It is not difficult to be astonished these days, given how many things going on around us warrant astonishment. To pull something out of a hat at random, the Democratic apparatus has openly, brazenly politicized the judicial system—weaponized it, if you prefer—in its determination to destroy Donald Trump and now has the temerity to warn in the gravest terms that a second Trump term would mean… the politicization of American justice.
Again at random, in The Washington Post’s June 7 editions George Will tells us President Biden “has provided the most progressive governance in U.S. history.” Yes, he wrote that. Give in to your astonishment.
It is interesting in this case to note that, during the reign of Ronald Reagan 40 years ago, our George thought big government was bad, bad, bad. Now it is a fine thing that Biden is “minimizing the market’s role by maximizing the government’s role in allocating society’s resources and opportunities.” Apart from turning his own argument hourglass upside-down, this assessment of our swiftly declining president is preposterously, right-before-your-eyes false.
You cannot tell the AC’s from the DC’s these days. But this is not the half of it in the way of astonishing events, things done, things said and such like.
Last week, as many readers will have noticed, Scott Ritter, the former weapons inspector and now a widely followed commentator, was about to board a plane bound for Turkey when armed police officers stopped him, confiscated his passport and escorted him out of Kennedy International Airport. Ritter was booked to transit through Istanbul for St. Petersburg, where he planned to attend the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, an annual gathering.
Here is Ritter recounting this incident in an interview with RT International:
I was boarding the flight. Three officers pulled me aside. They took my passport. When asked why, they said, “Orders of the State Department.” They had no further information for me. They pulled my bags off the plane, then escorted me out of the airport. They kept my passport.
No passport, no freedom to travel, no explanation. I have it on good authority that Ritter subsequently advised other Americans who were to attend the St. Petersburg events not to risk it.
I have had countless conversations over many years in which the question considered has been “Is this as bad as the 1950s?” The matter has been especially vital since the Russiagate fiasco began during the Clinton–Trump campaign season in 2016. It was in the ensuing years that the authoritarianism implicit in American liberalism from the first burst upon us like some weird grotesque out of a Dr. Seuss book.
I always urge caution when invoking comparisons between our corruptions and ideological extremes and those of the McCarthy era. Hyperbole and exaggeration never serve one’s understanding or one’s argument. But the confiscation of Scott Ritter’s passport on the instructions of Antony Blinken’s State Department seems to me a radical step too far. The liberal authoritarians now in command of the nation’s major institutions, the House of Representatives among the only exceptions, have just signaled they are quite prepared to act at least as undemocratically as the House Un–American Activities crowd, the FBI and the rest of the national-security state did during the 1950s to preserve their political hegemony.
When I think of confiscated passports I think of Paul Robeson, the gifted singer, the courageous political dissenter, the civil rights advocate — here he is singing his famous Water Boy — whose documents were seized in 1950 because he refused to indulge in the Cold War paranoia that was already prevalent. His performing career collapsed and he nearly went broke before a Supreme Court decision restored them in 1958. Or I think of all the screenwriters, novelists, poets, painters and activists whose papers were canceled while they were in Mexico — or in France or in Sweden or in England — to avoid HUAC and expatriation turned into exile.
And when I am finished thinking of these people, about whom there is a rich, inspiring literature, I think of how far America descended into a derangement we tend to look back upon in some combination of wonder, derision and contempt.
We can no longer look back in this fashion. The revocation of Scott Ritter’s passport, along with the destruction of the judicial system, the myth-spinning about our purported leaders and all the rest pushes this in our faces. Let us give this a moment’s thought to see if we can determine what is likely to be in store.
Why Scott Ritter, I have wondered these past few days. Of all the dissident commentators of too many stripes to count, why Scott? I reply to myself, “Because Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer, a former U.N. arms monitor in Iraq and he enjoys big-time credibility as a patriotic American.” His voice, in short, is the sort that can carry weight in sectors of the voting public that may well prove key in determining the outcome in the Trump–Biden election this Nov. 5.
