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Where Was All The Investigative Journalism On US Airstrikes The Last 20 Years?

By Caitlin Johnstone | September 18, 2021

The Pentagon has finally admitted to the long-obvious fact that it killed ten Afghan civilians, including seven children, in an airstrike in Kabul last month.

In an article with the obscenely propagandistic title “Pentagon acknowledges Aug. 29 drone strike in Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians,” the New York Times pats itself on the back for its investigative journalism showing that the so-called “ISIS-K facilitator” targeted in the strike was in fact an innocent aid worker named Zemari Ahmadi:

“The general acknowledged that a New York Times investigation of video evidence helped investigators determine that they had struck a wrong target. ‘As we in fact worked on our investigation, we used all available information,’ General McKenzie told reporters. ‘Certainly that included some of the stuff The New York Times did.’”

Indeed, the Pentagon only admitted to the unjust slaughter of civilians in this one particular instance because the mass media did actual investigative journalism on this one particular airstrike. This is an indictment of the Pentagon’s airstrike protocol, but it’s also an indictment of the mass media.

This after all comes out following a new Byline Times report which found that “at least 5.8 to 6 million people are likely to have died overall due to the War on Terror – a staggering number which is still probably very conservative.”

It also comes out two months after whistleblower Daniel Hale was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for leaking secret government information about America’s psychopathic civilian-slaughtering drone assassination program.

It also comes a few months after a Code Pink report found that the US and its allies have been dropping an average of 46 bombs per day in the so-called War on Terror for the last twenty years.

Do you remember seeing an average of 46 news reports a day on bombings conducted by the US and its allies? Do you remember even reading about one single US bombing per day in the mainstream news? I don’t. The US power alliance has for decades been continuously raining explosives from the sky on impoverished people in the Global South and the mainstream news reports on almost none of those instances, much less launches an in-depth investigation into whether each one killed who the military claims they killed.

The difference between the August 29 airstrike and the thousands which preceded it in America’s post-9/11 wars was that this one was politicized. The Biden administration ordered it to look tough on terrorism after the Kabul airport attack (most of the fatalities from which were probably due to panicked gunfire from US and/or allied troops), amidst a withdrawal for which Biden was being aggressively slammed by plutocratic media outlets eager to paint ending US wars as a bad thing that everyone should oppose.

The Pentagon doesn’t care that it snuffed out innocent lives in an airstrike; it does that all the time and its officials would do it a lot more if that’s what it took to secure their futures as lobbyists, consultants, board members and executives for defense industry corporations after they retire from the military. And the mass media don’t care either; they only cared about this one particular highly politicized airstrike during a withdrawal from a military engagement the mass media vehemently opposed.

“Pentagon acknowledges Aug. 29 drone strike in Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians.” Can you believe that headline? Not “admits” but “acknowledges”. Not “killed children while targeting an aid worker based on flimsy evidence” but “was a tragic mistake”. How many times did New York Times editors rewrite this? Imagine if this had been a Russian airstrike.

Think about all the murder victims we’d have known about if the news media had done its job and used their immense resources to investigate them as journalists should over the last twenty years. Think about how much harder it would have been for the war machine to inflict these evils upon the world if they had. Instead it’s been left to obscure bloggers and indie journalists to question these actions using scant resources and shoestring budgets.

They’ve shown that they can do these investigations into the validity of US airstrikes, and they’ve shown that they’ve spent two decades choosing not to. The mass media manipulators who provide cover for mass military murder by journalistic malpractice and negligence are just as complicit in these depraved acts of human butchery as the people firing the weapons and the officials giving the orders.

September 27, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Pathologists’ Shocking Finding From Deaths After COVID-19 Jabs

Written by Professors Arne Burkhardt and Walter Lang | RT | September 21, 2021

At a press conference today, two experienced pathologists presented their investigations of ten deaths linked to COVID-19 vaccination. They were shocked by the results.  Most of the deaths “likely” or “probably” due to COVID jabs.

Professor Arne Burkhardt and Professor Walter Lang, who presented their findings at a press conference today (September 21, 2021), are both long-time experienced pathologists. Burkhardt headed the Institute of Pathology in Reutlingen for 18 years, and Lang headed a private institute specializing in lung pathology, among other things, for 35 years.

Both, in collaboration with other, unnamed pathologists, investigated ten deaths that had occurred after COVID-19 vaccination. They obtained the tissue material from the forensic pathologists who had first examined the cases. The decedents examined were all over 50.

Of the ten deaths, they found, five were very likely and two were probably related to vaccination; they considered one unclear, and in two they saw no causal relationship. What puzzled them, however, were the similarities among the cases they linked to vaccination.

In three cases, they found rare autoimmune diseases; one of them so rare that they only discovered it when they looked closely at the digitized image. They were Hashimoto’s, an autoimmune-triggered hypothyroidism; leukoclastic vasculitis, an inflammatory reaction in the capillaries that leads to skin bleeding; and Sjögren’s syndrome, an inflammation of the salivary and lacrimal glands.

Although deaths with suspected vaccine reactions are far from a representative sample of the population, three autoimmune diseases in a total of ten is a strikingly high rate.

The most striking finding, however, related to lymphocytes. “The lymphocytes are running amok in all organs,” Professor Lang called it.

Not only did he show accumulations of lymphocytes in a wide variety of tissues, from the heart muscle to the kidney, liver, spleen, and uterus; he also showed images in which the tissue was massively attacked as a result, and a whole series of lymphocyte follicles, which are, as it were, small, developing lymph nodes in completely the wrong place, for example in lung tissue.

It also showed detachments of endothelial cells – which are the smooth cells that form the wall of blood vessels – clumps of red blood cells that ultimately cause thrombosis, and giant cells that formed around trapped foreign bodies.

Lang said he had not seen anything like these clusters of lymphocytes in hundreds of thousands of pathological studies. Normally, other white blood cells, the granulocytes, are found in inflammations. In these cases, however, these are hardly found, and instead there are masses of lymphocytes.

Further investigations are needed to determine which type of lymphocyte is involved in this process and how exactly it is triggered in order to prove a watertight connection with the vaccination; however, the histological examinations required for this would still take at least six months.

Still, he said, the results available so far are important enough to make known in advance in the form of this press conference.

