Who cares how war criminals vote?
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | May 30, 2019
Alastair Campbell has been kicked out of the Labour Party.
Apparently, he voted for the Liberal Democrats in the recent European Parliamentary elections, and then announced he had done so on Sky News. Thus putting him in breach of paragraph 2 of Labour’s Membership Rules, which states:
A member of the Party who joins and/ or supports a political organisation other than an official Labour group or other unit of the Party, or supports any candidate who stands against an official Labour candidate, or publicly declares their intent to stand against a Labour candidate, shall automatically be ineligible to be or remain a Party member, subject to the provisions of Chapter 6.I.2 below of the disciplinary rules.”
It’s a fairly open and shut case, to be honest.
And so ends the Labour career of Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s PR man, one of the key architects of the “dodgy dossier”, a man complicit in every death that resulted from the US/UK illegal invasion of Iraq.
The reaction of anyone, with even the most rudimentary grasp of ethics, should be “good riddance”.
Clearly therefore, the vast majority of the pundits, “journalists” and talking heads do not have a rudimentary grasp of ethics.
Yes, Campbell was actually defended. By journalists. And celebrities. And members of parliament.
Campbell is a “strong voice for Labour values” according to some, his expulsion is “Stalinist” according to others.
It’s time for a very serious reality check: Alastair Campbell should not be in the Labour Party.
He shouldn’t be tweeting his thoughts or giving interviews or writing columns. He shouldn’t have any power or influence or authority. He shouldn’t even be breathing free air.
He should be in the dock at the Hague, briefly. And then – hopefully – spending the rest of his time in eternity’s waiting room, carving tally marks on a cell wall.
Who cares who he voted for? He’s a fucking monster.
This is not “silly” or “old fashioned” or “predictable”. It’s just true.
As a society it’s important we try and recognise principles and morality. Virtue matters. Truth matters. There ARE absolutes. Most of the Labour MPs defending Campbell voted FOR that war. They all voted against investigations into it.
They are complicit in crimes against humanity. That is a statement of fact. And yet their opinions are treated as if they carry weight. They are assumed to have ideals, to be sincere, when their actions demonstrate this is simply not the case.
We don’t talk about Pinochet’s economic reforms.
We don’t isolate Pol Pot’s opinion on free healthcare.
We don’t defend Mussolini’s well organised internal transport infrastructure.
It is accepted that crimes of a certain scale put a mark on you that you can’t scrub off. That doesn’t change because these criminals are all well-spoken chaps with open shirt collars, it doesn’t change because they managed to slime their way out of punishment, it doesn’t change because our national ego lifts Britain above the law, and it doesn’t change because we’re all so English and confrontation makes us uncomfortable.
These people are monsters. Who they vote for does not matter. What they say does not matter. They have no values. They have no standing. They have no place in a decent world. If it were any other crime of the same magnitude that would not need to be explained.
“Progressives” will vilify Tulsi Gabbard for even daring to speak to Narendra Modi, or visit Assad’s Syria. Corbyn has been raked over the coals for talking with the IRA. Nigel Farage is considered a “Russian stooge” for deigning to even vaguely compliment Vladimir Putin.
All those people combined don’t add up to the butcher’s bill Campbell racked up in the Middle East. Not even in the most fevered, deceitful propaganda of the Western press.
But no one is talking about Iraq. When Momentum tweeted about it, they were accused of being “shallow” and “stuck in the past”.
Maybe people are just divorced from the reality. Maybe the scale warps in their minds. Maybe it’s just too big, too dreadful to actually picture.
One. Million. Dead.
The entire population of Birmingham dropping dead tomorrow.
More than double the British losses in World War 2.
9/11 happening every single day, for a whole year.
Alastair Campbell helped make that happen. He did it dishonestly. He did it deliberately. He did it for personal and political gain.
And he has not, to this day, faced any kind of punishment. In all likelihood, he never will.
