US Supreme Court heaps more damages on Sudan in embassy bombing cases
MEMO | May 18, 2020
The US Supreme Court dealt a legal setback to Sudan on Monday, ruling that the African nation cannot avoid punitive damages in lawsuits accusing it of complicity in the 1998 al Qaeda bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people.
Siding with hundreds of people hurt and relatives of people killed in the bombings, the justices ruled 8-0 to throw out a lower court’s 2017 decision that had freed Sudan from punitive damages awarded in the litigation in addition to about $6 billion in compensatory damages. Justice Brett Kavanaugh did not participate in the case.
The case hinged on the Supreme Court’s view of a 2008 amendment to a federal law known as the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act allowing for punitive damages. The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2017 upheld Sudan’s liability but ruled that the amendment was made after the bombings occurred and could not be applied retroactively.
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in Monday’s ruling that for claims made under federal law, “Congress was as clear as it could have been when it authorized plaintiffs to seek and win punitive damages for past conduct.”
The ruling also ordered the D.C. Circuit to reconsider its decision that the foreign plaintiffs who sued Sudan under state law in the United States also could not seek punitive damages.
Starting in 2001, groups of plaintiffs sued in federal court in Washington under the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which generally bars claims against foreign countries except those designated by the United States as state sponsors of terrorism – as Sudan was in 1993. A federal judge found Sudan liable and awarded the plaintiffs $10.2 billion, including $4.3 in punitive damages.
Sudan has faced a deepening economic crisis since the 2019 overthrow of its longtime ruler Omar al-Bashir.
President Donald Trump’s administration had urged the justices to side with the plaintiffs who sued Sudan.
Twelve Americans were killed in the August 7, 1998, attacks. The lawsuits involve 567 people, mostly non-US citizens who were employees of the US government and their relatives.
The damages had been imposed by default because for most of the litigation Sudan did not appear before a lower court to counter accusations that it harbored and provided support to the Islamist militant group al Qaeda. Sudan denied the allegations.
The truck bombs that detonated outside the embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania marked the first large-scale al Qaeda attack.
A Cautionary Tale About the WHO
By Larry Romanoff | Moon of Shanghai | May 10, 2020
There appears to be no shortage of claims from multiple informed and independent sources that the WHO has two primary functions, the first as a tool for world population reduction on behalf of its masters, and the second as a powerful marketing agent for big pharma, specifically the vaccine manufacturers. Many critics have pointed out that the ‘vaccination experts’ at the WHO are “dominated by the vaccine makers standing to gain from the enormously lucrative vaccine and antiviral contracts awarded by governments.” And indeed, the advisory and other committees involved with the WHO’s vaccine programs seem heavily populated with those who profit directly from those same programs.
Equally, the claims and concerns about population control and reduction are far from conspiracy theories today, with far too much evidence, some of it frightening, that this is indeed a major agenda of the WHO today. We have already seen too much hard evidence of this body’s involvement in both areas to justify dismissing the concerns as implausible fears. Moreover, there is a disturbing list of individuals closely associated with the WHO, who have had either population reduction or mass vaccinations as a pet project; individuals like David Rothschild, David Rockefeller, George Soros, Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Gates, and many more, the list including national organisations like the CDC, FEMA, the US Department of Homeland Security, the Rockefeller and Carnegie Institutes, the CFR, and others.
It is not difficult, on the basis of all the evidence, to conclude the WHO is an international criminal enterprise under the control of a core group, one with European corporate dynasties at its center which, as one writer noted, “provides the strategic leadership and funds the development, manufacturing and release of synthetic, man-made viruses solely to justify immensely profitable mass vaccinations”. We have seen so many instances of an unusual and apparently laboratory-made virus appearing without warning, the onset followed immediately by urgent worried pronouncements from the WHO of yet another mandatory mass vaccination.
We have the rampant production of deadly viruses in secretive labs around the world, and the repeated “accidental” release of those into various populations (think ZIKA) – seemingly inevitably without explanation, apology or even a semblance of actual investigation, much less censure or criminal or civil charges. We also have the blanket legal immunity for all pharma companies in their creation and dissemination of deadly pathogens by vaccination. When we add into this mix the WHO’s history of criminality as with their now-famous tetanus/hCG international sterility program, the curious timing of the onset of AIDS, and the many occurrences of the WHO’s vaccination programs perfectly coinciding with a sudden outbreak of yet another unusual disease in the same areas and populations, one would have to be a hard-core ideologue to not become damned suspicious.
WHO Vaccinations and Population Control
During the early 1990s, the WHO had been overseeing massive tetanus vaccination campaigns in Nicaragua, Mexico, the Philippines, Tanzania and Nigeria. All tell a similar story, one that almost beggars belief but with the facts too clear to refute. Tetanus is a disease whose onset we often associate with stepping on a rusty nail or some such event. It should be clear that men would be at least as likely, if not more likely, to encounter this circumstance than would women, and perhaps careless children more than adults, but the WHO vaccination program was directed only to females from 15 to 45 years of age – in other words, child-bearing ages. In Nicaragua, the targets were females from 12 to 49 years of age.
Also, a single tetanus shot is universally accepted as sufficient to provide protective duration of ten years or more, but the WHO inexplicably insisted on vaccinating these women five times within several months. Shortly after the initiation of these programs, concerns began to emerge about spontaneous abortions and other complications arising exclusively within the vaccinated populations. On suspicion, a group in Mexico had the vaccination serum analysed and discovered it contained the Human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG) hormone. This hormone is critical to the female body during pregnancy. It causes the release of other hormones that prepare the uterine lining for the implantation of the fertilised egg. Without it, a woman’s body is unable to sustain a pregnancy and the fetus will be aborted. This hormone was injected into the subjects along with the tetanus serum, causing a female body to then recognise both as foreign agents and to develop antibodies to destroy either if they were to ever appear in the body in the future.
Upon becoming pregnant, a woman’s body would fail to recognize hCG as a friend and would produce anti-hCG antibodies, the prior vaccination now inducing her body’s immune system to attack the hormone that is needed to bring an unborn child to term, preventing subsequent pregnancies by killing the hCG which is necessary to sustain them. This means each woman who received the WHO inoculation was vaccinated not only against tetanus but also against pregnancy. (1) (2)
The WHO at first denied the facts and disparaged the results of the initial tests, but following this revelation each nation conducted extensive tests and in all cases the hCG hormone was identified as existing in the tetanus vaccination serum. The WHO eventually went silent and discontinued their program but by this time many millions of women had been vaccinated – and rendered sterile. One important fact is that the three different brands of tetanus vaccine being used in this project were developed, produced, and distributed in secrecy and that none had ever been tested or licensed for sale or distribution anywhere in the world. The companies that produced them were Connaught Laboratories and Intervex from Canada, and Australia’s CSL Laboratories. Connaught is the same firm that, along with the Canadian Red Cross, knowingly distributed AIDS-contaminated blood products for several years during the 1980s, a criminal organisation that should have been executed along with its owners. (3)
Further damning evidence that the Western media censored, was the fact that the WHO had been actively involved for more than 20 years prior in the development of an anti-fertility vaccine utilizing hCG tied to tetanus toxoid as a carrier – precisely the same combination as in these vaccines. According to the WHO’s own reports, they had spent nearly $400 million on this kind of “reproductive health” research. More than 20 research articles have been written on this subject, many of these by the WHO itself, that document in detail the WHO’s attempts to create an anti-fertility vaccine utilizing tetanus toxoid. And they aren’t alone; the UNFPA, the UNDP, the World Bank and of course – whenever we encounter secret efforts at population control – the ubiquitous Rockefeller Foundation, are all allied in this cause, as was the US National Institute of Health. The Government of Norway was also a partner in this travesty, contributing more than $40 million to develop this Tetanus-abortion vaccine.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been heavily funding the distribution of tetanus vaccine in Africa by UNICEF, which is the agency that provided Kenya with the vaccine laced with hCG. Gates said: “The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps ten or fifteen percent.” (4) The Rockefeller Foundation also heavily funded this vaccine research and distribution. (5) All this amounts to genocide on a planetary scale.
I examined in detail the WHO website and discovered there were dozens of articles, many written by WHO researchers, documenting in detail the WHO’s attempts to create an anti-fertility vaccine utilizing tetanus toxoid as a carrier. (6) Some leading articles included:
- “Clinical profile and Toxicology Studies on Four Women Immunized with Pr-B-hCG-TT,” Contraception, February, 1976, pp. 253-268.
- “Observations on the antigenicity and clinical effects of a candidate antipregnancy vaccine: B-subunit of human chorionic gonadotropin linked to tetanus toxoid,” Fertility and Sterility, October 1980, pp. 328-335.
- “Phase 1 Clinical Trials of a World Health Organisation Birth Control Vaccine,” The Lancet, 11 June 1988, pp. 1295-1298. “Vaccines for Fertility Regulation,” Chapter 11, pp. 177-198, Research in Human Reproduction, Biennial Report (1986-1987), WHO Special Programme of Research, Development and Research Training in Human Reproduction (WHO, Geneva 1988).
- “Anti-hCG Vaccines are in Clinical Trials,” Scandinavian Journal of Immunology, Vol. 36, 1992, pp. 123-126.
As early as 1978, the WHO was actively exploring ways to eradicate much of the population of the Third World. A paper published by the WHO (7) was titled, “Evaluating … placental antigen vaccines for fertility regulation”; The paper acknowledged “substantial progress” in its worldwide eugenics program of culling non-whites, but yet identified “an urgent need for a greater variety of methods” of preventing fertility, and gushed over the fact that “immunisation as a prophylactic measure is now so widely accepted”, that the employment of sterilisation vaccines would be widely appealing (to those dispensing the vaccines) and would offer “great ease of delivery”.
If that isn’t clear, the WHO is saying that vaccinations for other purposes – protection against diseases – are so common and widely-accepted, inoculation is probably the easiest way to sterilise the populations of undeveloped countries. The paper then notes the accumulation of evidence that “there exist proteins specific to the reproductive system” which “could be blocked” by vaccinations and provide a new method of “fertility regulation”. Among the stated advantages of a sterilisation vaccine is that it could prevent or disrupt implantation of the fertilised egg onto the uterus wall, and thereby guarantee that every (non-white) conception would result in a miscarriage or spontaneous abortion, i.e., an anti-hCG vaccine. The paper continues:
“Testing … will reveal whether a single injection is sufficient to achieve the desired level of immunization, or whether several boosting injections will be required. The main desired effect is to achieve a degree of immunization sufficient to: (a) neutralize the hormonal activity of hCG in vivo; and (b) prevent or disrupt implantation at a very early stage of pregnancy. It is not yet established whether immunization with the β hCG peptide conjugate will cause an irreversible biological neutralization of hCG … This will probably vary from individual to individual. In the first case, the indication for immunization will be restricted to sterilization, whereas in the second eventuality … immunization may be considered as a long-lasting but reversible anti-fertility measure.”