“We’re missing out on 90 percent,” he said of the number of fatal vaccine reactions. That is not the fault of forensic scientists and pathologists, he said; after all, you can only see what you know, and forensic medicine can’t do histological examinations anyway.

But it is urgently necessary to perform more autopsies on such cases. Unfortunately, he said, that is often hindered.

“Our task is to educate people about risks and side effects,” he said of the goal of his work.

A task that would actually have to be fulfilled by institutions such as the Paul Ehrlich Institute in the case of experimental vaccines with emergency approval.

Source: https://de.rt.com/inland/124390-lymphozyten-laufen-amok-pathologen-untersuchen-todesfaelle-nach-impfung/. Translated from German by www.DeepL.com/Translator.

Enhanced translation from original German by Calvin Luther Martin.

September 27, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Palestine Voices: Abrahim Amen, Bet Lahia, Gaza

Al-Haq | September 20, 2021

Abrahim Amen, a survival from an Israeli rocket attack that destroyed his family house and killed his father and three sisters, on May 14, 2021.

September 27, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Video, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Washington’s Assembly Line for Retraining Soldiers in Syria Isn’t Stopping

By Valery Kulikov – New Eastern Outlook – 25.09.2021

According to the Syrian news agency SANA, on September 19, US Air Force helicopters transported two new groups of militants to their base in Al-Shaddadah in Al-Hasakah Governorate, northeastern Syria, for retraining. There were about 60 people in total who had previously fought in the ranks of the terrorist group ISIS.

These militants were transported from a prison in the city of Qamishli, where they were guarded by Kurds from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) after ISIS’s defeat in 2019. The majority of these prisoners have Iraqi citizenship, and among them are also Saudi Arabians and Tunisians. According to SANA sources, at least three former ISIS members have held senior positions in its regional structure in the past. One of them presided over the police force in Deir ez-Zor, another headed penitentiary facilities, and the third was responsible for finances.

SANA elaborates that they will undergo retraining at the US military base in order to later integrate into puppet groups under the label of the “Army of Free Tribes,” which are used by the US command to conduct subversive operations in northeastern Syria.

It is notable that this is not the first such US operation to organize “retraining courses” for Islamist militants at its bases in Syria. For example, on August 7, 40 ISIS supporters were transported to a base controlled by the US Armed Forces in Al-Shaddadah. As reported by the Syrian media, the terrorists, among whom were an ISIS “spy group leader” and “explosives specialist,” were moved to the military base from prisons under the control of the Kurdish SDF. It was stressed that the terrorists “were armed and received logistical support for the perpetration of further acts of terrorism, the target of which could be populated areas, sites occupied by the Syrian army, and infrastructure.”

On June 21, US Air Force helicopters transported yet another group of militants to Al-Shaddadah from the Es-Sanawiya prison, situated in the administrative center of Al-Hasakah. They were also preparing to join the Army of Free Tribes group, which the United States uses to conduct operations in northeast Syria.

Prior to this, in April no less than 70 other former mercenaries from the ranks of ISIS were transferred from Ghuwayran prison, which is also controlled by SDF fighters, to the pro-Western coalition base at Al-Tanf where the borders of Syria, Iraq, and Jordan meet.

Mehmet Ali Güller, the Turkish author of “ISIS. Black Terror,” writes that ISIS has always been a “convenient enemy” for the USA and has served as a “skeleton key” for doors, which Washington has wanted to open.

Another Turkish publication, Milliyet, emphasizes that the USA has constantly signaled the need to focus on the fight against ISIS, but it has never acted with the aim of destroying it. The USA used ISIS to change the map of the region, reconstruct it, establish the space for a terrorist mini-state, and partition and destroy the region’s states. Somewhere there was ISIS, and somewhere “Al-Qaeda” or “Khuras al-Din”. In other words, the USA has never seriously fought against the by-products of its own creation, which have appeared under different names. The publication emphasizes that the USA only ever acted with the consideration of exploiting them in their own interests and for their own benefit.

Any supporting information about secret ties between the USA and ISIS should not surprise anyone, since even The Washington Post writes that the leader of ISIS, Amir Mohammed Said Abel-Rahman al-Mawla, also known as Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Kurashi, previously performed the role of informant for the US military in Iraq. An in-depth investigation of the support that several Western intelligence agencies, including the CIA, provide to jihadist groups in Syria can be found in “The Secret War in Syria” by Maxim Shae, an expert on covert operations, intelligence and US foreign policy.

Not only does the USA continue to conduct “retraining” for former ISIS fighters and other extremist groups in “its own interests,” but it also supplies them with weapons. The aim of such US actions is extremely simple: to prepare a new detachment of radical pro-American groups that will perform the rough work of Special Force units. And the results of these actions are already plain to see: on September 17, the militants cut off the power supply across Damascus and sabotaged a gas pipeline to the South near Deir Ali. In addition to disabling the pipeline, according to Reuters and Al-Ikhbariya there have been attempts to blow up two power lines in the Khuran district of Damascus.

Besides training ISIS fighters at American military bases in Syria, the US-backed SDF abduct civilians to force them to fight in their ranks, carry out raids on Syrian cities, and wreak havoc in the country. Thus, on September 20, as reported by SANA news agency, the SDF executed another raid on houses in the town of Abu Hamam in Deir ez-Zor during which they abducted nine local residents, who were taken in an unknown direction. It is reported that the militants indiscriminately opened fire to disperse some people who were trying to recapture the abducted residents, sowing panic among the civilian population. Windows were also broken in several houses. The kidnapping was carried out with the support of the US military.

In order to avoid allegations against the US Air Force of killing civilians, the Pentagon plans to train SDF militants in independent operations with the use of military aircraft. For this, training in aviating and using T-6 Texan aircraft and MD-500 helicopters was organized at the Al-Kafr base. For this purpose, according to the available data, three such aircraft and two helicopters have already been delivered to the American base.

Furthermore, as El Mundo and many other Western media have already reported, US militants who have undergone “special training” are actively deployed in Syria, along with mercenaries from the American private military company Academi, to guard and transport convoys with stolen Syrian oil to Iraq.

Meanwhile, it should be recalled that US military personnel are in Syria illegally, violating the norms of the UN Security Council. Washington funds the militants through a program of assistance to the “Syrian opposition” and is using them to retain its positions in the Syrian oil fields.

These illegal and predatory actions on behalf of Washington must ultimately be subject to a legal assessment by the international community and be stopped!