If you EVER find yourself defending him, whether opportunistically to undermine Corbyn or earnestly because you see no problem with his actions, then you are through the looking glass. Your morality is tonaly inverted.
Alastair Campbell’s voting record is an irrelevance. I don’t know who he voted for, or if he voted at all. I don’t care. It probably was the Lib Dems. It’s the mootest of moot, and the media outcry about it is beyond absurd.
Every time any person who played a part in the crimes of the Iraq war is allowed to exist in our society, without reference to the immense crime they committed, we normalise the idea that murder is OK when WE do it to THEM. That our wars are mistakes, or misjudgments or “foreign policy blunders”. They don’t really count. We don’t really mean it. We’re nice.
Blair and Campbell are given column inches. Their enablers in parliament rail against “antisemitism” and for the “people’s vote”, or talk about the evil “dictators” in Venezuela or North Korea who don’t share our “values”. Their cheerleaders in the press talk up Vladimir Putin as a “pariah” because of the totally bloodless Crimean referendum, but happily chuckle through interviews with Campbell as if he isn’t soaked to the bone in the blood of innocents.
Criminals discussing Brexit and football and Love Island, like it’s all a big joke. Campbell talks “candidly” about his “battles with depression” and we’re all supposed to go “awwww!”
All the while the man who proved their criminality rots in jail, barely able to move.
The world of the media is upside down.
It is disgusting, but wholly expected. The Establishment is rallying to defend one its own, it always does.
But most people know the truth: The only thing wrong with Alastair Campbell being kicked out of the Labour party, is that it’s fifteen years too late.
Top IDF lawyer tells The Hague to back off, says Israel can probe own alleged war crimes
RT | May 29, 2019
The Israeli military wants the International Criminal Court to butt out of its affairs, its top military prosecutor has declared in response to efforts to hold it to account for its use of live fire against Palestinian protesters.
“Israel is a law-abiding country, with an independent and strong judicial system, and there is no reason for its actions to be scrutinized by the ICC,” Brig. Gen. Sharon Afek, Israel’s military advocate, declared at an international conference on warfare laws in Herzliya. “The position of Israel is that the International Criminal Court does not have jurisdiction to discuss the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
The ICC is weighing investigating Israel over its use of live ammunition against Palestinian protesters demonstrating at the Gaza border. Since March 2018, IDF soldiers have killed at least 251 people participating in the Great March of Return, a movement calling for Palestinians expelled from their land during the establishment of Israel to be allowed to return, and injured at least 26,797 more, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
Earlier this year, a United Nations Human Rights Council fact-finding mission on the protests submitted to the ICC a list of Israeli officials it suspects of serious crimes, including IDF snipers, their commanders, and the military legal advisers who outlined their rules of engagement.
Afek’s objections to the ICC’s involvement center on the body’s charter, which permits it to investigate crimes only when there is no reasonable assumption that the country in which they have been committed will prosecute them adequately. Israel, he claims, will take care of its own business.
But as of March, only 11 of the protesters’ deaths were being investigated as possible criminal acts. Israel has insisted that even the journalists and medics killed by snipers – a war crime under any jurisdiction – were actually working for Hamas and therefore fair game.
Israel’s judicial system has refused to pursue investigations of alleged war crimes committed by the IDF against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza before, and the ICC has long sought to prosecute Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians. Before the Great March of Return began last year, the court was looking into whether Israel had committed war crimes during 2014’s Operation Protective Edge, the seven-week bombardment of Gaza that killed 2,000 Palestinians and injured over 10,000, deliberately targeting civilians and landmark buildings according to Amnesty International. Settlement-building and the eviction of Palestinians from West Bank and East Jerusalem were also scrutinized.
French rights group moves to block Saudi arms cargo
RT | May 28, 2019
A French humanitarian group is seeking to block a delivery of munitions to a Saudi ship docked at a port in southern France, arguing the weapons will be used to commit war crimes in Saudi Arabia’s conflict with Yemen.