On August 17-18, 1992, the WHO produced a report titled “Fertility Regulating Vaccines”, resulting from a large meeting in Geneva of scientists and ‘womens’ health advocates’ “to review the current status of the development of fertility regulating vaccines.” The meeting was from a joint Special Program of research in reproduction of the UNDP, UNFPA, the WHO and the World Bank. The report stated, “… applied research on FRV’s (fertility-regulating vaccines) has been going on for more than twenty years …”, and discussed not only the anti-hCG vaccines already receiving clinical trials, but the development of other vaccines such as an anti-GnRH vaccine that would extend the temporary infertility due to breast-feeding.
This vaccine was also being field-tested at the time, with the possible intention of employing both antigens in the same vaccine on the assumption that a single vaccine might not sterilise all victims. They also recognised the dangers of administering such a vaccine to women who were already pregnant, and expressed awareness the antibodies would almost certainly be present in the milk and might therefore render the infants permanently sterile as well – with the massive understatement that this “might not be acceptable to all potential users …” From the outset, WHO planners realised that during mass vaccinations, many pregnant women would also be inoculated with the anti-hCG serum, which would inevitably result not only in sterilisation, miscarriages and spontaneous abortions but also incurable autoimmune disorders and birth defects.
The same paper went on to state, “In addition to women being immunized inadvertently during an established pregnancy, fetuses could be exposed to potential teratological effects of immunization …”. In other words, WHO staff would freely inoculate pregnant women, those embryos or fetuses not spontaneously aborting would experience pathological growth from which would result various undefined birth defects. The WHO is not researching ‘reproductive health’, but reproductive impossibility, and their tetanus-hCG vaccine is not in any sense ‘regulating’ the fertility of women but rendering their fertility biologically impossible, which is not quite the same thing. Their own paper stated the vaccination likely “will cause an irreversible biological neutralization of hCG”, which means the permanent sterilisation of innocent women who agreed to receive tetanus shots.
Try to understand what this means: the WHO was for decades receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for research and testing, to produce an antifertility vaccine that would make a woman’s immune system attack and destroy her own babies in the womb, a vaccine they would surreptitiously combine with a tetanus vaccination without informing the victims. To say their deceit was successful would be an understatement. The WHO inoculated more than 130 million women in 52 countries with this vaccine, permanently sterilising some very large percentage of them without their knowledge or consent. It was only when an enormous number of women in all countries experienced vaginal bleeding and miscarriages immediately after the vaccinations, that the hormone additive was discovered as the cause. Suspicions were aroused when the WHO selected only females of child-bearing age and further specified the unheard-of practice of five multiple injections over a three month period, but the health officials in these undeveloped countries still had faith in the white man’s medicine.
Upon the discovery of the hormone in the vaccine, Nigerian physicians reported WHO doctors telling them the hCG hormone “would have no effect on human reproduction”, statements they knew to be false. When this information reached the public, the WHO assumed an offensive and repugnant stand, mocking and ridiculing the nations that had performed the tests and revealed the contamination, condemning them as incompetent, having “unsuitable” testing laboratories, and using improper samples or procedures. WHO officials claimed these nations had “Not the right kind of lab to do the test. The labs know only how to test urine samples . . .” This is the standard response by Western agencies, governments, and corporations, when caught with adulterated products. When Coca-Cola’s drinks in China were found to contain frightening levels of pesticides and chlorine, the immediate accusation was that China’s biological laboratories were all incompetent. When Nestle’s noodles in India were found to contain dangerously toxic amounts of lead, India’s laboratories were all incompetent. The next step is to carefully produce a few samples known to be uncontaminated, provide them to an “independent” laboratory that inevitably pronounces them clean, then move the story off the front page.
When the discovery was made, many nations enacted immediate legal restraining orders against WHO and UNICEF vaccine programs. WHO and UNICEF officials said the “grave allegations” were “not backed up by evidence”, which was nonsense. UNICEF, USAID and the WHO refused to address the evidence like vaginal bleeding, miscarriages and spontaneous abortions. They also refused to discuss the reasons for a series of five closely-spaced vaccinations when one had always been sufficient, ignoring the content of their own published papers stating that multiple injections of a tetanus-hCG vaccine would be necessary for effective sterilisation.
When faced with documented results, WHO officials admitted the hormone did indeed exist “in small amounts” in “some” of the vaccine material, but that this was an inconsequential result of “accidental contamination”. Nobody at the WHO attempted to explain the source of the hCG hormone in sufficient volume to contaminate 130 million doses of a vaccine, nor how that “contamination” could “accidentally” have inserted itself into all those vaccines. The Lancet reported that the US National Institute of Health supplied much of the hCG hormone for WHO experiments and testing. The Western media were of course too busy at the time telling us how evil Iran was, to notice the small issue of 130 million women having been deliberately vaccinated against pregnancy, without their knowledge. As I’ve often mentioned elsewhere, the Western media are excessively fond of demonising Hitler, but Hitler didn’t sterilise 130 million women without their knowledge or consent, so where is the moral outrage against the WHO? The outrage is buried in the fact that none of those 130 million sterilised women were white.
The WHO went silent for a while, but in 2015, Vatican Radio charged that the UN organisations WHO and UNICEF were again executing vast international programs of depopulating the earth by using vaccines to surreptitiously sterilise women in Third World countries, this time in Kenya. It stated that “Catholic Bishops in Kenya have been opposed to the nationwide Tetanus Vaccination Campaign targeting 2.3 million Kenyan women and girls of reproductive age between 15-49 years, terming the campaign a secret government plan to sterilize women and control population growth”. (8) In May of 2018, it was reported that fertility-regulating vaccines were being used in India. (9)
And Polio, Too
In 2009, there was a spreading outbreak of Polio in Nigeria, a direct result of yet another WHO vaccination program, this time directly linked to the vaccine which was made from a live polio virus which always carries a risk of causing polio instead of protecting against it – as the Americans learned to their chagrin many years ago. Today in the West, polio vaccines are made from a killed virus that cannot cause polio. This latest WHO-sponsored outbreak actually began several years prior, which the WHO blamed on the live virus in their vaccines that had somehow “mutated”. So once again, the WHO is causing polio in the undeveloped world, amid evidence that for every case of identified polio there are hundreds of other children who don’t develop the disease but remain carriers and pass it on to others. It has long been recognised that the live oral vaccine used by the WHO can easily cause the very epidemics it pretends to be eliminating, and of course there is no published evidence that the polio virus had in fact “mutated”. The same occurred in Kenya, this time using the hCG hormone tied to polio vaccinations, with the same tragic results. (10)
In late 2013, Syria experienced a sudden outbreak of polio, the first in that country in about 20 years, and in an area that had been under the control of US-backed revolutionary mercenaries. The Syrian government claimed to have evidence that these foreigners brought the disease into the country from Pakistan, from Western (US) agencies. The WHO was active in Pakistan in yet another of its “humanitarian vaccination programs” that strangely coincided in geographic area with a severe outbreak of polio, and Syrian authorities were adamant that the West transmitted it to their nation when 1.7 million doses of polio vaccine were purchased by UNICEF, in spite of the fact that no cases of polio had been seen since 1999. After the mass vaccination program started, cases of polio began to reappear in Syria.
UNICEF began a similar mass vaccination program with 500,000 doses of live oral polio vaccine in the Philippines in spite of the fact there were no reported cases of polio in the Philippines since 1993. This would fit the pattern from other instances of sudden disease emergencies. I have not managed yet to reconstruct the WHO’s vaccination and other programs in all locations, but sudden outbreaks of viruses are always suspicious since they cannot be created from nothing and must be introduced into a population, and with surprising regularity appear on the heels of some WHO vaccination program. The sudden and inexplicable appearance of the Bubonic plague in Peru and Madagascar are two such events and, increasingly often, the pathogens do not appear to be natural in origin. In particular, the SARS-related camel virus in the Middle East had some obvious signs of human engineering as did the SARS coronavirus itself. There are many other such cases which are far too often linked with the presence of some program of the WHO.
The WHO is also becoming active in China with alarming potential for disaster. As one example, in late 2013, a number of newborn Chinese babies died immediately after being inoculated by the WHO against hepatitis B. The WHO China representative, Dr. Bernhard Schwartlander, called China’s program “very successful”, but I find myself with gnawing suspicions about his definition of ‘success’. The infant deaths may indeed have been an unfortunate accident, but I was not encouraged by Schwartlander’s comment that it is “difficult to establish a causal link between the vaccines and the babies’ deaths”. Knowing the past history of the WHO and their infectious inoculations, the ‘difficulty of establishing a causal link between the WHO vaccinations and civilian deaths’, may have been the part that was ‘successful’.
Pfizer Case Study – The Perfectly-Timed Epidemic
It is by now well-known that many new drugs are accompanied by serious side-effects such as irreversible liver damage, and are often fatal to children. In 1996 Pfizer developed a new antibiotic called Trovan to treat a variety of infections – meningitis being one example. Many of these new antibiotics are very powerful and with side effects that normally make them too dangerous to use for children, often causing permanent liver damage, joint disease and many other debilitating complications. Inexplicably, Pfizer decided to perform test trials on infants. However, Pfizer had the standard problem that FDA certification in the US required clinical trials on humans, and these are almost impossible to conduct in developed countries because no parents are willing to allow their children to take part in such risky clinical trials, to say nothing of the lawsuits resulting from trials gone bad. Therefore these pharma companies tend almost universally to take their trials to poor countries in Africa, Asia and South America where the laws are unprepared and the people don’t understand the risks of untested and unapproved drugs. The American (and European) pharma companies therefore transformed the developing world into an enormous test laboratory that carries no financial liability.
As luck would have it, at precisely the moment when Pfizer was ready to commence clinical trials of this new drug, Nigeria was suddenly and inexplicably hit with one of the worst meningitis epidemics in history. And of course, Pfizer was there to help the Nigerian government deal with the outbreak. But Pfizer didn’t exactly deal with the outbreak; what it did was to conduct a reprehensible clinical trial for its new medication, on a group of victims unlikely to complain. Rather than “helping” as it claimed, Pfizer gathered a trial group and a control group, giving one group Pfizer’s new medication and a competitor’s product to the other. It quickly became obvious that the Americans were not on a humanitarian mission but were saving the expense of live trials. After experimenting on about 200 victims, they gathered their test information and left – right in the middle of the meningitis epidemic, without having saved any lives. The Nigerian government tallied the deaths at about 11,000.