September 25, 2021 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Israel to get another billion dollars – Time for an Iron Dome for Palestinians

By Alison Weir | Israel-Palestine News | September 24, 2021

The House of Representatives just voted 420-9 in favor of a fast-tracked bill (H.R. 5323) to give Israel an additional $1 billion dollars. The bill is now in the Senate (S.2839), where it is expected to be passed with little or no dissent.

In other words, once again, the vast majority of U.S. politicians from both parties obeyed Israel’s demand that American taxpayers give Israel their hard-earned tax dollars. Keep in mind that this $1 billion is over and above the $3.8 billion – $10.5 million per day – in military aid Israel currently receives from the U.S. Plus, our reps plan to expend an additional $3 billion on behalf of Israel.

This is on top of decades of receiving more U.S. tax money than any other country on earth. On average, Israelis have received 7,000 times more aid from the U.S. per capita than others around the world.

In voting for this latest billion dollars to Israel, members of the Israel lobby were elated at this demonstration of their power. Other Congress people explained that they were supporting the bill because it would ‘save civilian lives’ in Israel. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, for example, said that Iron Dome has “saved thousands of lives.”

Pelosi and the other 408 politicians who voted for the bill didn’t explain why Israel’s numerous billionaires and millionaires shouldn’t pay for this system themselves.

More important, our politicians failed to note that the population whose civilians have been killed in vastly larger numbers are actually Palestinians, including multitudes of children.

The bill that our politicians voted for states that the billion dollars “shall be provided to address emergent requirements in support of Operation Guardian of the Walls.”

The bill leaves out the fact that during this operation Israeli forces killed 260 Gazans, 66 of them children (Palestinian resistance groups killed a total of 13 people in Israel).

The bill also fails to mention that the Israeli operation damaged 52,000 Palestinian homes, totally destroying 2,400 of them, and displaced 120,000 Palestinian men, women, and children. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International both reported that Israel committed war crimes.

Amnesty stated: “There is a horrific pattern emerging of Israel launching airstrikes in Gaza targeting residential buildings and family homes – in some cases entire families were buried beneath the rubble when the building they lived in collapsed.”

Gazan children walk among the rubble of a building destroyed by an airstrike, May 24, 2021, in the Gaza Strip. (John Minchillo, AP )

And this is typical. Previous “wars” between Israel and Gazans (the large majority of whom are from families that were ethnically cleansed by Israel) have been just as one-sided. Over the years, Israeli airstrikes have killed approximately 4,000 Gazans, while Palestinian rockets have killed a total of 49 people in Israel.

In other words, Iron Dome actually costs lives – It allows Israel to attack and oppress Palestinians time after time, without being constrained by concern that such attacks could lead to retaliation that would endanger Israeli citizens.

It is clear that civilians in Gaza are in desperate need of protection.

Therefore, I suggest that our Congressional representatives who say they are so deeply concerned about civilian deaths now support an Iron Dome-like system for Palestinians.

If any of our Congress members truly care about all human beings, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, or nationality, they will immediately introduce such a bill.

Anyone who agrees with this can use the form below to contact their Congress members and ask them to introduce such life-saving legislation.

September 24, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

‘Israel and the Zionist enterprise were born in sin’, says heir to an iconic Zionist family

Yaakov Sharett [Youtube]

Yaakov Sharett
MEMO | September 20, 2021

In a remarkable political conversion, Yaakov Sharett, the heir to an iconic Zionist family and son of Israel’s second Prime Minister, Moshe Sharett, has turned his back on the founding ideology of the occupation state.

“The State of Israel and the Zionist enterprise were born in sin,” said Sharett in an interview with Haaretz. The 95-year-old spoke at length about his journey from a faithful servant of Zionism in the state of Israel to one of its harshest critics.

Sharett was born in 1927 and is said to belong to a well-connected family from the cream of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine. His father was Israel’s first foreign minister and one of the country’s leaders who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1948. Sharett also dutifully served Israel as a member of the Shin Bet, the country’s security agency, and helped Soviet Jews flee to Israel.

Ending his days in Tel Aviv as an anti-Zionist, Sharett predicts dark days for the country he spent nearly his entire life serving. “This original sin pursues and will pursue us and hang over us,” said Sharett referring to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine prior to Israel’s creation in 1948. More than half of the indigenous community were expelled in an attempt to artificially construct a Jewish majority.

Sharett recollected the history of Zionism and its rise within Jewish communities. He argued that the moment Zionism called for the Jews to immigrate to Israel, in order to establish an ethno-nationalist state, a conflict was created. “I see in this whole transformation of the majority [Arab] to a minority and the minority [Jewish] into a majority as immoral,” explained Sharett.

“Have you seen anywhere in the world where the majority would agree to give in to a foreign invader, who says, ‘our forefathers were here,’ and demands to enter the land and take control?” Sharett rhetorically asked. “The conflict was inherent and Zionism denied this, ignored it… as the proportion of Jews to Arabs changed in favor of the Jews, the Arabs realized that they were losing the majority. Who would agree to such a thing?”

Lamenting his continued presence in Israel he said that he sees himself as a “a collaborator” against his will.

I’m a forced collaborator with a criminal country. I’m here, I have nowhere to go. Because of my age, I can’t go anywhere. And that bothers me. Every day. This recognition won’t leave me. The recognition that in the end, Israel is a country occupying and abusing another people.

Sharett also railed against Israel’s turn towards religious fundamentalism and ultra-nationalism. “When I see the prime minister with a kipah on his head, I don’t feel good,” he added. “This is not the Israel I want to see. How did it happen that this new place, that was to have brought innovations, became the blackest place, controlled by the nationalist ultra-Orthodox? How is it that here of all places, there’s reactionism and zealotry, messianism, the desire to expand and control another people?”

September 20, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Apologies and compensation are simply not good enough for the victims of drone attacks

By Yvonne Ridley | MEMO | September 20, 2021

Palestine Action is, as its name implies, involved in direct action against some of the arms trade’s most deadly production lines, notably Israel’s Elbit Systems. Since it burst onto the scene, quite a few members have been arrested at some of Elbit’s ten known factories and offices in Britain.

Elbit Systems is Israel’s largest arms company; it makes deadly “unmanned aerial vehicles”, known as drones. Palestine Action’s trademark calling card is deep red paint; it has used gallons since last year, symbolising the blood of innocents spilled in drone strikes.