The rights group, Action by Christians for the Abolition of Torture (ACAT), filed its legal challenge Tuesday, following up on a previous effort which successfully blocked a shipment of howitzer cannons to the Saudi Kingdom.
The cargo ship “is to load French weapons bound for Saudi Arabia, one of the main belligerents of the Yemeni conflict,” ACAT said in a statement Tuesday, adding it was “calling on civil society … to prevent these munitions from leaving” the port of Marseille-Fos.
The shipment is to include ammunition for the French-made Caesar howitzer, a truck-mounted artillery system, according to sources cited by investigative outlet Disclose. Though ACAT managed to block a howitzer shipment earlier this month, Saudi Arabia obtained several Caesar batteries in previous sales.
ACAT argues that the UN’s Arms Trade Treaty, ratified by France in 2014, provides a legal basis for a court order to block the cargo.
Under the treaty, “France undertook not to authorize the transfer of arms when it ‘has knowledge, at the time the authorization is requested that such weapons or property could be used to commit genocide, crimes against humanity’,” or other violations of humanitarian law, ACAT said, quoting the language of the agreement.
French Defense Minister Florence Parly told lawmakers Tuesday that she had no information on the shipment, but added that France must respect its alliance with the kingdom in any case. Parly has previously stated there was “no proof” that French weapons contributed to rights violations in the Yemen war.
In April, however, French journalists with Disclose published classified military intelligence documents revealing that French weapons likely were involved in strikes on civilians. French authorities have since interrogated the journalists and threatened them with jail time.
Earlier Tuesday Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called on Saudi Arabia to end its “dirty war” on Yemen, but stopped short of demanding an end to French weapons sales, adding that France was “extremely vigilant” in its arms transfers.
Activists at Italian and Spanish ports have also attempted to interfere in the Saudi war effort, with Italian dock workers in Genoa refusing to load cargo onto a Saudi vessel earlier this month, and a similar, albeit unsuccessful, protest at the Spanish port of Santander.
The UN says Yemen is suffering the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with millions dependent on humanitarian aid and tens of thousands killed in the fighting. A coalition of states led by Saudi Arabia began military operations in Yemen in March 2015, seeking to oust rebels from power and reinstate Yemeni President Mansour Hadi. Both the coalition and the rebels have violated the laws of armed conflict, according to rights groups, but the bulk of civilian casualties have been inflicted in the Saudi air war.
Settler filmed starting fire in West Bank field is Israeli soldier
MEMO | May 27, 2019
One of the two Jewish settlers recently caught on video starting a fire in the occupied West Bank is an Israeli soldier, it has been revealed.
According to reports in the Israeli media, “the army knows the identity of the settler”, and “two security sources confirmed the details, saying that the soldier was on leave when the arson took place”.
The military said that “the Israel Police are expected to handle the incident”, while “the police said that they have yet to arrest the soldier”.
The incident took place on Friday, 17 May, when settlers attacked Palestinians and their properties in three West Bank villages.
While the Israeli military initially blamed Palestinians for starting the fires, the army was forced to change its story after a video clip published by human rights NGO B’Tselem clearly showed settlers lighting fires in fields.
In a separate video taken by local Palestinians that day, settlers are seen throwing rocks at villagers’ homes, while Israeli soldiers “can be seen standing among the settlers and doing nothing to stop them”.
To date, no one has been arrested for any of these attacks.
Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank routinely assault Palestinians and vandalise their property, attacks which are almost never investigated or prosecuted by Israeli occupation authorities.
All Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem are illegal under international law.
Ex-Israeli official admits 2015 assassination of Kuntar after tip-off from Syria militants
Press TV – May 27, 2019
A former Israeli army officer has admitted that Israel’s military, with the help of militants in Syria, assassinated Samir Kuntar, a commander of Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement, during air raids in 2015.
According to UK-based Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, the ex-army officer Marco Morno said the operation was carried out with information from “one of the leaders of the Syrian opposition factions.”