That would have been the end, except that a controversy erupted soon after about the relationship between Pfizer’s need for test trials and the meningitis outbreak. As it happened, the WHO was in Nigeria immediately prior to that time on another of its “life-saving” vaccination programs, this time for polio, and the timing and location of the meningitis outbreak apparently matched perfectly the WHO’s polio vaccination program. And of course it perfectly matched Pfizer’s need for large numbers of test subjects. There were lawsuits and payments, accusations and denials, but to this day Nigeria refuses WHO entry into the country and will not participate in any further “humanitarian” aid from the UN or the WHO. We cannot definitively say that the WHO deliberately created the meningitis epidemic for the benefit of Pfizer’s tests, but it’s the only theory that fits all the known facts and it’s the kind of thing the WHO appears to do on a regular basis. We should note Pfizer’s intention to market Trovan in the US and Europe after its trials on these African children, but the FDA refused to approve Trovan for American children due to the severe dangers.
Pfizer’s behavior after these “field trials” ended was, if anything, even more reprehensible. The lawsuits were based on claims that Pfizer did not have proper consent from parents to use an experimental drug on their children, the use of which not only left many children dead but others with brain damage, paralysis or slurred speech. Pfizer eventually reached a settlement with the Nigerian state government to pay $75m in damages and to create a fund of $35m to compensate the victims. This, after what the Guardian described as “a 15-year legal battle against Pfizer over a fiercely controversial drug trial”. Pfizer not only resisted to the end, forcing the poor families through 15 years of hell before finally relenting, but resorted to extortion and blackmail of Nigerian government officials in attempts to avoid making any payments to the families of the tiny victims of its illegal drug trial. The UK Guardian reported that leaked US government diplomatic cables revealed that “Pfizer hired investigators to look for evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in an effort to persuade him to drop the legal action”, with the apparent full knowledge and possibly assistance of the US State Department.
The Guardian stated the diplomatic cables recorded meetings between Pfizer’s country manager, Enrico Liggeri, and US officials at the Abuja embassy on 9 April 2009, stating, “According to Liggeri, Pfizer had hired investigators to uncover corruption links to federal attorney general Michael Aondoakaa to expose him and put pressure on him to drop the federal cases. He said Pfizer’s investigators were passing this information to local media.” The Guardian also reported there was no suggestion or evidence Nigeria’s attorney general was swayed by this pressure. Pfizer of course claimed the entire notion was “preposterous”, but we can assume the cables – which were classified as “Confidential” – didn’t lie.
It seems Pfizer was dissembling in all its statements, not only with claims of government approval and parental knowledge, but their claim a Nigerian doctor was in charge and directed the experiments. The government’s study found the local doctor was the director “in name only” and most often was not even informed of the procedures of the study and was typically “kept in the dark”. As well Pfizer used the fake letter from a non-existent department to obtain FDA approval for these clinical trials. Pfizer finally admitted the forged letter was “incorrect”, but I’m not sure that is the most appropriate adjective to use. Pfizer also made the infuriatingly dishonest claim that its antibiotic “Trovan demonstrated the highest survival rate of any treatment at the hospital. Trovan unquestionably saved lives.” Well, maybe, but the data on which Pfizer based this claim were the fact that in one location five patients died after using Pfizer’s drug while six patients died after using another medication, with no data as to infection severity or anything else. At best, an empty and fundamentally dishonest claim.
To deflect the issue of Pfizer’s Trovan being lethal to children, the company claimed that the international body Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans Frontières) were administering Pfizer’s drug in their own large treatment program, a claim MSF vehemently denied, saying, “We have never worked with this family of antibiotic. We don’t use it for meningitis. That is the reason why we were shocked to see this trial in the hospital.” It was Pfizer’s Liggeri who claimed the lawsuits against Pfizer “were wholly political in nature”, and Liggeri as well who concocted the accusation that MSF had administered Pfizer’s Trovan to children.
In 2006 the Washington Post reported on a lengthy Nigerian government study that concluded Pfizer violated international law by testing its unapproved drug on children with brain infections. The Post apparently obtained a copy of the confidential report which had been hidden away for five years, and which stated Pfizer had never received authorisation from the government for its clinical trial, the apparent authorisation letter having been forged on the letterhead of a non-existent department and backdated to a date prior to the study. According to the Post’s article, the government claimed Pfizer’s ‘humanitarian effort’ was “an illegal trial of an unregistered drug, and a clear case of exploitation of the ignorant.” (11)
The American response was not one of shame for participating in this fraud, nor did the State Department condemn Pfizer for either conducting the drug trials or attempting the extortion and blackmail. Instead, the US ambassador condemned the leak of US embassy cables, as if publicly revealing the crime constituted a worse action than the crime itself. The State Department rushed the high moral ground to condemn “endangering innocent people” and “sabotaging peaceful relations between nations”, ignoring the facts that Pfizer’s trials did far more to ‘endanger innocent people’ and ‘sabotage relations’ than could be done by the revelation of a crime. But in the eyes of the US government, Americans do not commit crimes, and in any case the victims weren’t white. The cables further claimed Pfizer settled only because legal and ‘investigative’ fees had been costing the company more than $15 million per year, which leads one to wonder what occurs in the minds of these people who will spend $15 million a year for 15 years, to avoid paying half that sum to compensate lives they destroyed.
And there is still more. We have seen so many documented examples of the US courts assuming jurisdiction where they have none, agreeing to try cases without any US involvement that occurred wholly outside the US, in flagrant violations of international law, and indicative only of imperial arrogance. But when Nigeria attempted to file claims against Pfizer in the US, the American courts refused to hear the cases, oddly claiming they had no jurisdiction. And this isn’t the first time the US government, the State Department and the US courts have circled the wagons to protect a US multinational by closing the courts.
In 2004 and 2007, the Nigerian media carried reports which were heavily suppressed in US and Western media that the country was refusing to permit UN health authorities to carry out further administration of polio vaccines, blaming the WHO for having initiated the meningitis epidemic in 1996 that resulted in Pfizer’s highly questionable drug trial in that country. Nigerian leaders were also concerned that polio and other foreign vaccines were deliberately contaminated with sterilising and other agents, as occurred in the Philippines and other nations at around the same time. In much of Africa, there appears to be little remaining of the trust that once existed in international agencies and US and European pharma companies. Today, they are viewed primarily as imperial predators with a distinctly anti-human agenda, or at least an agenda that is anti non-white. The portions of Nigeria and other African nations that do still permit vaccinations now insist these be prepared in a trusted non-Western country with no involvement of the WHO or other Western agencies.
Many nations today insist the WHO is a tool to reduce Muslim populations, a claim that is increasingly difficult to dismiss as simple paranoia, and in fact Nigeria also discovered sterilants in WHO vaccines in that country that were clearly capable of lowering fertility in women. The Western media steadfastly ignore the body of evidence supporting these claims and suspicions, and focus instead on a moralistic concern that “the world might be slipping in its efforts to wipe out polio”, categorising the valid concerns of so many nations as ignorant and uninformed suspicion. The Western media of course are all reading from the same page as the perpetrators of this outrage.
We also have the ever-present corporate apologists, weaving their tapestries of misinformation attempting to irreversibly confuse an issue with irrelevancies and so as to place doubts in the minds of the public. One perennial favorite is a claim that “these attacks on pharmaceutical companies could encourage countries to enact legislation that would lower drug profits, which in turn could hamper the development of new medications”. This foolish statement from Roger Bate, a “fellow” at the International Policy Network, which is a lobby group for big pharma, funded by the usual Foundations and corporations, and dutifully reported by London’s Daily Telegraph in its campaign to confuse the uninformed public. The statement is actually rather clever, suggesting that our condemnation of the atrocities and illegalities of big pharma are somehow unjustified violent “attacks” on undeserving corporations. In the case of Pfizer and its Nigerian Trovan trials, The Telegraph gives us an added incentive to sympathise with big pharma by telling us – without evidence or documentation – that “the Nigerian government’s motives (in condemning Pfizer) have also been questioned”, the issue being morphed from reprehensible drug trials resulting in death of children into one of an untrustworthy government with questionable political motives. Thus will the Western media will spin and weave until truth in all its forms disappears from the landscape forever.
Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Notes:
(1) Tetanus vaccine laced with anti-fertility drug; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12346214
(2) HCG found in WHO tetanus vaccine in Kenya; https://nexusnewsfeed.com/article/human-rights/hcg-found-in-who-tetanus-vaccine-in-kenya/
(3) Vaccines and Population Control: A Hidden Agenda; https://www.thelibertybeacon.com/are-new-vaccines-laced-with-birth-control-drugs/
(4) Bill Gates and the anti-fertility agent in African tetanus vaccine;
(5) Rockefeller-Funded Anti-Fertility Vaccine Coordinated by WHO; https://www.globalresearch.ca/rockefeller-funded-anti-fertility-vaccine-coordinated-by-who
(6) One need only search the WHO website for hCG to find the reports.
(7) Clin. exp. Immunol. (1978) 33, (360-375); February 8, 1978
(8) Vatican: UNICEF and WHO are sterilizing girls through vaccines
(9) Fertility-Regulating Vaccines are Being Tested in India; https://vactruth.com/2018/05/30/fertility-regulating-vaccines-india/
(10) Polio Vaccines Laced with Sterilizing Hormone Discovered in Kenya – WHO is Controlling Population?
(11) Panel Faults Pfizer in ’96 Clinical Trial In Nigeria; www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/06/AR2006050601338.html
(12) Drugs companies fund patient groups which attack NHS; https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/3112841/Drugs-companies-fund-patient-groups-which-attack-NHS-decisions.html
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Global Research, 2020
Africa, Latin America Fragile Targets for Coronavirus Spread
teleSUR | March 20, 2020
The West African nation of Mali has roughly one ventilator per 1 million people — 20 in all to help the critically ill with respiratory failure. In Peru, with more than 32 million people, about 350 beds in intensive care units exist.
Many of their nations are slamming shut borders and banning large gatherings in the hope of avoiding the scenes in wealthier countries such as Italy and the U.S., but local transmission of the virus has begun.
Containing that spread is the new challenge. Africa has more than 900 confirmed cases and Latin America more than 2,500, but an early response is crucial as fragile health systems could be quickly overwhelmed.