Viewed in this context, I take the full-frontal suppression of Ritter’s rights last week as very likely tied to the liberals’ political prospects, other than brilliant as they are at this point. Censorship, suppression of various kinds taking various forms, “canceling”—these are nothing new, of course. But I sense things may get a great deal worse from here on out.
This is a year of global elections, as has often been remarked. The Associated Press counted 25 major national elections in a piece published at the start of the year. Taiwan, El Salvador, Indonesia, Russia, Slovakia, India, Mexico: These are among the big ones that have already taken place. The European Union is holding parliamentary elections June 6–9, cited in liberal quarters as the most important in decades. When Americans vote Nov. 5, it will be in this context.
In many of these elections — not all but many — the core issues are variants on a theme. The liberal order, such as we have it, is cast as defending itself against the onslaughts of —take your pick — populists, authoritarians, here and there a dictator. This is certainly how liberal media encourage American voters to view the Biden – Trump contest. And it is for this reason I think we must all brace ourselves for what may turn out to be a very major disaster for what remains of American democracy — and by extension the West’s.
Cast your mind back to 1992, when the Soviet Union was no more, an incipient triumphalism was taking hold in the U.S. and Francis Fukuyama published his famous (or infamous) The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press). Fukuyama, then a middling bureaucrat at the State Department, made the case that liberal democracy had won out and would stand as the ultimate, unchallenged achievement of humankind. A sort of happy political monoculture was destined to prevail eternally across the planet.
However sophomoric you may find this thesis, and I find it almost juvenile in its silliness, it came to define the expectations of all righteous American liberals. There was the Bush II administration, a major setback for the liberal narrative, although at the horizon this was merely a variation on the liberal theme. Then came the Obama years. And the Obama years set up the Democrats for a kind of fateful consummation in 2016. Hillary Clinton’s ascendancy that November was incontrovertibly the surest of outcomes because it was… what is my phrase?… a matter of historical destiny.
This is why Clinton’s defeat landed so hard among the mainstream Democrats. It was more, much more, than a loss at the polls. Trump’s victory contradicted what had become a prevalent consciousness among American liberals. Biden’s win in 2020 was a kind of salvage job: It put the liberal narrative back on track. But something had happened in the years after Clinton’s November 2016 loss. Liberals had assumed an uncompromising ideological righteousness such that we can now legitimately call them authoritarians—soft despots in de Tocqueville’s terminology, apple-pie authoritarians in mine. The cause is upside-down to the Cold War cause, but these people are at least as dangerous as the McCarthyites, and, as I have suggested, maybe more so.
We learned something important during those years. Deprived of what they considered their right as conferred by the force of history, liberals demonstrated that they would stop at nothing in the cause of retrieving it. Even those institutions that must stand above the political pit if a democracy is to have any chance of working, notably but not only the judiciary, were intruded upon in the liberal authoritarian project. Nothing was off limits.
Here we are again. We are headed into another confrontation of the kind that set liberals on the path of destruction they began to walk in 2016. We are already seeing a new wave of preposterous, utterly unsubstantiated charges of Russian or Chinese interference. Trump will turn America into a dictatorship. Trump will go on a rampage of retribution. Trump—we hear this already, as noted—will corrupt the courts, our courts, the courts we have kept pristine.
The Scott Ritter affair astonishes me yet more than any of the other astonishing developments of late. I read it as a warning of how extreme things may get, what irreparable damage to the American polity may be done, if liberal authoritarian cliques determine that a broad campaign to suppress dissent will be necessary if Biden is to have a chance of winning a second term and they are to fulfill their end-of-history destiny.
Let me put it this way. Liberal media now routinely bait Trump to say whether he will automatically accept the outcome this Nov. 5. One would have to be naïve in the extreme to make any such commitment as things now stand.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His new book, Journalists and Their Shadows, is out now from Clarity Press. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.
In June 2021, Dr. Sam White, a general practitioner, released a video calling out harmful covid policy. From a scientific perspective every word he said was entirely defensible. Moreover it is clear that he was speaking from an ethical position of wanting to protect his patients from harm. He pulled no punches in addressing the most prominent issues that were causing harm – lack of treatment for the frail, inappropriate gene therapies and masking. In interviews, in 2022, he called the situation a war between good and evil. In doing so he unleashed a torrent of anger among those in a position of power over him, which, three years on, continues to harm him.