Recently, the group has expanded its brief from targeting weapons factories to spraying the tented entrance of Britain’s biggest arms fair — DSEI at London’s ExCel Centre — to remind those seeking to buy weapons of the bloodshed caused by the products marketed within. Key exhibitors such as Elbit Systems, Raytheon, BAE Systems, and Lockheed Martin use arms fairs to market their deadly technology and products to governments from around the world. Perhaps they should be the focus of police interest rather than members of Palestine Action.

Palestine Action activists dyed security tent blood red and threw red and green flares on the Excel exhibition centre in London – Sunday, Sept 12, 2021 [VX Photo/ Vudi Xhymshiti]

Like many others, I am sick and tired of half-hearted apologies from the armed forces which use (or misuse) their weaponry. There’s nothing “smart” about a precision-guided missile which kills innocent civilians as — and I hate this term — collateral damage. There is no such thing as a clinical kill, a point agreed by several protest groups which have criticised the arms fair for its role in enabling the destructive US-UK war in Afghanistan over the past twenty years.

According to US policy, attacks by drones are not to go ahead if there is a probability that innocent civilians will be killed or injured. As we found out a few days ago, the US doesn’t really have a clue who it’s blowing up. Call me naïve, but it seems that the only certain thing when a drone takes to the air is, that innocent civilians will die, whether they’re Afghani, Iraqi, Pakistani, Yemeni, Syrian, or Palestinian.

Drone attacks were much favoured by Barack Obama who joked about their efficiency. One news story illustrated how much he ordered their use by pointing out that it would take the former US president more than three years to get through them all if he apologised to one innocent person a day. Human rights groups have demanded transparency from all US presidents since the Bush administration launched its drone wars, but there remains very little clarity on the number of civilians killed.

I’ve suspected this for many years. After the most recent US apology for killing civilians, I had a sense of déjà vu. In April 2003, I travelled solo to Paktika in Afghanistan after hearing rumours of an atrocity against innocent civilians in a district called Bermal. All eyes were focused on Iraq so even though I got the story, it was difficult to find someone to publish it. There’s only so much injustice against the people of Asia and the Middle East that the media is prepared to broadcast or publish.

While I was investigating the atrocity in southern Afghanistan, a senior US army officer was also in the district with hush money to keep Afghan villagers quiet. He did not want people talking to me in case I found out that America had killed eleven children in another deadly blunder.

The Pentagon had claimed that it destroyed a Taliban stronghold when, in fact, US forces had destroyed a house. The grieving mother — Sawara was her name —lost all of her nine children in the attack. She was like an empty shell when I finally spoke to her.

She and her husband Mawes Khan had put their children to bed in the family home they shared with his brother Sardar, and his wife and their seven children. By morning, the corpses of eleven brothers, sisters, and cousins lay in a neat row in the courtyard. The Americans realised the full extent of their mistake and gave the family the equivalent of £6,350 and an apology.

That happened two years into the war when the number of dead Afghan civilians was not deemed important enough to register. How much compensation will the Americans pay to Zemari Ahmadi after wiping out ten members of his family, including eight children? The admission of guilt and an apology were only forthcoming because the world’s media was in Kabul on the day of the attack and had access to the scene of devastation as well as eyewitnesses and survivors to interview.

The media in Washington was briefed about how an unnamed ISIS-Khorasan fighter had been in a vehicle with an associate at the time of the strike, which was carried out by an MQ-9 Reaper drone. Captain Bill Urban, spokesman for US Central Command, assured journalists that the military had used specially chosen precision munitions in order to minimise civilian casualties. In essence, the compliant media was being fed propaganda packed with deceptive euphemisms.

The drone attack on the eve of the departure of the last US troops had come three days after Isis-Khorisan terrorists killed dozens of Afghan civilians, nearly 30 Taliban soldiers, and thirteen members of the US military in a suicide bombing at the gates of Kabul Airport. Civilians always suffer when the US rushes in to wreak revenge.

This week we heard US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin apologise for a “horrible mistake” after he admitted: “We now know that there was no connection between Mr Ahmadi and Isis-Khorasan, that his activities on that day were completely harmless and not at all related to the imminent threat we believed we faced, and that Mr Ahmadi was just as innocent a victim as were the others tragically killed.”

Compare this with the narrative pushed out on 29 August when the US military claimed triumphantly to have taken out ISIS terrorists and that there had been “significant secondary explosions from the vehicle”, suggesting that explosives were on board. Journalists were told that there were “no indications” of civilian casualties. As I said, America would have got away with the lies had there not been so many foreign journalists on the ground.

It emerged that Zemari Ahmadi is an engineer for aid group Nutrition and Education International. He was observed placing large water bottles or jugs into the back of his white car. US intelligence (surely a contradiction in terms) interpreted this as an ISIS-K member packing explosives into a vehicle for another suicide mission.

It is time for the world to accept that there’s no such thing as a surgical strike and that unmanned drones are among the worst weapons for producing civilian casualties. It would, therefore, make more sense to listen to groups like Palestine Action rather than deploy deadly weapons which have a track record of killing innocent people.

The theme of the DSEI fair at the ExCel Centre was “Integrated Response to Future Threats”, with a focus on drone warfare and surveillance technology. Palestine Action says that this will mean a greater role for drones in British policing as the government enters new procurement and training contracts with the likes of Elbit Systems. According to the activists’ press release, the London fair and a similar exhibition in Liverpool “serve a similar purpose of normalising these firms’ operations and providing an open market for the exchange of the weapons of war. Palestine Action is calling for the cancellation of both events and the ceasing of these firms’ operations on British soil, failing which direct action will continue and will escalate.”

Drone strikes outside the declared war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq are the province of the CIA and the secretive US Joint Special Operations Command. Various US administrations have treated them as official secrets. In the absence of justice for the families of those killed accidentally and/or targeted in drone strikes, civil disobedience and resistance is thus the duty of all reasonable people in war zones like Palestine, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere.

It is easy for governments to demonise dead civilians as “terrorists” because most are killed in remote areas where the absence of justice or journalists makes it easier for the authorities to bury their mistakes. With governments prepared to lie or twist the facts, weapons manufacturers should be careful about those to whom they sell their arms, or be ready to be accused of complicity in war crimes.