With such limited resources, experts say identifying cases, tracing and testing are key.
“We have seen how the virus actually accelerates that after a certain … tipping point. So the best advice for Africa is to prepare for the worst and prepare today,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Wednesday.
“We have different and significant barriers to health care in Africa, which could be a real challenge,” said Dr. Ngozi Erondu, a senior research fellow at the Chatham House Center for Global Health Security.
Many countries in sub-Saharan Africa do not have the isolation wards or large number of health care workers to respond to a surge of COVID-19 patients, she said.
Liberia and Burkina Faso only have a few ventilators for their millions of people.
Dr. Bernard Olayo, founder of the Kenya-based Center for Public Health and Development, said most countries in Africa can’t afford ventilators. Even if ventilators were provided by other countries, it’s not sufficient because of the lack of qualified people to use them.
“It’s complex, it’s very very complex because the patients that end up on ventilators require round the clock care by larger teams,” he said.
Many patients could do well with just oxygen, he said, but close to half of health facilities in African countries don’t have reliable oxygen supplies. Oxygen concentrators can be used, but given the frequent electricity cuts in many countries, oxygen generators and pressure cylinders are needed because they can function while power is out.
The WHO regional Africa director, Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, said the lack of ICU facilities and ventilators is one of the biggest challenges facing the continent.
“We have been able to identify importing a field hospital-type of facility that can be set up and equipped with some of the key items needed, such as ventilators,” she said. Training has begun in Republic of Congo and Senegal so health care workers will be ready to operate it, and World Bank funding is being made available, she said.
Several countries in Latin America are also among the least prepared in the world for a pandemic, with healthcare systems already stretched thin.
Peruvian Minister of Defense Walter Martos told local America TV on Monday that the nation has less than 400 respirators available.
“It’s not a lot,” he said. “Really, we don’t have the infrastructure that developed nations do.”
Peru and other nations in Latin America are looking to the experience in Europe as a cautionary tale and hoping to curtail the spread of coronavirus cases before they overwhelm hospitals.
Epidemiologist Cristian Díaz Vélez said those measures could potentially create a slower rise in cases that is more manageable for Peru’s medical system. He said the country has around 300 to 350 beds in intensive care units, half of which are now in use.
“It will overwhelm our healthcare system,” he said, if cases skyrocket.
Other countries in Latin America could fare far worse.
Syria and “Transitional Justice”
By Helena Cobban | Just World News | February 12, 2020
Almost from the beginning of the US-supported regime-change project in Syria, US policymakers have incorporated several kinds of planning for what is called “transitional justice” into their pursuit of the project. Transitional justice (TJ) is a field that came into great vogue in the mid-1990s, after two key developments in the post-Soviet world: (1) the UN Security Council’s creation of a special International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and (2) the agreement of the African National Congress in South Africa to negotiate an end to the Apartheid system– but with the proviso that the most heinous of the rights violators of the Apartheid era all ‘fess up to all their actions in a specially created Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC); and if those confessions were deemed full and heartfelt, then the perpetrators could escape prosecution for their actions.
From the early 1990s, these two approaches to TJ were in tension with each other; and that tension has lain at the heart of the rapidly burgeoning field of TJ projects ever since.
For its part, the prosecutorial/criminal-justice approach claimed descent from, crucially, the two US-dominated international courts established immediately after WW-II, in Nuremberg, and Tokyo. (The above photo is of Herman Goering on the stand, in Nuremberg.) The creation of ICTY was followed, two years later, by the Security Council’s creation of a parallel special court for Rwanda; and meantime, a broad movement emerged to press for the establishment by treaty among nations of a permanent “International Criminal Court” (ICC) which could hold accountable perpetrators of the worst forms of atrocities– described as war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide– in a criminal proceeding. In 1998, 120 governments adopted the “Rome Treaty” that established and set the rules for this court. In 2002, the requisite 60 countries had ratified the Rome Treaty and the ICC came into existence, headquartered in The Hague.
I have reflected at length in many earlier writings (including this 2006 book and these earlier articles: 1, 2) on some of the shortcomings of the ICC and the criminal-justice approach it adopts to dealing with the aftermath of atrocities. Suffice it here to note the following:
- The United States is not a member of the ICC; but all the presidents since 2002 have on occasion sought to use the investigative, international arrest, and prosecutorial powers of the ICC, or to threaten their use, against political figures around the world they are opposed to.
- The whole prosecutions movement since the creation of ICTY has claimed descent (and therefore a strong degree of legitimacy) from the whole Nuremberg/Tokyo Trials legacy. But all the “modern” international courts have omitted from their actual charge-sheets one of the key acts– perhaps the key act– prosecuted at Nuremberg and Tokyo: the crime of aggression, that is, the act of launching an aggressive war. The Rome Treaty listed the crime of aggression as potentially on the ICC’s docket, but its signatories have failed to reach agreement on how to define it and thus it has not in practice been chargeable.
- In March 2003, eight months after the ICC formally came into existence, the United States launched a massive, quite unjustified (and militarily successful) war of regime change in Iraq– a war that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan later admitted lacked any legitimacy.
- One of the early acts of the “Coalition Provisional Authority” through which the US military ruled Iraq after the invasion was to establish a special tribunal to try former president Saddam Hussein and his top associates. After the CPA set up an Iraqi government (though still under its own control), this government adopted the trial plan, renaming the body the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal. Saddam was captured by US soldiers in late 2003 and sent for trial by the SICT; in November 2006, it sentenced him to death. He was held in a prison inside the US military’s “Camp Justice.” On December 30, 2006 he was taken to a scaffold earlier than the Americans had planned by a group that included SICT officials and members of Shiite militias. There, he was hanged to the jubilation of many of the witnesses, who also circulated cellphone videos of the event. Saddam’s very unseemly execution capped off a trial that had been marred throughout by grave irregularities.
This political background should be borne in mind when considering the legitimacy (or even, the utility) of any plans to use prosecutorial TJ mechanisms in connection with US-led regime-change projects in the present era– in Syria, Venezuela, or anywhere else.
In June 2019, Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton published a broad and detailed description in The Grayzone of the work of several organizations that have as their mission the collection of evidence of war crimes and other atrocities committed in Syria and to some extent also Iraq, and the compilation of this evidence into forms that can help (or even spur) the prosecution of alleged perpetrators by international courts.
Most of these organizations are funded by Western governments. Most were also, like the Syrian Network for Human Rights, founded at, or shortly after, the time that Secretary of State Hillary of Clinton and Pres. Barack Obama committed Washington to full support of the regime-change project in Syria. Other such organizations include:
- the “Commission for International Justice and Accountability”, an organization founded by an enterprising Canadian investigator called Bill Wiley, that has received funding from Canada, the EU, numerous European countries, and the United States. CIJA got a massive boost in visibility in the United States after the New Yorker published a serious of materials about it written by Ben Taub. In this one, Taub breathlessly described how, “At an undisclosed location in Western Europe, a group called the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) is gathering evidence of war crimes perpetrated by the Syrian government… “
- The Syria Justice and Accountability Center (SJAC), which states explicitly on its website that it was founded in 2012 by the “Group of Friends of the Syrian People”– that is, the coalition of governments united in their project to overthrow the Syruian government. On its website, SJAC states that it was founded in The Hague and moved in 2016 to Washington DC, where it “is currently registered as a nonprofit corporation.” However, no organization of its name comes up in standard searches of nonprofits, while SJAC is currently listed as a project of the old cold-war organization, IREX.
Chart from p.50 of the Day After Project’s report
During their early years in existence, these organizations had as their goal the collection, preservation, and organization of materials that could, after the opposition’s overthrow of the government, serve in a war-crimes court as evidence of the organization by Syrian government officials of broad patterns of gross abuse.
The work of these documentation organizations was also inspired by “The Day After Project”, a project the federally funded U.S. Institute of Peace launched in late 2011 to plan for what decisionmakers in Washington all confidently expected would be the imminent fall of the Assad government. The Day After Project’s final report (PDF) was launched in August 2012, ostensibly by the all-Syrian group of 45 individuals who co-authored it. It contained a lengthy section on “Transitional Justice”, complete with a complex organogram showing how all the proposed parts of this project should be managed.
That was still the heyday of the thinking in official Washington that “Assad will fall any day now!” Washington– like Paris, Ankara, Doha, and other anti-Assad capitals– was full of very busy, Ahmad Chalabi-style Syrian exiles (often being handsomely paid by their Qatari, Saudi, or Emirati backers) who had managed to persuade themselves and numerous “locals” in those Western countries that any day now they would be riding into Damascus to take over the whole Syrian government. Well, in March 2003, Ahmad Chalabi did at least manage to get back to Baghdad in the wake of the US invasion of the country– though once he arrived, it was patently clear he had never enjoyed anything like the degree of popular backing within Iraqi society that he had long claimed to have. Regarding Syria, the earnest bands of exiles who were making detailed plans for their own imminent return “home” never even made it. They were unable to persuade a US government and public that had already been badly duped once, back in 2003, that the claimed “sins” of the Syrian government were bad enough to warrant a full-scale U.S. invasion– especially one that this time around (unlike in 2003) threatened to trigger a serious global showdown with a now more confident and capable Russia.
Yes, under Obama and Clinton, Washington did give the anti-Assad fighters some serious shipments of arms, along with strong political backing; and they and the Israelis did from time to time launch one-off strikes against Syrian military bases. But Obama and Clinton never signed off on a full-throated military campaign against Assad; and the anti-Assad rebels proved quite incapable of actually persuading enough Syrians to come over to their side, to win. The sides settled into a very lengthy and draining stalemate, during which the government side slowly proved able– with the help from international allies on whom it was quite legitimately able to call– to retake parts of Syria that had earlier been taken over by the foreign-armed (and increasingly jihadi-controlled) rebels.
Today, nine years into the conflict in Syria, there is no hope at all of the opposition seizing Damascus. And within the anti-Assad camp itself, extremist jihadis affiliated with either ISIS or Al-Qaeda long ago took over control, snuffing out the hopes of the Washington establishment that “moderate rebels” of the kind now firmly ensconced in Western think-tanks can ever become a significant force inside Syria. All the plans that those “moderate rebels” had made for the imminent establishment of an anti-Assad “special war-crimes court” like the one that earlier tried Saddam Hussein, or for other mechanisms of post-victory “transitional justice”, have to them a quality that is either robotic or slightly other-worldly.