The attack was conducted by two warplanes that bombed a building with four long-range missiles in Jaramana, near Damascus, in late 2015.
Back then, Kuntar was in Syria helping government forces and Hezbollah fight back foreign-backed Takfiri terrorists in the Arab country.
“Samir Kuntar, the longest serving Arab prisoner in Israeli jails, was killed in a terrorist rocket attack targeting a building in the southern parts of Jaramana, Damascus countryside,” the official Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported at the time.
He had spent about 30 years in Israeli prisons and was released in 2008 as part of a swap deal between Tel Aviv and Hezbollah in exchange for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers killed during the 2006 war.
According to the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a pro-militant monitoring group, Kuntar had been the target of various failed Israeli assassination attempts in Syria.
Morno, who was responsible for communicating with militants in Syria, revealed the details of Kuntar’s assassination during an interview with an Israeli news site on Thursday. The information he disclosed was allowed to be published under military censorship.
Hezbollah has been effectively helping the Syrian government in its fight against terrorists.
In May 2016, Mustafa Badr al-Deen, another Hezbollah commander, was killed in an Israeli air raid on the Syrian-Lebanese border.
Tel Aviv frequently attacks military targets inside Syria in what is considered as an attempt to prop up Takfiri terrorist outfits that have been suffering heavy defeats against Syrian government forces.
Numerous reports have also emerged of the discovery of Israeli-made weapons and military equipment during clean-up operations by the Syrian army.
The occupying regime has been providing medical treatment to extremist elements wounded in Syria.
Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011. The government says the Israeli regime and its Western and regional allies have been aiding the Takfiri terrorist groups wreaking havoc in the country.
Turkey is one of the main backers of anti-government militants in Syria.
On Saturday, senior militant sources said Turkey has equipped an array of terrorists with fresh supplies of weaponry to help them try to repel a major Syrian assault.
The delivery of dozens of armored vehicles, Grad rocket launchers, anti-tank guided missiles and so-called TOW missiles, helped roll back some army gains and retake the strategically located town of Kafr Nabudah, one senior militant figure said.
Syria’s SANA news agency reported on Sunday that Syrian army troops had established full control over Kafr Nabudah in Hama province after eliminating the last remnants of the Jabhat Fateh al-Sham terrorist group, formerly known as Nusra Front.
Nasrallah: If It Weren’t for Liberation in 2000, Trump Would Grant South to ‘Israel’
Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah
Sara Taha Moughnieh | Al-Manar | May 26, 2019
Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah delivered a speech Saturday 25th of May on the anniversary of Resistance and Liberation day.
Sayyed Nasrallah tackled regional and internal files including the upcoming Bahrain Summit, localizing the Palestinians in Lebanon, strength of the resistance axis, return of the Syrians to their country, and internal files.
His eminence called for a wide participation in Al-Quds day which is held annually on the last Friday of the Holy Month of Ramadan, stressing that this day is of great significance this year because of the efforts being made to put an end to the Palestinian cause, specifically during the upcoming Economic Conference in Bahrain.
He greeted the Palestinian’s united stance to boycott and refuse this conference and praised the Bahraini people, scholars, and political powers’ stances that condemned the country’s decision to be the first to embrace “the deal of the century” which aims at putting an end to the Palestinian cause.
25/May/2000: Resistance and Liberation Day
Sayyed Nasrallah greeted everyone who was part of this victory through sacrificing, staying patient, supporting and aiding.
“We should remember the families of the martyred and injured, Lebanese factions, Security Forces, Army, Palestinian factions and the Syrian Army and keep in mind that Iran and Syria are the ones who stood by our side and they are our companions in victory,” he said.
Hezbollah SG assured that one of the major outcomes of this victory was the “Equation of Strength” in Lebanon because the Israeli enemy had to pull back without any victories or conditions.
