”. This is clearly illustrated by the events of March 16, when, during a brief meeting with journalists from the White House pool, Biden, when asked by Fox News to describe Putin, first left the room, and then, apparently having been “prompted” on the sidelines, returned and called the Russian president a “war criminal”.
It is notable that exactly one year ago – on March 16, 2021 – Biden made a high-profile statement in an interview with ABC News when he called Putin a “murderer”. Even then, the Chairman of the State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, called Joe Biden’s behavior “impotent hysteria” and Russian Ambassador to Washington Anatoly Antonov was invited to Moscow “for consultations” to review Russian-American relations.
And following the referendum on Crimean independence eight years ago (again in March), Hillary Clinton called Russian President Putin “the new Hitler”.
There is no doubt that such labels, which US leading politicians are trying to place in official statements, are unacceptable. Not only for reasons of diplomatic etiquette, but also morality, as it is American politicians themselves who are up to their elbows in blood. The same applies to Hillary Clinton, who reacted with undisguised enthusiasm to the White House-organized assassination of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. And to Joseph Biden, who personally came up with the idea of bombing peaceful Belgrade in 1999 and sent American pilots to destroy all the bridges on the Danube. “Biden, US senators and congressmen were the initiators and perpetrators of the current events in Ukraine. They are the ones who committed crimes against humanity and should be brought to justice,” the Chairman of the State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin said. “US President Joe Biden is beginning to understand that he will have to answer for what is happening in Ukraine, which is causing hysteria in Washington.”
US President Joe Biden’s rating has fallen to 37%, the lowest mark from voters in his career – but even that figure is almost certainly inflated as the country is “going to hell” because of his decisions, Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump told Fox News in a phone interview.
The Daily Wirepolled Joe Biden’s supporters on the UCLA campus. In particular, when students were asked what achievements the US president had made over the past year, no one could recall a single specific White House head’s success.
Four dozen people from the US House of Representatives, including the former White House chief doctor, called in February for Joe Biden to undergo a medical test of his mental capacity. They suspect that the head of state is being consumed by “senile dementia”. Their appeal, citing the Alzheimer’s Association, stresses that Biden’s behavior is on a list of ten signs of diminished mental capacity.
Inflation at a 40-year high is dragging both Biden’s and the Democratic Party’s approval ratings down, threatening to have them lose the mid-term election to the Congress next autumn and result in the formation of a parliament opposed to the White House. And there are also sanctions imposed by Moscow on him and his closest “prompters”! Yes, the “talking head” of the White House can’t take this kind of “overheating”, so he “went berserk”.
However, public accusations (not for the first time, either!) against the leader of a world power may result in more than just impeachment!
A NEW paper at an open access platform (OSF) about German excess all-cause deaths adds significantly to the growing body of evidence being reported around the world.
There are a number of interesting points in the German data which is broken down by age. During 2020, Covid infections peaked but all-cause mortality was not seriously elevated, whereas during 2021 while the mRNA vaccine was being rolled out, German all-cause deaths were elevated for the 15-79 age range.
This is not an isolated statistic. All-cause deaths among working age populations are increasing. Official US all-cause death data paints a depressingly similar picture to the German and New Zealand stats. Commercial insurance data confirms this.
A comparison of 15-79 German all-cause deaths with vaccinations by month shows how vaccination numbers mirrored deaths. It also shows how an increase in all-cause deaths occurred when boosters were rolled out. The relationship is similar to the observed excess all-cause deaths in NZ.
The significance of this data cannot be overestimated. UKHSA reports that the average age of people dying from Covid is 82.9 years, higher than the average UK life expectancy. Therefore all-cause deaths among the 15-79 year age bracket are not expected to increase significantly as a result of Covid infections. The implications of the observed rises across multiple countries are very disturbing. Most studies of long-term outcomes following Covid infection are not differentiating between subjects who have been vaccinated and those who are not. This allows vaccine advocates, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and governments to continue to blame adverse outcomes including deaths on Covid infection alone or chance events without considering the adverse effect of mRNA vaccination, whose long-term impacts may be even larger. The German data supports causal attribution of increases in all-cause deaths to the effects of mRNA Covid vaccination.