Last week I went to the launch at a Qatari-funded think-tank called the Arab Center of Washington of a book called Accountability in Syria: Achieving Transitional Justice in a Postconflict Society. I guess the Qatari funding has been running a bit low, because there were no free copies of the book being handed out, and only one sample copy that attendees could take a glance at. It costs $90. Rush right over to the link above to buy your copy!
The three panelists were: the book’s editor, Radwan Ziadeh, a longtime regime-change advocate whose only listed professional achievement is his longtime gig as a “Senior Fellow” at the Arab Center; Mai el-Saadany, a US-trained Syrian-American lawyer who now works at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy; and Mohammed Alaa Ghanem, who until recently was Government Relations Director and Senior Political Adviser for the Syrian American Council, one of Washington DC’s principal regime-change organizations. Ghanem, who still has a (presumably nicely funded) affiliation with the UAE-funded Atlantic Council, is now doing a Master’s degree in international affairs at Columbia.
At one level, it was kind of a sad event. When Ziadeh started talking, he recounted that work on the book had started back in 2015– at a time when it may have been possible for regime-change advocates still to imagine that one day soon, just possibly, they could seize power in Damascus. (Hence, the reference in the book’s sub-title to a “Postconflict society.”) Poignantly, he spoke about how back then, “Aleppo”–actually, just that small portion of East Aleppo that the opposition still controlled– was becoming a center of evacuation, and how Ma’aret al-Numaan, in the opposition fighters’ Idlib redoubt, was a center of evacuation today.
In both instances, as the government regained control of terrain previously held by the jihadi extremists, the government allowed the opposition fighters and any civilians who chose to leave, to do so, and indeed, facilitated their departure. This is in notable contrast to the bloodthirsty actions the jihadi oppositionists have always taken toward the residents and defenders of areas that they’ve overtaken. But the video footage of desperate civilians fleeing in advance of the Syrian army’s arrival always looks pretty heart-wrenching.
(The videos widely circulated in the west notably do not depict the civilians who stay in the areas being brought back under Syrian government control– or, the earlier presence and activities of any of the jihadi fighters, some of whom who are Syrian and many of whom are not, who had controlled these areas so brutally over the preceding few years.)
When Mai el-Saadany spoke she stated confidently that, “The time for justice is now… We can’t afford to wait until the conflict ends.” She said that both the International Criminal Court and the UN’s doctrine of “Responsibility To Protect” (R2P) had proven useless in protecting Syria’s people; but that even without those tools there were three “accountability tools” the Syrian oppositionists could use: Documentation; a couple of different UN inquiry/documentation mechanisms; and prosecutions outside Syria, such as the one brought against two former Syrian officials by a court in Germany, last October.
When she talked about documentation, el-Saadany singled out for special praise the efforts of a group called Bellingcat–and of The New York Times.
For his part, Ghanem focused on the contribution he had made to the Accountability in Syria book, in which he looked at what he described as the “sectarian cleansing” that he saw the Syrian government as undertaking in formerly opposition-held areas over which it regained control. He accused “the Assad regime” of being dominated by Alawites and of engaging in “sectarian cleansing or demographic engineering” against “communities” in these areas, though he did not name these “communities.” He said he had been very proud to have gotten reference to this phenomenon included in the “Caesar Act”— a US sanctions measure against Syria that was signed into law in late December.
The most interesting part of this sad gathering came toward the end ( at 1h24m on the video.) A questioner had asked how the panelists thought that the kinds of “accountability”mechanisms they favored could be applied to other perpetrators of atrocities in Syria, “such as in the Turkish-controlled areas, or the SDF”, in addition to the government. At that point, Ziadeh almost completely lost it. The other two panelists, much better qualified and better prepared professionals than he, had both expressed their support for the idea that all accused perpetrators of significant atrocities, whatever their political alignment, should be subjected to the same accountability measures. (This is, after all, a key tenet to the whole field of transitional justice… Heck, in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, even some of the excesses of the ANC came under the same kind of scrutiny as the gross tortures of the Apartheid regime.)
Ziadeh argued that only the “Assad regime” should be addressed by any accountability mechanisms. “The Syrian government– it became not a rogue state, but deep sectarian militias, that has no regard for the life of any Syrian” he said. “It’s impossible to think of having a political settlement with this kind of militia in control of Syria… What’s the end answer? No Syrians nor anyone else have any answer for that… There is nothing to talk about! There is nothing to leverage or negotiate about. I am very pessimistic. There is no soon, any hope of a political settlement of the conflict.”
The other two panelists hewed more closely to the standard TJ script. Both argued that, while there is no “false equivalence” between the violations committed by the “Assad regime” and those committed by other parties, still, all violators should be held accountable.
Ghanem had earlier argued that accountability-seeking mechanisms could be used as “leverage” for the Syrian opposition in a future negotiated settlement. The relationship between pressure for “accountability” and momentum toward negotiations is a complex–and, as I demonstrated in this recent article, “Syria: Peacemaking or prosecutions?”, often an inverse–one. (When I wrote that piece, in early November, the prospects for reaching a negotiated political transition in Syria seemed greater than they do today.)
One misapprehension into which all three of the panelists at the Arab Center event seemed to have fallen was to conflate the idea of “accountability” almost completely with the path of criminal prosecutions. But as anyone who has studied the TJ field knows, there are numerous other mechanisms that have been used to enact accountability other than Western-style courts of law. South Africa’s TRC was one such mechanism. It was widely (and correctly) lauded for helping enable South Africans to make the transition from a deepseated system of colonial expropriation and Apartheid to a much more inclusive system that enabled the “White” colonists to remain in the country on a basis of political equality with its indigenes– and to achieve this without triggering a massive new race war between those two sides (though the transition was accompanied by very lethal fighting between the two major Black African political forces.)
The main premise of the TRC was that as part of the transition to political equality, it was necessary to draw a line under the violence of the past and to offer a full amnesty from prosecutions for all the perpetrators of that violence provided they (a) had stopped committing it; and (b) provided a full description of the violent acts they had committed, such as could help bring a degree of legal and emotional “closure” to survivors of the violence and others bereaved by it or otherwise affected by it.
The exact terms of the TRC’s “deal” with former perpetrators were painstakingly negotiated among the parties to the transition– principally, the Apartheid era’s ruling National Party and the anti-Apartheid African National Congress (ANC). The Apartheid government possessed overwhelming military and socioeconomic force throughout the whole of South Africa; and it would never have agreed to end Apartheid and transition to a one-person-one-vote system in South Africa if its leaders had not been offered an amnesty. If there had been no TRC, the whole of Southern Africa might still be riven with terrible conflicts, to this day. The “offer” of amnesty was backed up by the existence in the country of a fairly well-functioning judicial system. But the main factor motivating perpetrators to come forward and participate in the often riveting public hearings that the TRC held all around the country was the desire most of them felt to allow their families, their communities, and their country to move forward.
In my 2006 book, Amnesty After Atrocity? Healing Nations after Genocide and War Crimes, I looked at the effectiveness of South Africa’s TRC and compared it with the very different post-conflict mechanisms that, in that same period of 1992-94, had been adopted by Mozambique and post-genocide Rwanda. Those two other cases effectively “bracketed” what the South Africans agreed to do. In Rwanda, the post-genocide government was heavily inclined towards prosecutorialism, supporting both the creation and work of a UN-established International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and the use of a very broad campaign of national-level prosecutions of suspected genocidaires. In Mozambique, by contrast, an extremely lengthy and ugly civil war was brought to an end in 1992 when the two main parties to it, the ruling Frelimo movement and the opposition Renamo, were brought together in a negotiation conducted by a Vatican-sponsored peace group and agreed to end their combat on the basis of a blanket amnesty for previous perpetrators of violence from both sides. The United Nations then stepped in with a broad program for demilitarization, demobilization, and reintegration into their home societies of the former fighters from both sides (DDR).
Intense inter-group conflict of any kind of course inflicts massive damage on a country’s economy, including its most basic infrastructure, so societies emerging from such conflicts have numerous, extremely pressing human and economic needs. In this context, the relative costs– and therefore, also opportunity costs– of the TJ mechanisms used are definitely a factor. I used public documentation to calculate the costs of these mechanisms as follows (p.209):
- Each case completed at the ICTR : $42,300,000
- Each amnesty application at the TRC: $4,290
- Each case in Rwanda’s planned “local-style” gacaca courts (projected): $581
- Mozambique: each former fighter demobilized/reintegrated: $1,075
- South Africa: each former fighter demobilized/reintegrated: $1,066.
In that concluding chapter of the book, I presented (pp.212-13) a critique of the degree of “accountability” that advocates of prosecutorialism judge that their favored approach provides, noting that the kind of personal “accountability” required of perpetrators by a court of law is very thin indeed compared with, for example, that required in TRC or other similar mechanisms.
I also presented (p.241) a list of nine “meta-tasks” that, based on my previous analysis in the book– and on my own experience of having lived and worked in an area wracked by civil conflict, during the first six years of Lebanon’s civil war– I concluded that societies recovering from grave inter-group conflict need to undertake. It runs as follows:
Top rank (all of equal urgency):
-
- Establish rigorous mechanisms to guard against any relapse back into conflict and violence.
- Actively promote reconciliation across all inter-group divisions.
- Build an equality-based domestic democratic order that allows for nonviolent resolution of internal differences and respects and enforces human rights.
- Restore the moral systems appropriate to an era of peace.
- Reintegrate former combatants from all the previously fighting parties into the new society.
- Start restoring and upgrading the community’s physical and institutional infrastructure.
- Start righting the distributional injustices of the past.
Second rank (of somewhat less urgency):
-
- Promote psychological healing for all those affected by the violence and the atrocities, restoring dignity to them. (If the top-rank tasks are all addressed, those moves will anyway do much to achieve this; but it will probably need continuing attention.)
- Establish such records of the facts as are needed to meet victims’ needs (death certificates; identification of the burial sites; etc) and to start to build a record for history.
In the real world, decisions on what to do with individuals accused of having committed grave infractions nearly always get made in the context of a negotiation over the nature and terms of a major societal transition to a new political order. “String ’em all up on the lamp-posts!” or “Line ’em all up and shoot them!” are versions of one notable, non-negotiated type of such decision– and a type that notably doesn’t augur well for the political tone of the new order. In Syria, the way that ISIS or the bunch of Al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadis who currently control Idlib treat accused government supporters who fall under their sway definitely falls into this category.