He had already resigned from his GP partnership in protest at their vaccination policy in February 2021. His conscience had been keeping him awake at night because he did not want to be a part of the vaccine rollout. Consequently, after resigning he was signed off with stress rather than having to work his notice. NHS England still saw fit to suspend him with an emergency order in June. Dr White managed to record a conversation with an NHS senior clinical adviser who implied that he was mentally unwell. Dr White believes that possession of that recording led the NHS to revoke their suspension. However, by then the NHS had referred him for a GMC investigation and an automatic GMC suspension.
The GMC overturned the suspension in August 2021 but imposed restrictions on him including a ban on mentioning covid on social media and requiring the removal of his previous posts. The legal position is that doctors have a right to free speech but if the GMC could prove Dr White’s speech was a threat to the health of the public or undermined trust in the profession then he could be sanctioned.
Dr White looked to his indemnity provider for support to fund his legal case but they washed their hands of him saying it was a “conduct issue”. With the help of crowd funding support, Dr White took the case to the High Court in November 2021. The verdict was published in December 2021, overruling the GMC and saying they had not followed due process in their actions. The High Court documentation was removed from the judiciary’s website in September 2022 such that other doctors in a similar position will be unable to refer to it in their defence. It is available on the Wayback Machine.
Dr White has asked to be removed from the register, as he is no longer practising conventional medicine, but the GMC have refused and are continuing to persecute him. Every interview he has undertaken has been transcribed and put forward as evidence that he is undermining public health policy and causing the public to lose trust in the profession. The next tribunal hearing is scheduled to last three weeks in August and September 2024. This ongoing investigation, three years later, indicates a relentless effort to discredit and punish Dr. White for his dissenting views.
If that sounds bad, wait until you hear about the NHS’s role.
The same day as the High Court hearing, unbeknown to Dr White or his lawyers, NHSE had a meeting where they decided to refer Dr White for a health assessment, despite the fact he no longer worked in the NHS. This was an opportunity to reopen the investigation into him. They have repeatedly asked if he had returned to NHS work and said he must tell them if he did. What was their intent here? Were they planning to ask any future employer to suspend him all over again?
NHS England has a list of “approved providers”. Any doctor not on their list cannot work for the primary employer of doctors in the country. In 2023, NHS England removed Dr White from their list, effectively barring him from practising within the NHS. He had already shifted his practice to private healthcare with a holistic focus, but this further punishment leaves him with no other options.
The GMC is far from perfect but at least it has due process and a system of appeal for where there might be an injustice. NHS England can unilaterally destroy a career, with no legal recourse.
In some ways, the most disturbing aspect of the whole affair was revealed in the communications between the GMC and NHS England. Firstly, the derogatory terms used about the doctor to justify their behaviour are shocking and reveal a lack of professionalism and intolerance for differing opinions within the medical establishment. Moreover, this language served as a means to rationalise their harsh and unjust actions towards him. Secondly, they appeared to be acting in cahoots. The GMC’s apparent open and fair processes have been bypassed by direct communication with NHS England, stripping Dr White of a right to employment.
Dr. Sam White’s case is a stark example of systemic injustice and the erosion of professional rights within the NHS and the GMC. His ongoing persecution for voicing dissenting views underscores a troubling intolerance for ethical and scientific debate, reminiscent of a Kafkaesque nightmare where rationality and justice are subordinated to bureaucratic oppression.
Hamburg MP Olga Petersen has sought refuge in Russia, telling Bild that she feared having her children taken by the German state over her perceived support for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Petersen left Hamburg with her children last month, prompting widespread speculation about her whereabouts. Several weeks before her disappearance, her party – the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) – expelled her from its Hamburg faction for traveling to Russia as an election observer in March and declaring the vote “open, democratic, and free.”
Alexander Brod, a member of the Russian Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, told TASS last week that Petersen had settled in Russia with three of her four kids.