At a press conference on Thursday, Northern Region Health Coordination Centre (NRHCC) chief clinical officer Dr Andrew Old said only a third of the 1,000 people currently in hospital with Covid-19 were there due to the effects of the virus. He did not provide any details about how many of this third were vaccinated and how many unvaccinated. He didn’t provide any data on how many of the modest number of deaths were ‘with Covid’ and how many were ‘because of Covid’. So all bets are off when it comes to analysing NZ data. Yet Dr Ashley Bloomfield, the NZ Director General of Health, who was interviewed by Mike Hosking yesterday morning, said the 1,000 people in hospital would not be there if it wasn’t for Covid. Hosking had to correct him.
This means for the last few weeks we have been subjected to a meaningless psychobabble of palpably false Covid statistics designed by the Ministry of Health to contain us in a state of constant fear. What the government hasn’t really talked about is their failure to upgrade the emergency departments of NZ hospitals (they’ve had two years to prepare), instead spending 64billion dollars of borrowed money promoting an ineffective Covid vaccination programme. The NZ Herald reports our hospital system is in crisis, strained to breaking point. The statistics show that the hospitals are overwhelmed with vaccinated Covid patients, but you wouldn’t know it unless you moved beyond government propaganda.
Despite the mounting evidence of ineffectiveness and serious harm, the focus of government and the health system is still saturation advertising proclaiming the safety and effectiveness of mRNA vaccination. Meanwhile thousands of people in and out of hospital with serious illness continue to be under-resourced and in some cases neglected.
Excess all-cause death is not a statistic that can be ignored. Dr Ashley Bloomfield says it is not necessary to institute mandatory reporting of adverse events following vaccination. What planet is he on? We need an immediate end to mandates, proper assessment of adverse effects, and adequate compensation and treatment for those affected.
Guy Hatchard PhD is a former senior manager at Genetic ID, a global food testing and certification company. He lives in New Zealand.
The United States and Russia continued this week with furious sparring over the issue of biological laboratories in Ukraine. The U.S. accuses Russia of “disinformation” about the labs, saying that they were standard sanitary facilities studying common diseases and epidemiology. For its part, Russia claims that the laboratories were conducting far more sinister and illicit research into developing biowarfare weapons.
Surely, the quickest way to discern the relative validity of concerns is the following basic fact. The research facilities numbering up to 30 locations in Kiev, Kharkov, Kherson, Lvov, Odessa and Poltava, among other cities, were being funded by the Pentagon to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. The figure is estimated at $200 million and, it seems, the research has been going on for several years up until recently. If the laboratories were involved in benign disease investigations then why was the Pentagon the sponsor and liaison organization? Why not the U.S. Department of Health, or Center for Disease Control, instead of the Department of Defense? And why were the laboratories ordered to destroy their samples when Russia launched its military intervention in Ukraine – an intervention that Moscow claims is justified on the grounds of self-defense?
This week the Russian Ministry of Defense named the Pentagon’s liaison officer formerly at the U.S. embassy in Kiev who was responsible for the laboratory programs as Joanna Wintrol. It was suggested that American lawmakers should ask this person to give testimony on the purpose of the facilities.
The involvement of the Pentagon in the activities of dozens of laboratories across Ukraine is the most strident fact pointing to concerns that the research was being conducted for the nefarious purpose of developing biological weapons.
It is telling, too, that anyone who raises questions about the activity is immediately denounced as a Russian propagandist. They are vilified as trying to amplify Moscow’s justification for its military intervention into Ukraine that began on February 24. A diverse range of American public figures has called for a transparent investigation into concerns over U.S. bioweapons being developed in Ukraine. They include journalists like Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald, former U.S. Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter, former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and professor of international law Frances Boyle.