Negotiating an end to a conflict– or acting with restraint in the event no negotiation proves possible– nearly always augurs a better outcome. At the end of WW-II, in the Asian theater, the Japanese Emperor was able to negotiate surrender terms on fairly favorable terms that ensured his dynasty’s continuation in office (and his own exculpation from responsibility for any of Japan’s preceding war crimes)–but in return for allowing the Americans and their allies to set up an international criminal tribunal to try certain Japanese decisionmakers, and numerous other concessions. In Germany, there was no negotiated end to the fighting; and the Russian, French, and British leaders (whose peoples had suffered most gravely from the Nazis’ actions) were all baying for extreme retribution. But the US public was relatively distant from the battlefield. That allowed Secretary of War Henry Stimson and President Harry Truman– both of whom were also aware of the disastrous sequelae of the punitive approach the victorious Allies had imposed on post-WW-I Germany– to argue for, and implement, the much more restrained approach to post-war justice that the Nuremberg trials represented.
Recent developments in Syria make the prospect of a negotiated end to the country’s lengthy civil war seem more remote today than they did a few months ago. The country’s 22 million people have been held in the vice of this conflict, and victim to the wiles of numerous outside actors and interveners much more than to those of any domestic actors, for nine long years. (This was also, interestingly, the case in Mozambique. Much of the terrible violence that Renamo used in its campaign to control as many Mozambicans as possible as a way of pressuring and overthrowing the Frelimo government had been organized and underwritten by South Africa’s Apartheid. The intra-Mozambican negotiations that brought an end to the war only made progress after a weakened South Africa started to withdraw that support.)
Throughout the first six years of Syria’s civil war, the determination of the United States and several allied governments (Turkey, Qatar, the Saudis, the UAE) to accept nothing less than the complete overthrow of the Assad government stymied all attempts by the United Nations and others to attain a negotiated end to the war. After Pres. Trump assumed office, he was less devoted to total “regime change” than Pres. Obama had been… and since late 2018 or so, the UAE has pulled back from its focus on regime change. Turkey also, from the Astana Agreement of September 2018 on, was clearly exploring some kind of “regional super-powers mega-deal” with Russia and Iran, that could help ramp down, or even bring to a negotiated end, Syria’s civil war.
More recently, though, Trump has pulled back from his fondness for a pullback from Syria. And perhaps he has started to see US military involvement in Syria as helping to serve his broader campaign of “maximum pressure” against Iran? Turkey has also pulled back from its commitment to Astana and is currently squaring up for a possibly broader military clash with Syrian government forces?
So the prospect for a negotiated settlement to the Syrian civil war has receded some. But it has certainly not disappeared completely. If nine years of slogging fighting– accompanied by terrible, unspeakable atrocities being suffered by people from all “sides”–has not succeeded in bringing about a “decisive” victory for any side, then surely an end to this war that is negotiated in some way is the only reasonable path, and the only path that can draw a line under the suffering of the past nine years? A viable negotiating forum has already been established by the United Nations. Let us hope it can complete its work as soon as possible, and that as part of this process the negotiators can find a list of mutually acceptable ways to deal with the whole range of transitional justice issues. And these, as noted above, go considerably further than the kinds of war-crimes trials so beloved by the Western media.
Everything You Wanted to Know About Pete Buttigieg, But Were Too Afraid to Ask
By Robert Bridge | Strategic Culture Foundation | February 19, 2020
Rhodes Scholar. Afghan vet. Mayor. An impressive resume, to be sure, but to have made the fantastic leap from local politics to the doorstep of the Oval Office – at the age of just 38 – seems altogether impossible without some serious behind-the-scenes connections.
Let’s just cut right to the chase with a couple questions that the media has glaringly failed to consider about the top-polling Democratic presidential candidate. First, the most obvious one. How on earth does a young Midwestern mayor, regardless of his polished resume, jump to the front of the serving line, past hundreds of veteran politicians who have quietly nurtured presidential ambitions inside of the Beltway their entire lives?
As The Economist emphatically stated this week, “Mr Buttigieg is ridiculously young to be doing so well.”
Second, if the mayor of South Bend, Indiana (pop. 101,166) is now in serious contention to challenge Donald Trump in November, what exactly does that say about the depth of the Democratic bench, loaded as it is with Senators, House members, Governors and various state officials with far more political experience and acumen?
While the Oval Office has seen its share of pretenders, and even actors, the great majority of those men who made it to the pinnacle of power have spent at least some time in high political office before contemplating a presidential run. Incidentally, it is on this particular point, political experience, which could make a Trump-Buttigieg debate a very interesting spectacle. Although Buttigieg has limited political experience, Trump had none before he entered the White House, although certainly proving his abilities once in office.
For Pete’s sake!
Born on January 19, 1982, Buttigieg graduated valedictorian from St. Joseph High School in 2000. That same year he won a JFK ‘Profiles in Courage’ essay contest on the subject of none other than Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist the incredibly rising mayor is competing against for the November nod. “Above all, I commend Bernie Sanders for giving me an answer to those who say American young people see politics as a cesspool of corruption, beyond redemption,” Buttigieg wrote. His trip to Washington D.C. to collect his prize included a meeting with members of the Kennedy clan, an honor that must have left a deep impression on the 18 year old.
Upon graduation from Harvard University, Buttigieg did a stint (2007-2010) at the Chicago office of McKinsey & Co, the discreet U.S. management consulting firm. During his time there, the young upstart took a trip to perhaps the most unlikely destinations in the world, Somaliland, a self-proclaimed independent state in Africa that is struggling for international recognition to this day. In other words, not a trip to Disneyland.
Just before embarking on his African adventure (Summer of 2008), Buttigieg was taken on as a fellow with the Truman National Security Project, a neoliberal think tank that has been described as “a powerful and exclusive club for the best and brightest young progressives in the country.” Among its esteemed alumni is none other than Madeleine Albright, chief architect of NATO’s obliteration of Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, the founder of the Truman Project, Rachel Kleinfeld, deserves some consideration.
Upon graduating from Oxford, Kleinfeld took up employment with Booz Allen Hamilton, the private contractor that carried out a long list of services for the military. It has also been described as “the world’s most profitable spy organization.” The head of the company at the time was none other than James Woolsey, the neoconservative former CIA director who has advocated for a fiercely interventionist U.S. foreign policy, notably the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Back to Somaliland. In addition to Buttigieg’s affiliation with the Truman Center, where he now sits on the advisory board, his Somalian ‘vacation’ managed to garner special attention in The New York Times, suggesting this was much more than your ordinary getaway.
“Somaliland is pursuing investment and support from China and Gulf countries,” Buttigieg wrote in the Times piece, co-authored by Nathaniel Myers, who also went along for the joyride. “Such support might be enough to ensure Somaliland’s survival and eventual growth, but it will crowd out America’s chance to win the gratitude of a potentially valuable ally in a very troubled area.”
Possibly more than just incidentally, Myers, a Harvard buddy of Buttigieg, now serves as Senior Transition Advisor at USAID – Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), which works to destabilize governments deemed unfavorable to U.S. interests.
Just over a year later, in September 2009, Buttigieg, and despite his participation in anti-war rallies while at Harvard, signed up for the U.S. Navy Reserve. Due to his particular “pedigree,” writes Stars and Stripes magazine, he was sworn in as an ensign in naval intelligence without any prior preparation, which is not the traditional route for enlistees. In 2014, he was deployed to Afghanistan, which required Buttigieg to take a seven-month leave of absence from his mayoral duties in South Bend. Here is where the political upstart’s career begins to look a little sketchy.
According to The Grayzone, Buttigieg “spent his six months in Afghanistan in 2014 with a little-known unit that operated under the watch of the Drug Enforcement Administration. It was the Afghanistan Threat Finance Cell (ATFC), according to his appointment papers.”
What exactly did Special Officer Pete Buttigieg do in this unit, which was founded by none other than the future CIA chief General David Patreaus, who at the time was the head of U.S. Central Command? Well, that’s hard to say because the job description that appears in his discharge papers is left conveniently blank. This, and the fact that the ATFC has direct links to U.S. intelligence has fueled rumors with regards to who or what was responsible for placing the mayor of South Bend, Indiana on the political fast lane.
But those sorts of connections alone cannot explain Buttigieg’s meteoric rise in Washington, D.C., especially when the young upstart spent the majority of his time in South Bend. No, Pete Buttigieg would require boatloads of cash to earn such fame in such a short time. And as it turns out, the money has been pouring into his coffers from some of the wealthiest families in the country.
Buttigieg attracts the bucks
According to federal election data, forty billionaires and their spouses have donated to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, putting his campaign war chest at around $52 million, the most collected among all the Democratic candidates. An analysis of the contributions shows that the majority of the billionaire donators came from the financial, media and technology sectors.
Of particular interest, however, is how much the tech titans of Silicon Valley have lavished the democratic frontrunner with attention as well as infusions of hard cash. In December, for example, Rex Reed, co-founder of Netflix, helped organize a fundraising dinner at a wine cellar in Palo Alto, California, which gave Buttigieg’s Democratic opponents a golden opportunity to expose his billionaire connections.
“Billionaires in wine caves should not pick the next president of the United States,” Elizabeth Warren told Buttigieg in a December debate.
Buttigieg responded that he was “literally the only person on this stage who is not a millionaire or a billionaire,” and that therefore Warren had failed the “purity test.”
It’s not just billionaires, however, who are cracking open their wallets for the Indiana native. The list includes more than 200 foreign policy and intelligence officials, including Anthony Lake, national security adviser for President Clinton, former National Security Council spokesman Ned Price, and former deputy CIA director David Cohen, among many others. Although such support from the foreign policy and intelligence community doesn’t prove cause and effect, it has helped spawn a number of online conspiracy theories that Buttigieg is something of a Manchurian candidate, propped up by a deep state desperate to beat the swamp drainer Donald J. Trump.
Those ideas were brought to a boil during the Iowa caucus when the aptly named app Shadow, designed to perform the simple task of reporting the polling results in a timely and efficient manner, fizzled out just as Bernie Sanders had taken a commanding lead over Buttigieg. Would it come as any surprise that Shadow Inc. has a very shadowy history?
“Shadow Inc. was picked in secret by the Iowa Democratic Party after its leaders consulted with the Democratic National Committee on vetting vendors and security protocols for developing a phone app used to gather and tabulate the caucus results,” AP reported. “Shadow Inc. was launched by ACRONYM, a nonprofit corporation founded in 2017 by Tara McGowan, a political strategist who runs companies aimed at promoting Democratic candidates and priorities.”
McGowan is married to none other than Michael Halle, a senior strategist for Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, which records show has also paid Shadow Inc. $42,500 for the use of software.
And people wonder why there are so many ‘conspiracy theorists’ running around these days.