“Lebanon was no longer regarded as the weak ring in the Arab/Israel conflict, and today the Israeli enemy states that in Lebanon there is a “strategic or central threat against Israel”, he noted; adding “just like the enemy is aware of this strength, the Lebanese people should be aware of its importance in order to sustain their country’s sovereignty and safety and in order to protect it. This is what forms the Golden Equation “Army, people and Resistance”.”
“If it weren’t for the resistance and liberation in 2000, Trump would’ve granted the south of Lebanon or other parts of it to Israel, just like he did with Al-Quds and the Golan,” Sayyed Nasrallah said, reassuring holding on to “Shabaa Farms, Kfarchouba hills and the Lebanese part of Al-Ghajar village.”
Localization in Lebanon
Concerning localizing immigrants in Lebanon, his eminence said: “we suspect that the economic summit in Bahrain will be opening the door for the localization of immigrants in Lebanon and other countries. The Lebanese agree on refusing localization politically and constitutionally, and the Palestinians as well agree on refusing localization and holding on to their right of return.”
Sayyed Nasrallah called for “a meeting between Lebanese and Palestinian officials to put a joint plan on how to face the danger of localization because the threat is approaching and statements are no longer enough”.
Syrian Refugees’ Return
Hezbollah SG pointed out that “the real reason behind delaying the return of the Syrian refugees in Lebanon to their country is political and it is related to the presidential elections in Syria because the presidency of Bashar Al-Assad will end in 2020 or 2021, and there is an American, Western, and Gulf insistence on keeping the refugees away from their countries until then. There are no humanitarian or security reasons behind postponing the refugees’ return to Syria and claims about that are just rumors.”
Sayyed Nasrallah further stated that “Assad has confirmed to me that he supports the return of everyone to Syria and is ready to offer facilitation, but the obstacle is political. Should Lebanon submit to this political obstacle only because the US, west and Gulf want that?”
Battle against Corruption Files
His eminence stressed Hezbollah’s commitment to fight corruption, reiterating that this needs time and patience, and it is even harder than the battle of liberating the south.
He indicated that the ministers are doing their jobs and have not found corruption in the Ministries of health and sports, and called on everyone who has information or data against these two ministries to propose them so that action would be taken.
On another hand, Sayyed Nasrallah stated that “budgeting discussion has been our priority because it is a major point in the process of fighting corruption and stopping financial waste.”
Israel’s War Criminals In Their Own Words
Shooting unarmed Palestinian demonstrators “preserves Israeli values”
By Philip Giraldi | Unz Review | May 21, 2019
Israel’s public face, sustained and propagated by a wealthy and powerful diaspora that has significant control over the media, insists that the country is the Middle East’s only true democracy, that it operates under a rule of law for all its citizens and that its army is the “most moral in the world.” All of those assertions are false. Israel’s government favors its Jewish citizens through laws and regulations that are defined by religion. It in fact now identifies itself legally as a Jewish state with Christians and Muslim citizens having second class status. Israel’s army, meanwhile, has committed numerous war crimes against largely unarmed civilian populations in the past seventy years, both in Lebanon and directed against the Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza.
In response to the past year’s Great March of Return protests staged by Gazans along the fence line that separates them from Israel, Israeli army snipers have shot dead 293 Palestinians and wounded seven thousand more. Twenty-thousand other Gazans have been harmed by other weapons used by the Israelis, to include canisters from the volleys of tear gas and rubber bullets. The numbers include hundreds of children and medical personnel trying to help the wounded, which reportedly have been particularly targeted.
The United Nations has reported that many of the wounded have been shot in their legs, which the Israeli army regards as “restraint” on its part. Many of those injured will likely need to have limbs amputated because Gaza lacks the medical facilities required to properly treat their wounds. Israel has bombed hospitals and blocked the importation of medical supplies into Gaza while also not allowing Gazans to leave the enclave for medical treatment elsewhere in the Middle East.