We now suspect that the Palestinian children killed while playing on a beach in Gaza in 2014 were hit by an Israeli drone strike. The manufacturers are surely just as complicit as the Israeli soldiers who targeted young boys. Again, had journalists not been in an adjacent hotel when the strike took place, Israel might have got away with insulting everyone’s intelligence by claiming that Hamas “terrorists” were on active duty that day.

These are the sort of crimes that British police officers should be investigating, instead of arresting the people who draw attention to international war crimes and criminal negligence which led to the killing of Palestine’s 9-year-old Ismayil Bahar, 10-year-old Aed Bahar, 10-year-old Zacharia Bahar, and 11-year-old Muhammed Bahar on that Gaza beach; the Ahmadi family in Kabul earlier this month; and the Khan’s eleven children in Bermal in 2003, as well as the tens of thousands of others in-between. The law of universal jurisdiction exists to allow states to prosecute those responsible for international crimes committed elsewhere. The fact that few, if any such prosecutions go ahead, signals a degree of complicity at the highest levels of governments and judiciaries.

In such cases, it is not always the law that is an ass, but the people charged with implementing it and ensuring that justice is seen to be done for people like the Bahar, Ahmadi, and Khan families. Apologies and compensation are simply not good enough.

September 20, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Solidarity and Activism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Reflections on the 39th anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre

Memorial posters in the Sabra and Shatila massacre graveyard.

Memorial posters in the Sabra and Shatila massacre graveyard [Ferdous Al-Audhali/Middle East Monitor]
Dr Swee Chai Ang | MEMO | September 18, 2021

The steadfastness and courage of Sabra and Shatila are in all of our hearts. Today, we commemorate the cruel injustice inflicted on the Palestinians in the massacre of 1982, knowing that this is just one of the continuous assaults on Palestinians since 1948. We resolve to continue to be with you all in your difficult journey in solidarity, hope and love, knowing that one day, the freedom and peace stolen from the Palestinian people for all these years will be won back through your struggle. We commemorate with tears, but pledge our commitment to this struggle with all our strength and lives. We know that the day will come when our children’s laughter will be the reward of years of sacrifice and endurance.

In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. It bombed Lebanon by land, air and sea, and laid siege to Beirut. Israel killed and wounded thousands of innocent people and made at least 100,000 homeless within a few weeks. Beirut city was denied electricity, medicine, food and water.

I resigned from my job at a hospital in London to help the victims in Lebanon. At that time, my sympathies were with Israel, and I had not known that Palestinians existed. But I could no longer stand by and watch the wounding and killings of women, children and unarmed civilians – or watch them being made homeless as the bombs continuously fell on Lebanon.

I arrived in Beirut in August 1982, and was seconded to Gaza Hospital in Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. It was one of nine hospitals and 13 clinics of the Palestine Red Crescent Society and the only one that was not flattened by the bombs.

The people of Sabra and Shatila told me about their suffering ever since they were driven out of Palestine to become refugees in 1948. Many of the residents of Sabra and Shatila were third and fourth-time refugees being driven from camp to camp when their families were killed and homes destroyed by Israeli planes. That was the first time I heard about their terrible suffering. That was also the first time I met Palestinians.

After resisting the continuous bombardment for ten weeks, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) evacuated in exchange for peace. The US promised that it would protect the 300,000 Palestinian refugees left behind in Lebanon. They were encouraged to return from the shelters to the refugee camps to rebuild their homes and lives. But this did not happen.

Three weeks later, on 15 September, 1982, Israeli tanks were allowed to overrun Beirut. A large number surrounded and sealed Sabra and Shatila refugee camp so that no one could leave nor enter the camp.

Sniping started once the camp was sealed. Initially, the wounded and dead brought into the hospital were mainly women gathering water and food for their families. By the afternoon of the next day, men, women, children and babies were shot in their homes. Many were brought in dead and filled the mortuary.

More than 2,000 frightened people fled into our hospital with stories that the Haddads, Kataebs and Israelis were killing defenceless families in the camp. They feared for their lives.

They could not escape, and no one protected them.

The hospital ran out of blood, medication and food. Our medical and surgical team worked non-stop. I wanted the nurses to give the last packet of blood to a wounded mother, but she pleaded for it to be given to her child, and she died shortly afterwards.

At night, the skies of Sabra and Shatila were lit with Israeli military flares. We heard explosions and machine gun noises throughout, and the wounded continued to be brought into Gaza Hospital.

It was especially painful to operate on a little boy who was shot along with 27 members of his family. As the bodies fell on him, he passed out and was mistaken for dead by the murderers. When he awoke, he was in great pain. Years later, he told of how he heard women being rounded up and raped. His physical wounds may have healed, but his emotional scars are still with him today. It took my American colleagues four years to get him out of living in the house where his family was murdered. He was not the only child who suffered in this way.

At dawn on 18 September, 1982, soldiers with machine guns forced the entire international medical volunteer team out of the hospital.

When we were marched into Rue Sabra, we saw groups of old men, women and children rounded up by militia. A frightened, desperate young mother tried to give me her baby, but was forced to take it back. She begged them to spare her baby. They were all subsequently executed, including the mother and baby.

There were dead bodies piled up in the camp alleys and bulldozers destroying camp homes. We had struggled for 72 hours non-stop without food and sleep to save dozens of lives. But within the same 72 hours, at least 3,000 were killed.

I was 33 years old then. I grew up a Zionist Christian and never knew Palestinians existed until I stepped foot in Sabra and Shatila. I knew then that it was my human responsibility never to walk away from this horrendous injustice. I also realised that I must speak up on behalf of the victims. The dead could not speak up, and the survivors needed my voice.

After testifying to five Commissions of Inquiry on Sabra and Shatila, including travelling to Israel with Ellen Siegel to give evidence to the Israeli Kahan Commission of Inquiry into the conduct of the Israeli Army in Sabra and Shatila, I returned to the UK. The Palestinians in Lebanon continued to be destitute, homeless and hungry. Justice seemed not to be in sight. The situation was dire for them, and indeed, they continued to suffer and become more desperate. Children were born and grew up in the long, dark shadow of the massacre, and there was no hope of returning to Palestine. Could we make their lives just a little bit easier?

Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) was founded in the aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, under those circumstances. We wanted to support the Palestinians in any small way that we could. The founders of MAP formed the organisation so that the horrors of the massacre could be turned into a bridge – a positive channel of friendship and solidarity between people in the UK and the Palestinians – not only in Lebanon, but also in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and in the diaspora.