In any case, the glitch led to many days of debate as to who really won the Midwestern state, a debate that continues today. Yet despite that state of mass confusion, Buttigieg didn’t miss an opportunity to seize victory from the claws of (possible) defeat, announcing just hours after the technological breakdown that he had been “victorious” in Iowa. Meanwhile, Sanders’ supporters saw it as yet another brazen move by the DNC to sideline the democratic socialist.
So how does one explain the incredible string of political success for the young star of the Democratic Party? Is he really so politically talented and smart that there was no choice but to let him move to the front of the pack? That seems hard to believe since his speeches come off as hollow and scripted, a rhetorical trick that many politicians with far more experience have perfected. And how about all those billionaires, former state officials and people from the national security apparatus who have come forward to support him? A case of billionaire grassroots democracy in action, or just more good luck for the South Bend native?
As it stands, Pete Buttigieg remains a great mystery, a proverbial dark horse on the U.S. political scene. While there can be no question that he has a long future in American politics, it is too early to tell if that will be a good thing for the American people. There is still a lot of unpacking to do on the life and times of the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
Trudeau is buddies with murderous African dictator
By Yves Engler · February 12, 2020
Justin Trudeau wants us to know he’s buddies with Africa’s most ruthless dictator.
At the recent African Union Summit in Ethiopia Trudeau met Paul Kagame. The Prime Minister’s press people released a photo of him laughing with the Rwandan President and announced that the two discussed the upcoming Commonwealth summit Trudeau is set to attend in Kigali.
On at least five occasions since 2018 Trudeau has been photographed with Kagame during one-on-one meetings on the sidelines of different international summits. At one of those meetings the PM “affirmed the importance of strong and growing bilateral relations” between Canada and Rwanda.
Canadian-based Rwandan dissident David Himbara has criticized the PM’s embrace of Kagame. In April 2018 he wrote, “the romance between Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Rwanda’s strongman Paul Kagame is difficult to fathom. For the past several months, the romance between the two and among their respective ministers has blossomed beyond belief.”
After amending the constitution to be able to run indefinitely Paul Kagame won 98.63 per cent of votes in Rwanda’s August 2017 presidential election. In response, Canada’s High Commissioner Sara Hradecky tweeted, “congratulations to Rwandans for voting in peaceful presidential election” and “Canada congratulates Paul Kagame on his inauguration today as President of Rwanda.” The latter tweet was picked up by the state propaganda organ New Times in a story titled “Heads of State, diplomats laud Kagame’s ‘visionary leadership’.”
If garnering 99 per cent of the vote wasn’t a clue that Kagame is a dictator, the High Commissioner could have taken a look at Canada’s ‘paper of record,’ whose Africa bureau chief had recently shined a critical light on Rwanda. At the start of 2016 the Globe and Mail reported on two new books describing the totalitarian nature of the regime.
“Village informers,” wrote South Africa-based Geoffrey York. “Re-education camps. Networks of spies on the streets. Routine surveillance of the entire population. The crushing of the independent media and all political opposition. A ruler who changes the constitution to extend his power after ruling for two decades. It sounds like North Korea, or the totalitarian days of China under Mao. But this is the African nation of Rwanda — a long-time favourite of Western governments and a major beneficiary of millions of dollars in Canadian government support.”
In 2014 York wrote an investigation headlined “Inside the plots to kill Rwanda’s dissidents,” which provided compelling evidence that the regime had extended its assassination program outside of east Africa, killing (or attempting to) a number of its former top officials who were living in South Africa. After the initial investigation York reported on Rwandan dissidents who had to flee Belgium for their safety while the Toronto Star revealed five individuals in Canada who were fearful of the regime’s killers.
On top of international assassinations and domestic repression, Kagame unleashed mayhem in the Congo. In 1996 Rwandan forces marched 1,500 km to topple the regime in Kinshasa and then re-invaded after the Congolese government it installed expelled Rwandan troops. This led to an eight-country war between 1998 and 2003, which left millions dead. Rwandan proxies repeatedly re-invaded the mineral rich eastern Congo. In 2012 the Globe and Mail described how “Rwandan sponsored” M23 rebels “hold power by terror and violence” there.
Despite the regime’s violence, Governor General Julie Payette traveled to Kigali to meet Kagame in August. She lauded “the long-standing partnership between Canada and Rwanda.”
In November 2017 Rwanda’s Environment Minister visited Ottawa to meet her Canadian counterpart, Catherine McKenna, who lauded “our close friendship.” Later that year defence minister Harjit Sajjan hosted his Rwandan counterpart General James Kabarebe.
In 2015 Kabarebe was arrested in London under a Spanish indictment for war crimes committed between 1990 and 2002 in Rwanda, including the murder of two Quebec priests. Previously, Kabarebe had been the subject of an arrest warrant by a French judge for his role in shooting down President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane, which unleashed the genocidal violence in Spring 1994. A 2012 UN report claimed Kabarebe organized and armed deadly M23 rebels in eastern Congo, labeling Kabarebe “a central player in recruiting on behalf of M23” and noted that “he has often been in direct contact with M23 members on the ground to coordinate military activities.” After former Rwandan spy chief, turned Kagame critic Patrick Karegeya, was strangled to death in a South African hotel in January 2014 Kabarebe said, “when you choose to be a dog, you die like a dog, and the cleaners will wipe away the trash.”
The Rwandan government’s domestic repression, international assassinations and violence in the Congo are well documented. Yet I couldn’t find any criticism of Kagame by the Trudeau government. Instead, Ottawa provides about $25 million annually in assistance to Rwanda.
First Morocco, then Sudan: Netanyahu Intensifies Normalization Efforts with more Arab Countries
Palestine Chronicle | February 6, 2020
Amid the ongoing Israeli efforts to normalize ties with African countries, Tel Aviv has been intensifying its diplomatic relations with Sudan and Morocco over the last week.
On February 4, Israeli media reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been lobbying the United States to recognize Moroccan sovereignty over the occupied Western Sahara region, in exchange for a normalization of ties with Rabat.
Although the two countries have no official diplomatic relations, “contacts between Netanyahu and the Moroccans started getting more serious after a secret meeting with Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September 2018,” according to American news website Axios.
Meanwhile, Sudan had agreed to allow flights to Israel to cross its airspace, Reuters news agency reported Wednesday.
This comes two days after Sudan’s top military official Abdel Fattah al-Burhan held a surprise meeting with Netanyahu in Uganda.
Burhan currently serves as the head of Sudan’s Sovereign Council, a transitional ruling body made up of civilian and military figures.
The visit stirred controversy in the African country, generating tensions between the military and civilian groups, with Sudan’s Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok declaring that “all decisions related to Sudan’s foreign affairs “should be made” exclusively by his Cabinet”, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.
Defiant, the Sudanese military responded with a statement Wednesday in which it described the meeting as being in “the highest interests of national security and of Sudan.”
Sudan’s military spokesman Amer Mohamed al-Hassan told Al Jazeera that “Sudan has not announced full normalization (with Israel), but it is exchanging interests”.
“From Uganda, Netanyahu declared that Israel and Sudan were working towards normalizing relations.” Haaretz also reported. “For Israel, it was a major diplomatic breakthrough with a Muslim-majority African state.”
“The continent’s rapprochement with Israel is unfortunate, because, for decades, Africa has stood as a vanguard against all racist ideologies, including Zionism – the ideology behind Israel’s establishment on the ruins of Palestine,” wrote Palestinian journalist and editor of The Palestine Chronicle Ramzy Baroud.
“If Africa succumbs to Israeli enticement and pressure to fully embrace the Zionist state, the Palestinian people would lose a treasured partner in their struggle for freedom and human rights,” Baroud added.
Israel pushing for ties with Morocco in exchange for US recognition of its rule over Western Sahara
MEMO | February 4, 2020
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly been discussing a three-way agreement that would see the United States recognise Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara in exchange for having Rabat take steps to normalise ties with Tel Aviv, Israeli broadcaster Channel 13 reported.
Netanyahu has been trying in recent months to make the US promote his plan, as it will raise the chances for him getting a high-profile public visit to Morocco as well as being a major diplomatic achievement for Morocco’s King, Mohammed VI.
In addition, the report claimed, US President Donald Trump can gloat of having advanced ties between Israel and an Arab state, should the deal go through.
However, the spread of sovereignty of Morocco on Western Sahara was a deal always strongly opposed by former national security adviser John Bolton.
Following Bolton’s departure in September, Netanyahu reportedly began raising the matter again with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
It’s been more than 40 years since Morocco claimed sovereignty over Western Sahara, after it occupied large swathes of the area in 1975 as Spain withdrew from the area and later annexed the territories in a move not recognised internationally.
According to the publication, contacts between the two countries intensified after a secret meeting between Netanyahu and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Morocco Nasser Burita during the UN General Assembly in September 2018.
That meeting was the result of a back channel established between Bourita and Netanyahu’s national security adviser, Meir Ben-Shabbat, reported Arutz Sheva.
It also reported that Netanyahu wanted to reach an agreement before the April elections of 2019, but the plan was dismissed after the media got information about the secret visit of Ben-Shabbat to Morocco.
Though the countries have no formal relations, Morocco has long maintained informal but close intelligence ties with Israel and Israelis are allowed to visit there.
Last week, Morocco received three Israeli reconnaissance drones as part of $48 million arms deal, to counter extremist groups and fight rebel movements in the Western Sahara, French website Intelligence Online reported.
Sudanese promised jobs in UAE but taken to war in Libya, Yemen
Job seekers wait outside the Amanda travel agency in order to get their money back in Khartoum. (Photo by MEE)
Press TV – February 2, 2020
Sudanese youths have revealed that the UAE pledged them jobs with high salaries in the Persian Gulf small country, but instead took them to Libya which is embroiled in a war between rival groups.
The United Arab Emirates is the key supporter of renegade general Khalifa Haftar which is leading a grueling military offensive against the government in the Libyan capital of Tripoli.
Several Sudanese youths have told the Middle East Eye that they were promised to work as security guards in the UAE on a salary of around $2,175 per month, but were instead sent to hostile areas in Libya.
Abdul Rahman Alzaki, a 34-year-old IT engineer, went to visit the Amanda travel agency in the center of the Sudanese capital that had placed the advertisement.
He was told the work was for the Emirati security firm Black Shields and would be located in Abu Dhabi or another UAE city.
Following several job interviews, Alzaki paid around 80,000 Sudanese pounds ($950) to Amanda after he was told the salary had been confirmed and that the travel agency would transport him to the UAE.