One hundred and twenty amputations have already been performed this year. Jamie McGoldrick, the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Territories explained “You’ve got 1,700 people who are in need of serious, complicated surgeries for them to be able to walk again… [requiring] very, very serious and complex bone reconstruction surgery over a two-year period before they start to rehabilitate themselves.”
The U.N. would like to provide $20 million in assistance to enable medical treatment rather than amputations but the United States has refused to support emergency funding for the Palestinians through the Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), a step presumably taken to benefit Israel by punishing the Palestinian people.
Interestingly, a document has recent re-surfaced describing in chilling terms the Israel Army’s viewpoint on shooting protesting Arabs. One year ago former British diplomat Craig Murray posted on his blog, “Condemned By Their Own Words”, which provided a translated from Hebrew-to-English transcript of an Israeli radio broadcast that had taken place on April 21st. An Israeli Brigadier-General, named Zvika Fogel, was responding to reports of the killing by soldiers of an unarmed fourteen year-old boy. He explained in some detail why his soldiers are absolutely doing the right thing to shoot to kill Palestinians who approach the barrier separating Gaza from Israel.
General Fogel’s comments are reflective of the Israeli government view of how to control the “Palestinian problem.” Only the rights, including the right to life, of Israeli Jews are legitimate and Arabs should be grateful for what the Jewish state allows them to have.
Fogel responded to interviewer Ron Nesiel’s first question “Should the IDF [Israeli army] rethink its use of snipers?” by saying that “Any person who gets close to the fence, anyone who could be a future threat to the border of the State of Israel and its residents, should bear a price for that violation. If this child or anyone else gets close to the fence in order to hide an explosive device or check if there are any dead zones there or to cut the fence so someone could infiltrate the territory of the State of Israel to kill us …”
Nesiel: “Then, then his punishment is death?”
Fogel: “His punishment is death. As far as I’m concerned then yes, if you can only shoot him to stop him, in the leg or arm – great. But if it’s more than that then, yes, you want to check with me whose blood is thicker, ours or theirs. It is clear to you that if one such person will manage to cross the fence or hide an explosive device there …”
Nesiel: “But we were taught that live fire is only used when the soldiers face immediate danger. … It does not do all that well for us, those pictures that are distributed around the world.”
Fogel: “I know how these orders are given. I know how a sniper does the shooting. I know how many authorizations he needs before he receives an authorization to open fire. It is not the whim of one or the other sniper who identifies the small body of a child now and decides he’ll shoot. Someone marks the target for him very well and tells him exactly why one has to shoot and what the threat is from that individual. And to my great sorrow, sometimes when you shoot at a small body and you intended to hit his arm or shoulder it goes even higher. The picture is not a pretty picture. But if that’s the price that we have to pay to preserve the safety and quality of life of the residents of the State of Israel, then that’s the price.
“[And] look, Ron, we’re even terrible at it [at suppressing those pictures]. There’s nothing to be done, David always looks better against Goliath. And in this case, we are the Goliath. Not the David. That is entirely clear to me. … It will drag us into a war. I do not want to be on the side that gets dragged. I want to be on the side that initiates things. I do not want to wait for the moment where it finds a weak spot and attacks me there. If tomorrow morning it gets into a military base or a kibbutz and kills people there and takes prisoners of war or hostages, call it as you like, we’re in a whole new script. I want the leaders of Hamas to wake up tomorrow morning and for the last time in their life see the smiling faces of the IDF. That’s what I want to have happen. But we are dragged along. So we’re putting snipers up because we want to preserve the values we were educated by. We can’t always take a single picture and put it before the whole world. We have soldiers there, our children, who were sent out and receive very accurate instructions about whom to shoot to protect us. Let’s back them up.”