Since then, MAP has not only worked with the Palestinians in Lebanon, but also in Gaza and the West Bank. The existence of MAP is also our way to let them know we will never forsake or forget them. What MAP is doing is minuscule, a drop in the ocean, but we are part of the tide moving towards justice for the Palestinians.

As for me, I count myself privileged and honoured to be able to journey alongside the Palestinians, to be accepted as their family. Whether in Shatila, in Gaza, onboard the Freedom Flotilla Al-Awda to Gaza, in Israeli prison or being deported, I want my life to be an acceptable tribute to the Palestinians. They welcomed me into their broken lives and homes and made me one of their own, offering me Arabic coffee in the midst of the rubble they call home. For this, I will thank God every day of my life, until death do us part.

September 18, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

That no one will resign for killing Kabul children shows American empire’s true face

Seven children, including Jamshid Yousoufi’s two-year-old daughter Sumaya, died in the American strike, which killed ten civilians in total. © RT
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | September 18, 2021

While finally admitting the “righteous” drone strike against ISIS-K terrorists actually killed civilians and children, the Pentagon won’t punish anyone, because these things aren’t considered war crimes when the US does it.

General Kenneth McKenzie, head of the US Central Command, offered “profound condolences” on Friday to the families of 10 people – seven of them children – killed in the August 29 drone strike in Kabul. It was ordered in “earnest belief that it would prevent an imminent threat to our forces,” but “it was a mistake and I offer my sincere apology,” he said.

McKenzie then did what the Pentagon does best: he put up a powerpoint presentation, explaining how US “intelligence” came to the conclusion that 43-year-old aid worker Zemari Ahmadi going to and from work in his white Toyota was really an Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K) terrorist plotting a car-bombing of the Kabul airport.

What he did not do, however, is resign or promise anyone else involved in this atrocity would do the same – or even be reprimanded, counseled, or otherwise disciplined. One might think someone ought to, considering that they killed children.

That’s not how the Pentagon works, though. For two weeks, the US military lied about the drone strike, and the corporate press ran with it.

McKenzie’s CENTCOM initially claimed that the vehicle was an “imminent threat” to the airport and the ongoing airlift, and that there were no civilian casualties. Then they said there might have been civilian casualties, but blamed that on the supposed secondary explosions.

“We know that there were substantial and powerful subsequent explosions resulting from the destruction of the vehicle, indicating a large amount of explosive material inside that may have caused additional casualties,” CENTCOM spokesman Captain Bill Urban said on August 29.

Literally none of this was true.

According to a New York Times investigation published on September 10, what the US thought was a suspicious compound turned out to be the office of a US-funded food charity, where Ahmadi had worked for 14 years. The suspicious bags and containers loaded into his white Toyota? Laptop cases and jugs of water he was bringing home.

Ahmadi had even applied for a visa to emigrate into the US, as one of the “special immigrants” the Kabul airlift was ostensibly trying to evacuate. Someone gave the order, however, and a Hellfire missile obliterated him, his car, and seven children that came to greet him.

The last US flight out of Kabul departed just before midnight on August 30. President Joe Biden addressed the nation the following day, calling the airlift an “extraordinary success.” The day after, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley faced reporters at the Pentagon, patting themselves on the back for a job well done.

Asked about the drone strike, Milley described it as “righteous” and said it killed an ISIS-K “facilitator.”

“Were the[re] others killed? Yes. Who are they? We don’t know,” he said, seeming more interested in talking about his own anger and pain over the war that just ended.

Twelve days later, on Monday after the Times investigation was made public, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby was still insisting that the Kabul strike had prevented an “imminent attack” against the airport and the US forces there. It wasn’t until Friday afternoon, when Washington traditionally releases all the bad news, that McKenzie popped up on the screen at the Pentagon briefing room and delivered his “oops.”

Except this isn’t an “oops.” It’s a war crime. They killed children.

Ahmadi and the children were killed because the White House had to look tough after the August 26 suicide bombing at the Kabul airport killed 13 US troops and 170 Afghans, and demonstrate “over the horizon” capabilities it claimed to have. McKenzie had to look like the withdrawal wasn’t a humiliation. Milley had to look competent – just like when he reassured China in January that “the American government is stable and everything is going to be OK,” while working with the Democrats to sideline President Donald Trump and prepare DC for Biden, according to a book widely quoted on Tuesday.

Resign? Of course not. Besides, Milley said he did nothing wrong, and Biden declared “complete confidence” in him.

Thing is, Joe and Ken and Mark and everyone else involved up and down that chain of command killed children.

Worse yet, they had to have known it right away. Local media reported the civilian casualties immediately, followed by outlets like CNN. RT interviewed the survivors days before the Times investigation was published. Is anyone seriously suggesting the New York Times had the resources and capability that the infinitely better-funded Pentagon and the CIA did not? Or were they too busy studying critical race theory and purging domestic “deplorables” to pay attention to which white Toyota they were blowing up in Kabul? Don’t they all look alike, anyway?

They. Killed. Children.

It’s not even the first time, either. According to the ‘Drone Papers’ published in October 2015 and detailing US drone strikes in Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere, up to 90% of casualties at one point were innocents – but the military classified them as terrorists anyway.

The man who revealed this, Daniel Hale, was sent to prison for 45 months back in July.

The man who blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program, John Kiriakou, likewise ended up behind bars. WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is still stuck in an English oubliette, a decade after exposing US war crimes in Iraq. Meanwhile, the generals and politicians who murder children and commit other war crimes – they get medals and promotions, fawning book accounts, lush retirements in “defense” industries. And power, of course.

That’s how the empire works. Always has been, even as its child-murdering leaders talk about “defending democracy” and “rules-based international order” and “human rights for women and girls.”

Tell that to two-year-old Malika Ahmadi and Sumaya Yousoufi, whom you killed on August 29 in Kabul. I hope their ghosts haunt you for the rest of your miserable lives.

Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Telegram @TheNebulator

September 18, 2021 Posted by | Deception, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Florida & Texas fume as Biden seizes and RATIONS supply of life-saving Covid treatments

RT | September 16, 2021

Seven southern US states, mostly led by Republican governors, say they are now facing shortages of monoclonal antibody treatments for Covid-19 after the federal government took over the distribution, citing the need for “equity.”