He traveled to the Emirates, but his dream soon turned into a nightmare after he discovered that he would in fact be receiving three months of military training and then be sent to Libya or Yemen.
The UAE wanted him and other Sudanese youths to protect oil refineries and strategic locations in the area held by Haftar, he told the MEE.
The UAE is among several countries supporting Haftar in his campaign to oust the UN-recognized government in Tripoli. The Arab country is also a key party to a Saudi-led coalition waging war on Yemen.
Around 3,000 Sudanese are believed to have been deceived by Black Shields, which sub-contracted companies such as Amanda advertising for the Emirati company.
“When we reached the Emirates we realized that we had been cheated, as the company had taken our passports, mobile phones and everything, and sent us to a military training camp called Zayed Military City” in Abu Dhabi, Alzaki said.
The MEE said it visited the Amanda travel agency in downtown Khartoum on Wednesday, but the agency was closed and phone calls to the manager and other employees of the agency went unanswered.
Dozens of job seekers were waiting outside the agency in order to try to get their money back, the online website said.
Boraey Mohamed Ahmed said he and other Sudanese youths had been subjected to extensive cheating by mafia companies working between the UAE and Sudan.
Circulation of the story on social media has ignited protests against the UAE and its policies in Sudan and in the region.
Thousands of Sudanese protesters have waged a wide campaign on social media against UAE policies, calling on the government to maintain the dignity of the Sudanese.
On Tuesday, hundreds of protesters demonstrated outside the UAE embassy and the Sudanese Foreign Ministry in Khartoum, demanding the return of the Sudanese youths.
Chanting anti-Emirate slogans, the protesters also called for the return of Sudanese soldiers from the war in Yemen.
Protester Marwa Hassan criticized the policies of the UAE on Sudan and the region as whole.
“Why do they want to use our people as mercenaries in Yemen and Libya, we have nothing to do with their interests in these countries, why are they exploiting the poverty of our youth to use them badly like this,” she shouted.
A New US Air Force Video Game Lets You Drone Bomb Iraqis and Afghans
By Alan MacLeod – MintPress News – January 31, 2020
The United States Air Force has a new recruitment tool: a realistic drone operator video game you can play on its website. Called the Airman Challenge, it features 16 missions to complete, interspersed with facts and recruitment information about how to become a drone operator yourself. In its latest attempts to market active service to young people, players move through missions escorting US vehicles through countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, serving up death from above to all those designated “insurgents” by the game. Players earn medals and achievements for most effectively destroying moving targets. All the while there is a prominent “apply now” button on screen if players would like to enlist and conduct real drone strikes all over the Middle East.
The game has failed to win over David Swanson, director of the anti-war movement World Beyond War, and the author of War is a Lie.
“It is truly disgusting, immoral, and arguably illegal in that it is recruitment or pre-recruitment of underage children to participate in murder. It is part of the normalization of murder that we have been living through,” he told MintPress News.
Tom Secker, a journalist and researcher into the influence of the military on popular culture was similarly unimpressed by the latest USA.F. recruitment strategy, telling us:
The drone game struck me as sick and demented… On the other hand, many drone pilots have described how piloting drones and killing random brown people is a lot like playing a video game, because you’re sat in a bunker in Nevada pushing buttons, detached from the consequences. So I guess it accurately reflects the miserable, traumatised, serial killing life of a drone pilot, we can’t accuse it of inaccuracy per se.”
Game Over
Despite the fact that they are rarely, if ever in any physical danger, the military has considerable difficulty recruiting and retaining drone pilots. Nearly a quarter of Air Force staff who can fly the machines leave the service every year. A lack of respect, fatigue and mental anguish are the primary reasons cited. Stephen Lewis, a sensor operator between 2005 and 2010 said what he did “weighs on your conscience. It weighs on your soul. It weighs on your heart,” claiming that the post traumatic stress disorder he suffers from as a consequence of killing so many people has made it impossible for him to have relationships with other humans.
“People think it is a video game. But in a video game you have checkpoints, you have restart points. When you fire that missile there’s no restart,” he said. “The less they can get you to think of what you’re shooting at as human the easier it becomes to you to just follow through with these shots when they come down,” said Michael Haas, another former USAF sensor operator. The Airman Challenge game follows this path, using red dots on the screen to represent enemies, sanitizing the violence recruits will be meting out.
“We were very callous about any real collateral damage. Whenever that possibility came up most of the time it was a guilt by association or sometimes we didn’t even consider other people that were on screen,” Haas said, noting that he and his peers used terms like “fun sized terrorist” to describe children, employing euphemisms like “cutting the grass before it grows too long,” as justifications for their extermination. The constant violence, even from afar, takes a heavy toll on many drone operators, who complain of constant nightmares and having to drink themselves into a stupor every night to avoid them.
Others, with different personalities, revel in the bloodshed. Prince Harry, for example, was a helicopter gunner in Afghanistan and described firing missiles as a “joy.” “I’m one of those people who loves playing PlayStation and Xbox, so with my thumbs I like to think I’m probably quite useful,” he said. “If there’s people trying to do bad stuff to our guys, then we’ll take them out of the game.”
A Nobel Cause
Drone bombing is a relatively new technology. Barack Obama came into office promising to end President Bush’s reckless aggression, even being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. While he slashed the number of American troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, he also greatly expanded US wars in the form of drone bombings, ordering ten times as many as Bush. In his last year in office, the US dropped at least 26,000 bombs – around one every twenty minutes on average. When he left office, the US was bombing seven countries simultaneously: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan.
Up to 90 percent of reported drone casualties were “collateral damage,” i.e. innocent bystanders. Swanson is deeply concerned about the way in which the practice has become normalized: “If murder is acceptable as long as a military does it, anything else is acceptable,” he says, “We will reverse this trend, or we will perish.”
History did not exactly repeat itself with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, but it did rhyme. Trump came to power having made multiple statements perceived as anti-war, strongly criticizing Obama and the Democrats’ handling of the situation in the Middle East. Egged on even by so-called “resistance” media, Trump immediately expanded drone bombings, increasing the number of strikes by 432 percent in his first year in office. The president also used a drone attack to kill Iranian general and statesman Qassem Soleimani earlier this month.
Killing in the Game of
In 2018, the armed forces fell well short of their recruitment targets, despite offering a package of benefits very attractive to working-class Americans. As a result, it totally revamped its recruitment strategy, moving away from television and investing in micro-targeted online ads in an attempt to reach young people, particularly men below the age of thirty, who make up the bulk of the armed forces. One branding exercise was to create an Army e-sports team entering video game competitions under the military brand. As the gaming website, Kotaku wrote, “Positioning the Army as a game-friendly environment and institution is crucial, or even necessary, to reach the people the Army wants to reach.” The Army surpassed its recruitment goal for 2019.
Although the Airman Challenge game is a new attempt at recruitment, the armed forces have a long history being involved in the video game market, and the entertainment industry more generally. Secker’s work has uncovered the depths of collaboration between the military and the entertainment industry. Through Freedom of Information requests, he was able to find that the Department of Defense reviews, edits and writes hundreds of TV and movie scripts every year, subsidizing the entertainment world with free content and equipment in exchange for positive portrayals. “At this point, it’s difficult to effectively summarise the US military’s influence on the industry, because it’s so varied and all-encompassing,” he said.
The US Army spends tens of millions a year on the Institute for Creative Technologies, who develop advanced tech for the film and gaming industries, as well as in-house training games for the Army and – on occasion – the CIA. The Department Of Defense has supported a number of major game franchises (Call of Duty, Tom Clancy games, usually first or third-person shooters). Military-supported games are subject to the same rules of narrative and character as movies and TV, so they can be rejected or modified if they contain elements the Department Of Defense deems controversial.”
The video games industry is massive, with hyper-realistic first person shooters like Call of Duty being among the most popular genres. Call of Duty: WWII, for example, sold $500 million worth of copies in its opening weekend alone, more money generated than blockbuster movies “Thor: Ragnarok” and “Wonder Woman” combined. Many people spend hours a day playing. Captain Brian Stanley, a military recruiter in California said, “Kids know more about the army than we do… Between the weapons, vehicles, and tactics, and a lot of that knowledge comes from video games.”
Young people, therefore, spend huge amounts of time effectively being propagandized by the military. In Call of Duty Ghosts, for instance, you play as a US soldier fighting against a red-beret wearing anti-American Venezuelan dictator, clearly based on President Hugo Chavez, while in Call of Duty 4, you follow the US Army in Iraq, shooting hundreds of Arabs as you go. There’s even a mission where you operate a drone, which is distinctly similar to the Airman Challenge. US forces even control drones with Xbox controllers, blurring the lines between war games and war games even further.
Cyber Warfare
Although the military industrial complex is keen to advertise opportunities for pilots, they go to great lengths to hide the reality of what happens to the victims of airstrikes. The most famous of these is likely the “Collateral Murder” video, leaked by Chelsea Manning to Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange. The video, which made worldwide news, laid bare the callousness towards civilian lives Haas described, where Air Force pilots laugh at shooting dead at least 12 unarmed civilians, including two Reuters journalists. While those commanders ultimately in charge of military operations in the Middle East appear on television constantly, trying to sanitize their actions, Manning and Assange remain in prison for helping to expose the public to an alternative depiction of violence. Manning has spent the majority of the last decade incarcerated, while Assange awaits possible extradition to the United States in a London prison.
The Airman Challenge video game, for Secker, is merely “the latest in a long line of insidious and disturbing recruitment efforts by the US military.” “If they feel they have to do this just to recruit a few hundred thousand people to their cause, maybe their cause isn’t worth it,” he said.
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From the Archives
The Strategy of Tension
Kenny’s Side Show | December 15, 2012
Operation Gladio never ended. It just moved around, changed names and adjusted motives and techniques.
In light of the recent Gladio style mass shootings, here’s a short background.
Operation Gladio is undisputed historical fact. Gladio was part of a post-World War II program set up by the CIA and NATO supposedly to thwart future Soviet/communist invasions or influence in Italy and Western Europe. In fact, it became a state-sponsored right-wing terrorist network, involved in false flag operations and the subversion of democracy.
The existence of Gladio was confirmed and admitted by the Italian government in 1990, after a judge, Felice Casson, discovered the network in the course of his investigations into right-wing terrorism. Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti admitted Gladio’s existence but tried to minimize its significance. … continue
Aletho News Original Content
Three Mile Island, Global Warming and the CIA
By Aletho News | January 9, 2012
This article will examine some of the connections between the US and UK National Security apparatus and the appearance of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory beginning after the accident at Three Mile Island. … continue
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