One might reasonably suggest that Fogel’s comments reflect a consensus among Israelis on how to deal with the Arabs. And the United States is fully complicit in the slaughter. American Ambassador to Israel David Friedman has repeatedly praised the restraint of the Israeli armed forces and has blamed the Gazans for their plight. The United States continues to subsidize illegal Israeli settlements that fuel the conflict and is putting the final touches on an Israeli approved peace plan that will now and forever make the Palestinians a non-people, without a nation of their own and without any hopes for the future. Meanwhile, they are target practice for Israeli snipers. The world should be mortified by Israeli arrogance and behavior and the United States should bow its head in shame each time a pandering American politician comes out with the line “Israel has a right to defend itself.”
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.
Where Lyme Disease Came From and Why It Eludes Treatment
By David Swanson | CounterPunch | May 17, 2019
A new book called Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons by Kris Newby adds significantly to our understanding of Lyme disease, while oddly seeming to avoid mention of what we already knew.
Newby claims (in 2019) that if a scientist named Willy Burgdorfer had not made a confession in 2013, the secret that Lyme disease came from a biological weapons program would have died with him. Yet, in 2004 Michael Christopher Carroll published a book called Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Germ Laboratory. He appeared on several television shows to discuss the book, including on NBC’s Today Show, where the book was made a Today Show Book Club selection. Lab 257 hit the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list soon after its publication.
Newby’s book reaches the same conclusion as Carroll’s, namely that the most likely source of diseased ticks is Plum Island. Newby reaches this conclusion on page 224 after mentioning Plum Island only once in passing in a list of facilities on page 47 and otherwise avoiding it throughout the book. This is bizarre, because Newby’s book otherwise goes into great depth, and even chronicles extensive research efforts that lead largely to dead ends, and because there is information available about Plum Island, and because Carroll’s best-selling book seems to demand comment, supportive or dismissive or otherwise.
In fact, I think that, despite the avoidance of any discussion of Plum Island, Newby’s research complements Carroll’s quite well, strengthens the same general conclusion, and then adds significant new understanding. So, let’s look at what Carroll told us, and then at what Newby adds.
Less than 2 miles off the east end of Long Island sits Plum Island, where the U.S. government makes or at least made biological weapons, including weapons consisting of diseased insects that can be dropped from airplanes on a (presumably foreign) population. One such insect is the deer tick, pursued as a germ weapon by the Nazis, the Japanese, the Soviets, and the Americans.
Deer swim to Plum Island. Birds fly to Plum Island. The island lies in the middle of the Atlantic migration route for numerous species. “Ticks,” Carroll writes, “find baby chicks irresistible.”
In July of 1975 a new or very rare disease appeared in Old Lyme, Connecticut, just north of Plum Island. And what was on Plum Island? A germ warfare lab to which the U.S. government had brought former Nazi germ warfare scientists in the 1940s to work on the same evil work for a different employer. These included the head of the Nazi germ warfare program who had worked directly for Heinrich Himmler. On Plum Island was a germ warfare lab that frequently conducted its experiments out of doors. After all, it was on an island. What could go wrong? Documents record outdoor experiments with diseased ticks in the 1950s (when we know that the United States was using such weaponized life forms in North Korea). Even Plum Island’s indoors, where participants admit to experiments with ticks, was not sealed tight. And test animals mingled with wild deer, test birds with wild birds.
By the 1990s, the eastern end of Long Island had by far the greatest concentration of Lyme disease. If you drew a circle around the area of the world heavily impacted by Lyme disease, which happened to be in the Northeast United States, the center of that circle was Plum Island.
Plum Island experimented with the Lone Star tick, whose habitat at the time was confined to Texas. Yet it showed up in New York and Connecticut, infecting people with Lyme disease — and killing them. The Lone Star tick is now endemic in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey.
If Newby agrees or disagrees with any of the above, she does not inform us. But here’s what she adds to it.
The outbreak of unusual tick-borne disease around Long Island Sound actually started in 1968, and it involved three diseases: Lyme arthritis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and babesiosis. A U.S. bioweapons scientist, Willy Burgdorfer, credited in 1982 with discovering the cause of Lyme disease, may have put the diseases into ticks 30 years earlier. And his report on the cause of Lyme disease may have involved a significant omission that has made it harder to diagnose or cure. The public focus on only one of the three diseases has allowed a disaster that could have been contained to become widespread.