Russia is endeavoring to have the matter raised at the UN Security Council despite American objections. China has also endorsed Russia’s concerns and calls for a full investigation. Given that China has previously raised questions about U.S. covert laboratory work on coronaviruses at Fort Detrick, Maryland, as possibly being responsible for releasing the Covid-19 coronavirus and the ensuing global pandemic it is understandable why Beijing is now taking a keener interest in the discovery of shadowy Pentagon laboratories in Ukraine. China has angrily rejected American attempts to smear it as the originator of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In any case, the matter of Pentagon-funded laboratories in Ukraine can’t simply be dismissed by arrogant assertions of innocence by Washington. After all the lies the U.S. has told about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that were used for justifying a war that killed over one million Iraqis, the Americans have no credibility whatsoever. The irony here is that Russia went into Ukraine and seems to have actually found evidence of WMD unlike the Americans when they invaded Iraq in 2003.
The background to the present inquiry is that Russia has long expressed fears that the United States was engaged in biological warfare research at facilities set up in former Soviet republics. This concern over clandestine facilities has been shared by independent investigative journalists such as Dilyana Gaytandzhieva who has reported on U.S. bioweapon laboratories in Georgia among other places.
Officially, the United States has sought to deny all allegations of such illicit activities which would put it in gross violation of the Biological Warfare Convention (1983). The Pentagon has claimed that laboratories in Ukraine and elsewhere have been charged with securing Soviet-era bioweapons. But decades later, surely that explanation is wearing thin, if not altogether obsolete.
The issue flared up again – unintentionally – when Victoria Nuland, the U.S. Under Secretary of State with responsibility for Ukraine (responsibility in more ways than her formal title indicates) admitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 8 that there were dangerous biological research laboratories in Ukraine funded by Washington. So dangerous, indeed, that Nuland openly expressed concern that Russian forces might come into their possession. To do what? Use them as weapons? Or, more realistically, be able to prove that the Pentagon was funding the development of bioweapons in Ukraine?
Some American media have gladly quoted a few Russian biologists who are dismissive of Moscow’s claims of U.S. bioweapons in Ukraine. They assert the strains of pathogens are not particularly dangerous. How they can be so insouciant is curious. The Russian military experts on biological weapons say the samples being experimented on in Ukrainian laboratories included pathogens causing a host of deadly diseases, ranging from brucellosis, diphtheria, dysentery, and leptospirosis. Pathogens being studied included anthrax and coronaviruses. Furthermore, the research also involved investigating animal to human transmission of these diseases, such as through bird migration paths specific to Russia. There is also evidence of local outbreaks of these diseases in recent years that are atypical for seasonal conditions.
The documents demonstrating Pentagon sponsorship of the Ukrainian laboratories are original and verifiable, according to Moscow. It has published some of the documents which appear to be genuine. Of course, with Western draconian censorship against Russian news outlets, it is harder for the international public interest to avail of relevant information.
Still, however, the case for an international investigation under the auspices of neutral biowarfare experts is one that is valid and urgent.
We have already seen the worldwide impact of the Covid-19 disease that erupted in late 2019. The last thing Europe and the world needs are a chain of potentially deadly bioweapons facilities in Ukraine that the Pentagon is desperate to cover up.
Many questions need answering seriously. It is contemptible to simply brush these questions aside as “Russian propaganda”. The U.S. has a long and vile history of using bioweapons dating back to killing native American populations with smallpox and later civilian populations in Central America and Cuba. Thus, the U.S. has forfeited any benefit of the doubt owing to its well-documented practices of bioterrorism; especially considering the conspicuous involvement of the Pentagon in Ukraine’s laboratories.
The issue also opens up the bigger picture of Russia’s demands for a security treaty in Europe and the end to NATO expansionism and decades of aggressive threatening. Right now the Western media is saturated with anti-Russian smears and Russophobia. Yet, this is precisely why the questions about the U.S., NATO, Pentagon, and their connections to Ukraine need to be focused on.