Monoclonal antibodies (MAB) are lab-created proteins that help those already infected deal with the virus. They have been intensively deployed in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas – states dealing with the recent surge of Delta-variant cases. With the exception of Louisiana, they are all run by Republicans.

On Wednesday, the Biden administration announced it would take over the distribution of these treatments using the Defense Production Act and would be centralizing them under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). A HHS spokesperson said this was being done to avoid shortages, as the seven states account for 70% of all orders.

“Given this reality, we must work to ensure our supply of these life-saving therapies remains available for all states and territories, not just some,” the spokesperson told CNN.

“HHS will determine the amount of product each state and territory receives on a weekly basis. State and territorial health departments will subsequently identify sites that will receive product and how much,” the spokesperson said. “This system will help maintain equitable distribution, both geographically and temporally, across the country – providing states and territories with consistent, fairly-distributed supply over the coming weeks.”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican who has clashed with President Joe Biden on Covid policies – from mask mandates to compulsory vaccination – said that the move has resulted in cutting the supply to his state by more than 50%.

The federal government has allocated fewer than 31,000 doses to Florida this week, while the average need for hospitals and state clinics is 72,000, his office said.

DeSantis said on Thursday that he has reached out to GlaxoSmithKline, another pharmaceutical company, to purchase their MAB treatment in order to make up the shortfall.

In Texas, the Biden administration told the state “to reduce its use of the therapeutic treatment that has literally been saving lives and reducing hospitalizations,” Mark Keough, a judge in charge of Montgomery County, just north of Houston, said in a Facebook post on Tuesday.

“The manufacturer has confirmed supplies are ample but due to the Defense Production Act, the White House and it’s agencies are the only entities who can purchase and distribute this treatment,” Keough added.

“So, less than a week after the president tells us his patience is wearing thin and he is mandating vaccines to millions of Americans, his administration limits and all but removes a non-controversial and highly successful treatment from our war chest of combating this virus,” he said.

One DeSantis aide said that the HHS hasn’t adequately explained its move, or given a warning.

“They had a vague statement about ‘equity’ but sorry that doesn’t cut it,” the aide told Real Clear Politics. “No explanation of how the allocation was determined. No explanation of why it’s only Florida and a few other red states being restricted. No warning.”

“How is it equitable to only send treatment for HALF the Floridians who need it, & NO state sites in Alabama?” DeSantis’s press secretary Christina Pushaw asked on Twitter.

She also pointed out that, just weeks ago, Democrats and their allies in the corporate press were claiming that MAB treatments were a scam to enrich a DeSantis donor – prompting a war of words – but have now suddenly pivoted to claiming that Florida is using too many doses.

Some pundits are going so far as to speculate that the move is part of a “civil war” in the US, since six out of seven states hardest-hit by HHS rationing are run by Republicans, and incumbent Donald Trump won all of them in the 2020 election.

September 16, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

And now the feds are taking over the distribution of monocloncal antibodies

By Meryl Nass, MD | September 16, 2021

From the WaPo we learn there is a shortage of monoclonal antibodies, so the feds will take over distribution.  Hmm. We don’t know anything about long-term side effects of monoclonals.

Monoclonal antibodies are an effective and very expensive product if used in the first week of illness–just like hydroxychloroquine, which the feds (and most states) have restricted. Will this move restrict monoclonals too? Why are the feds buying monoclonals to dole out for free but not letting us have HCQ and ivermectin? Does it have anything to do with the fact they are injected?

And of course the feds defend the move with the “equity” argument.

The Biden administration moved this week to stave off shortages of monoclonal antibodies, taking over distribution of the critical covid-19 therapy and purchasing 1.4 million additional doses…

“HHS will determine the amount of product each state and territory receives on a weekly basis,” an HHS spokesman said. “State and territorial health departments will subsequently identify sites that will receive product and how much.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe new procedures that are still being explained to communities throughout the country.

“This system will help maintain equitable distribution, both geographically and temporally, across the country, providing states and territories with consistent, fairly distributed supply over the coming weeks,” he added.

September 16, 2021 Posted by | Deception, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

The Meaning of the FDA Resignations

By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | September 14, 2021

How significant is it that the two top FDA officials responsible for vaccine research resigned last week and this week signed a letter in The Lancet that strongly warns against vaccine boosters? This is a remarkable sign that the project of government-managed virus mitigation is in the final stages before falling apart.

The booster has already been promoted by top lockdown advocates Neil Ferguson of Imperial College and Anthony Fauci of NIH, even in the face of rising public incredulity toward their “expert” advice. For these two FDA officials to go on record with grave doubts – and their perspective is certainly backed by the unimpressive booster experience in Israel – introduces a major break in the narrative that the experts in charge deserve our trust and deference.

What’s at stake here? It’s about more than the boosters. It’s about the whole experience of taking away the control of health management from individuals and medical professionals and handing it over to modelers and government officials with coercive power.

From the first week of March 2020, the US embarked on a wild experiment in virus mitigation, deploying a series of measures with a sweep and scope that had never previously been attempted, not in modern times and not even in ancient times. The litany of controls and tactics is long. Many of these measures survive in most parts of the US. The retail landscape is still filled with plexiglass. We are still invited to sanitize ourselves when going indoors. People still mask up in proximity to others. The “Karens” of the world are still actively shaming and denouncing anyone suspected of non-compliance.

The vaccine push has been particularly divisive, with President Biden actively encouraging “anger” at those who don’t get the jab, even as he refuses to acknowledge the existence of infection-induced immunities. In several cities, people who refuse vaccines are being denied active participation in civic life, and a populist movement is rising up that scapegoats the refuseniks as the only reason that the virus continues to be a problem.

All these measures were deployed in waves of controls. It all began with event cancellations and school closures. It continued with travel bans, most of which are still in place. Sanitization and plexiglass were next. Masks were rolled out and then mandated. The principle of forced human separation governed social interactions. Capacity limits indoors were a common feature. The US example inspired many governments around the world to adopt these NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions) and take away the liberties of the people.

At each stage of control, there were new claims that we’ve finally found the answer, the key technique that would finally slow and stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Nothing worked, as the virus seemed to follow its own course regardless of all these measures. Indeed there was no observable difference anywhere in the world based on whether and to what extent any of these measures were deployed.