Newby documents in detail Burgdorfer’s work for the U.S. government giving diseases to ticks in large quantities to be used as weapons, as they have been in Cuba in 1962, for example. “He was growing microbes inside ticks, having the ticks feed on animals, and then harvesting the microbes from the animals that exhibited the level of illness the military had requested.”
Burgdorfer published a paper in 1952 about the intentional infecting of ticks. In 2013, filmmaker Tim Grey asked him, on camera, whether the pathogen he had identified in 1982 as the cause of Lyme disease was the same one or similar or a generational mutation of the one he’d written about in 1952. Burgdorfer replied in the affirmative.
Interviewed by Newby, Burgdorfer described his efforts to create an illness that would be difficult to test for — knowledge of which he might have shared earlier with beneficial results for those suffering.
Newby, who has herself suffered from Lyme disease, blames the profit interests of companies and the corruption of government for the poor handling of Lyme disease. But her writing suggests to me a possibility she doesn’t raise, namely that those who know where Lyme disease came from have avoided properly addressing it because of where it came from.
Newby assumes throughout the book that there has to have been a particular major incident near Long Island Sound, either an accident or an experiment on the public or an attack by a foreign nation. Burgdorfer reportedly claimed to another researcher that Russia stole U.S. bioweapons. Based on that and nothing else, Newby speculates that perhaps Russia attacked the United States with diseased ticks, coincidentally right in the location where the U.S. government experimented with diseased ticks.
“What this book brings to light,” Newby writes, “is that the U.S. military has conducted thousands of experiments exploring the use of ticks and tick-borne diseases as biological weapons, and in some cases, these agents escaped into the environment. The government needs to declassify the details of these open-air bioweapons tests so that we can begin to repair the damage these pathogens are inflicting on human and animals in the ecosystem.”
Another product of U.S. bio-weapons tax dollars at work, of course, was the anthrax mailed to politicians in 2001. While Newby speculates that perhaps someone was trying to demonstrate the danger for our own good, I don’t think we should forget that one purpose served — whether or not intended — by the “anthrax attacks” was a significant augmentation of the Iraq war lies. The attacks were falsely blamed on Iraq, and even if people have forgotten that, they fell for it long enough for it to matter. The one bit of truth in current public understanding of Lyme disease is that it has not been falsely blamed on some country the United States is eager to bomb. Let’s keep it that way!
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Britain’s secret role in the brutal US war in Vietnam
By Mark Curtis | MintPress News | November 16, 2022
There is a myth the UK did not support Washington’s war against Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, Labour and Conservative governments backed every phase of US military escalation and played secret roles in the conflict, declassified files show.
- UK sent SAS team to Vietnam in 1962, flew secret RAF missions to deliver arms, and provided intelligence to US
- UK governments lied to parliament they were not providing military advice to South Vietnam’s brutal regime
- Labour government secretly gave arms to US for use in Vietnam, stressing need for “no publicity”
- It also connived with Washington to deceive UK public over its support for US
- UK governments knew of atrocities against civilians but backed US war aims
- Whitehall only started to advocate a peaceful solution, on US terms, once the war became unwinnable
During its war in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s the US dropped more bombs than in the whole of World War Two, in a conflict that killed over two million people. The wholesale destruction of villages and killing of innocent people was a permanent feature of the US war from the beginning, along with widespread indiscriminate bombing.
Britain’s role in the war has been largely buried and must be almost completely unknown to the public. When the UK media mentions the war now, reports often simply reference the refusal by Harold Wilson’s government to agree to US requests to openly deploy British troops.
Although this was certainly a public rebuff to Washington, Britain did virtually everything else to back the US war over more than a decade, the declassified documents show. … continue
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