Russia has insisted on Ukraine and other former Soviet republics being excluded from the U.S.-led military bloc – for good reasons. The turning of Ukraine into a platform of hostility towards Russia since the CIA-backed coup in Kiev in 2014 is the essential background to why the current war has manifested in Ukraine. The apparent involvement of Pentagon biowarfare laboratories in Ukraine is one reason among several why Russia was compelled to take defensive action with its intervention in Ukraine.
If we are ever to restore peace, then we need to understand where the hostility comes from, how, and why.
The video shows the current president [deranged tyrant] of the USA, Joe Biden, saying that it was he who proposed the bombing of the capital of the then FR Yugoslavia.
“I suggested bombing of Belgrade. I suggested that American pilots go there and destroy all bridges on the Drina,” Biden said.
Zakharova states that Biden talks about it even before the bombing, explaining that Belgrade was bombed.
“Yugoslavia did not pose a direct or indirect threat to the United States or its citizens. They just needed it,” [Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria] Zakharova concluded.
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After the 78-day air war:
“I will continue with every fiber in my being to keep America involved with troops that can shoot and kill…”
“I believe it is absolutely essential for American troops to be on the ground with loaded rifles and drawn bayonets.”
Pentagon-funded labs in nations bordering Russia and China need to be opened up for inspections, the Russian FM said
Samizdat | March 18, 2022
Russia suspects Pentagon-funded bioresearch laboratories in foreign nations, including those in Ukraine, may pose a threat because of the secrecy surrounding their work, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. Washington apparently didn’t want to risk exposing its own people to the pathogenic threat, he suggested.
“The Americans some years ago decided that it was too dangerous to do [such research] on their own soil. So, they moved all these threatening and dangerous activities to other countries,” Lavrov claimed.
“More and more they concentrate their research and experiments around the borders of the Russian Federation and China,” he remarked.
Lavrov was referring to biolabs funded by the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the existence of which was highlighted during Russia’s attack on Ukraine. The Russian military claims it has discovered evidence that the work in Ukrainian labs funded by the US Department of Defense had military applications.
Washington has denied the claims, which had reiterated Russia’s previous suspicions about research undertaken on foreign territory in return for American grants. The US government said the labs existed to study emerging infections throughout the world and served as an epidemic early warning system.
US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland last week testified under oath that there were “biological research facilities in Ukraine,” and that the US was assisting Kiev in destroying research materials so they would not get into Russia’s hands.
In his interview, Lavrov said that, in his assessment, there were more than 300 biolabs worldwide involved in research for the Pentagon. Such facilities should be subject to international monitoring for compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention, which bans any work related to germ warfare. There is no verification mechanism for the treaty – a lapse Moscow wants addressed, Lavrov said.
The UN Security Council is to convene later on Friday at Russia’s request to discuss a legally binding protocol to the convention, “which would require obligatory transparency measures by any participating state,” the minister said. The US stonewalled attempts to implement such a protocol throughout the 1990s before blocking it in 2001, therefore “the Americans … will be against it,” Lavrov predicted, branding the obstruction “not defensible.”
Beijing has previously supported calls for greater transparency about American bioresearch, arguing that Washington would have nothing to hide if all work carried out in foreign labs was as benign as it claimed.
Russia believes that laboratories in Ukraine funded by the US military were making biological weapons components, but that local staff was being kept in the dark about their research, a senior Russian general said on Thursday.
Lieutenant-General Igor Kirillov, who commands the Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Forces of Russia, presented documents and imagery showing why the military has come to such a conclusion.
“We believe that components of biological weapons were being made on the territory of Ukraine,” said Kirillov.
He noted that the documents he was presenting “have the signatures of real officials and are certified by the seals of organizations,” for those journalists and experts in the West doubting their veracity.
One document, dated March 6, 2015 confirms the “direct participation of the Pentagon in the financing of military biological projects in Ukraine,” Kirillov said. The US officially funded the projects through the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, according to the Agreement on Joint Biological Activities. However, the evidence shows that the real recipients of some $32 million in funds were Ukrainian Defense Ministry laboratories in Kiev, Odessa, Lvov and Kharkov.