Finally came the pharmaceutical interventions, voluntary at first but gradually mandatory, just as with each previous protocol began as a recommendation until it was mandated.

At no point in these 19 months have we seen a clear admission of failure on the part of government officials. Indeed, it’s mostly been the opposite, as the agencies double down, claiming effectiveness while citing no data or studies, while social media companies backed it all by taking down contrarian posts and brazenly deleting accounts of people who dare cite dissenting science.

The vaccine was the biggest gamble of all simply because the program was so expensive, so personal, and so wildly oversold. Even those of us who opposed every other mandate had hopes that the vaccines would finally end the public panic and provide governments a way to back out of all the other strategies that had failed.

That did not happen.

Most people believed that the vaccine would work like many others before them to block infection and spread. In this, people were merely believing what the head of the CDC said. “Our data from the C.D.C. today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick,” Rochelle Walinsky told Rachel Maddow. “And that it’s not just in the clinical trials, it’s also in real-world data.”

“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,”President Biden said, reflecting what was the common view in the summer of 2021.

That of course turned out not to be the case. The vaccines appear to have been helpful in mitigating against some severe outcomes but it did not achieve victory over the virus. Israel’s surge in infections in August was among the fully vaccinated. The same happened in the UK and Scotland, and that precise result began to hit the US in September. Indeed, we all have vaccinated friends who caught the virus and were sick for days. Meanwhile, team natural immunity has received a huge boost from a large study in Israel that demonstrated that recovered Covid cases gain far more protection than is conferred by the vaccine.

The fallback position then became the booster. Surely this is the answer! Israel was first to mandate them. Here again, the problems began to show, as yet another magic bullet of disease mitigation failed. Then the inevitable headline came: Israel preparing for possible fourth COVID vaccine dose. So think about this because there is a sense in which the vaccines rank among the biggest failures: in a matter of a few short months, we’ve gone from the claim that they fully protect to they are pretty okay provided you get regularly scheduled boosters forever.

Now to the striking resignation of two top officials at the FDA who were in charge of vaccine safety and administration. It was the Director and Deputy Director of the Office of Vaccines Research, Marion Gruber and Phillip Kause. They gave no reason for their departure, which is scheduled for October and November.

The case is fascinating because 1) people rarely resign cushy government jobs unless a higher-paying, higher-prestige job in the private sector awaits, or 2) they are being pushed out. It’s rare for anyone in a position like that to resign over a principled matter of science. When I first read that they were going, I figured something else was up.

These days, extremely weird things are going on within the Biden administration. Even though his approval ratings are sinking, the president has to pretend that he has all the answers, that the science behind his mandates and virus war is universally settled, that anyone who disagrees with him is really just a political enemy. He has gone so far as to denounce, demonize, and legally threaten red-state governors who disagree with him.

This is a deep problem for actual scientists working within the bureaucracy because they know for sure that all of this is a pretense and that the government cannot win this war on the virus. They simply cannot preside over more false promises, especially when the whole of their professional training is about assessing the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.

So what can they do? In this case, it appears they had to get away before they dropped a bombshell.

The bombshell is called “Considerations in boosting COVID-19 vaccine immune responses.” It appears in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet. The two top officials are among the authors. The article recommends against the Covid booster shot that the Biden administration, following Fauci’s advice, is suggesting as the key to making the vaccines work better and finally fulfill their promise.

Fauci and company are pushing boosters because they know what is coming. Essentially we are going the way of Israel: most everyone is vaccinated but the virus itself is not being controlled. More and more among those hospitalized and dying are vaccinated. This same trend is coming to the US. The boosters are a means by which government can save face, or so many believe.

The trouble now is that the top scientists at the FDA disagree. Further, they think that the push for boosters is courting problems. They think the current regime of one or two shots is working as well as one can expect. Nothing is gained on net from a booster, they say. There just isn’t enough evidence to take the risk of another booster, and another and another.

The authors knew this article was appearing. They knew that signing it under the FDA affiliation would lead to a push for their resignations. Life would get very difficult for both of them. They got ahead of the messaging and resigned before it came out. Very smart.

The signed article goes even further to warn of possible downsides. They point out that boosters might seem necessary because “variants expressing new antigens have evolved to the point at which immune responses to the original vaccine antigens no longer protect adequately against currently circulating viruses.” At the same time, there are possible side effects that could discredit all vaccines for a generation or more. “There could be risks,” they write, “if boosters are widely introduced too soon, or too frequently, especially with vaccines that can have immune-mediated side-effects (such as myocarditis, which is more common after the second dose of some mRNA vaccines, or Guillain-Barre syndrome, which has been associated with adenovirus-vectored COVID-19 vaccines.”)

Bringing up such side effects is essentially a taboo topic. That this was written by two top FDA officials is nothing short of remarkable, especially because it comes at a time when the Biden administration is going all in on vaccine mandates. Meanwhile, studies are showing that for teenage boys, the vaccine poses a greater risk to them than Covid itself. “For boys 16-17 without medical comorbidities, the rate of CAE is currently 2.1 to 3.5 times higher than their 120-day COVID-19 hospitalization risk, and 1.5 to 2.5 times higher at times of high weekly COVID-19 hospitalization.”

From the beginning of these lockdowns – along with all the masks, restrictions, bogus health advice from plexiglass to sanitizer to universal vaccine mandates and so on – it was clear that there would someday be hell to pay. They wrecked rights and liberties, crashed economies, traumatized a whole generation of children and other students, ran roughshod over religious freedom, and for what? There is zero evidence that any of this has made any difference. We are surrounded by the carnage they created.

The appearance of The Lancet article by two top FDA vaccine scientists is truly devastating and revealing because it undermines the last plausible tool to save the whole machinery of government disease management that has been deployed at such enormous social, cultural, and economic cost for 19 months. Not in our lifetimes has a policy failed so badly. The intellectual and political implications here are monumental. It means that the real Covid crisis – the task of assigning responsibility for all the collateral damage – has just begun.

In 2006, during the early years of the birth of lockdown ideology, the great epidemiologist Donald Henderson warned that if any of these restrictive measures were deployed for a pandemic, the result would be a “loss of trust in government” and “a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.” Catastrophe is exactly what has happened. The current regime wants to point the finger toward the noncompliant. That is no longer believable. They cannot delay the inevitable for much longer: responsibility for this catastrophe belongs to those who embarked on this political experiment in the first place.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.

September 16, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

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