These facilities were chosen by the US Department of Defense’s Threat Reduction Administration (DTRA), and the contractor Black and Veatch, to carry out the U-P-8 project, aimed at studying the pathogens of Crimea-Congo hemorrhagic fever, leptospirosis, and hantaviruses, Kirillov said, pointing to a slide with the Pentagon’s request.
“From our point of view, the interest of US military biologists is due to the fact that these pathogens have natural foci both in Ukraine and in Russia, and their use can be disguised as natural disease outbreaks,” the general said.
According to the evidence, the labs isolated three bacterial pathogens (causing plague, brucellosis and leptospirosis) and six families of viruses, including coronaviruses, all of which were drug-resistant and spread rapidly from animals to humans. A number of documents confirmed the samples taken in Ukraine to other countries – Georgia, Germany, and the UK.
Kirillov showed official documents confirming the transfer of 5,000 samples of blood serum taken from Ukrainian citizens to the Pentagon-backed Richard Lugar center in Tbilisi, Georgia. Another 773 biological assays were transferred to the UK, while an agreement was signed for the transfer of “unlimited quantities” of infectious materials to the Friedrich Loeffler Institute, Germany’s leading center for animal diseases.
However, the analysis of the obtained evidence suggests that Ukrainian specialists were not aware of the potential risks of transferring these materials, and may have been kept in the dark about the true goal of the ongoing research, Kirillov noted.
Documents from Project P-781, a study of ways of transmitting diseases to humans through bats, showed it was carried out by the Kharkov laboratory and the Lugar Center in Georgia, but Ukraine received most of the $1.6 million grant for the project. Kirillov said that “systematic” research in this area has been carried out since 2009, under the supervision of US specialists – referencing projects P-382, P-444 and P-568.
As one of the key people involved, Kirillov named the head of the DTRA office at the US Embassy in Kiev, Joanna Wintrol.
“Maybe she’s worth talking to, journalists?” he said.
Wintrol left Kiev in August 2020. In her parting interview, she insisted no US scientists worked in Ukrainian biolabs and accused Russia of spreading “false information” about the program.
Kirillov pointed to mass outbreaks of avian flu in Russia and the EU in 2021, causing billions in damages, while the Kharkov Institute of Veterinary Medicine was studying wild birds as transmission vectors and assessing conditions under which the spread could cause economic damage and food insecurity. Evidence now shows the institute collected strains of avian flu capable of jumping species, Kirillov said, calling for an international investigation into the matter.
Some of the documents at the Kherson laboratory appear to be missing and may have been destroyed, Kirillov said, suggesting it was related to the 2018 outbreak of a mosquito-borne parasitic disease in that region, and a possible cover-up.
Four cases of dirofilariasis were detected in February that year, which is not typical for mosquito life cycles, the general said. Pentagon representatives visited the local hospitals in April, collecting medical records and getting briefed on the epidemiological investigation. However, “no documentary evidence regarding this outbreak has been found in the Kherson laboratory,” leading the Russian military to believe that “the urgency of destroying such documentary evidence is explained by the desire to prevent access to them by Russian specialists.”
There was also an outbreak of drug-resistant tuberculosis in 2018, among the citizens of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, with 70 cases detected around the village of Pesky – on the frontline with Ukrainian troops – alone.
“This may indicate a deliberate infection, or an accidental leakage of the pathogen from one of the biological laboratories located on the territory of Ukraine,” Kirillov said.
The Russian general brought up the long history of US conducting banned biological research in other countries, noting as an example that in 2010 Washington apologized for syphilis experiments in Guatemala.
“We will continue to examine the evidence and inform the global community about the illegal activities of the Pentagon and other US government agencies in Ukraine,” Kirillov said.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lawsuits accusing top US universities of harboring antisemitism all originate from one source: a corporate law firm that fielded the pro-settler ex-US ambassador to Israel, and which was registered as a foreign agent of an Israeli principal as recently as 2021.
The firm now represents professional Israel lobby activists posing as victimized “Jewish students” and seeking to crush the free speech rights of Palestine solidarity activists. … continue
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