Petersen broke her silence on Friday. “I have indeed taken my children out of the country,” she told Bild. “I want to know that my children are safe and that they remain in my care. Without my children, I would no longer see any meaning in life.”
According to Brod’s account, social workers had begun proceedings to take the three children – all of whom are in elementary school – into state care. Petersen offered no further details on the alleged efforts to take her children, and Bild questioned these claims, stating that the kids had been reported to youth welfare workers over behavioral problems.
Expressions of support for Russia’s military operation in Ukraine are illegal in Hamburg, with a court in the city sentencing a man to three years in prison last May for sharing “pro-Russian ideas” and using the ‘Z’ symbol – painted on some Russian military vehicles operating in the conflict – on his Telegram channel.
While there were no criminal proceedings being taken against Petersen, any kind of prison term would have resulted in her losing custody of her children. German courts can also strip a parent of their custody rights if they are deemed abusive, violent, or negligent.
Although Petersen has been expelled from the AfD’s faction in Hamburg, she remains a member of the region’s parliament and will appear on ballot papers as an independent in Hamburg’s district election on Sunday.
“I will remain a member of the Hamburg Parliament and will fulfill my obligations to the best of my knowledge and belief,” she told Bild, adding that she will ensure her children’s safety before deciding whether she is “fit for political action again.”
The US government-affiliated Ukrainian web publication “Data Journalism Agency” (TEXTY) has just released a report attacking hundreds of prominent American individuals and organizations as enemies for not supporting sending more US money and weapons to Ukraine.
The report, titled “Roller Coaster: From Trumpists to Communists. The forces in the U.S. impeding aid to Ukraine and how they do it,” intends to smear American politicians, journalists, and social media influencers as tools of Russia, writing:
Most of the people in our study do not have direct, proven ties to the Russian government or propagandists. However, the arguments they use to urge authorities to distance themselves from Ukraine echo key messages of Russian propaganda aimed at depriving Ukrainians of the ability to defend themselves with Western weapons and funds. (emphasis added)
Although the “enemies list” purports to correct disinformation about Ukraine spread by those on its list, the report itself is full of crude disinformation. For example this bit:
Even long-debunked myths continue to surface, such as claims of Nazi dominance and American Biolabs in Ukraine and the portrayal of the 2014 Revolution of Dignity as a coup.
The organization’s assertion that these claims are “long-debunked” may be wishful thinking, but back on planet reality even mainstream, pro-Ukraine media sites in the US wring their hands over the disturbing, extremist images coming out of the country. For example, NBC News wrote that, “Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real, even if Putin’s ‘denazification’ claim isn’t.” Newsweek wondered, “Why Have So Many Neo-Nazis Rallied to Ukraine’s Cause?” Even before the current conflict, mainstream pro-Ukraine publications such as Reuters worried in 2918 about “Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem.”
As to the biolabs, none other than Mother of the Maidan Victoria Nuland admitted in a US Senate hearing that there were biolabs in Ukraine. Ah, but one may counter that these were not “American biolabs.” In fact with the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop now absolutely confirmed during his trial, a report by the New York Post two years ago based on the laptop also must be considered accurate. According to the article, “Russia’s assertion that President Biden’s son Hunter was ‘financing . . . biological laboratories in Ukraine’ was based in truth, according to e-mails reviewed by The Post.”
And on whether the Maidan events of 2014 were a “Revolution of Dignity” or a coup, we again only need turn to Victoria Nuland’s infamous phone call with US Ambassador to Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt, for all the evidence needed that the US was micromanaging the removal of an elected leader and replacing him with hand-picked US puppets.
The report also includes such prominent American politicians and journalists as Sen. JD Vance, Sen. Rand Paul, Rep. Matt Gaetz, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rep. Jim Jordan, and Col. Douglas Macgregor.
Even our friends at Antiwar.com… and your own correspondent (!) find ourselves appearing on the Ukrainian “enemies list”:
As the report states:
There are 391 individuals and 76 organizations in our list. These include politicians, political movements and groups, media and journalists, experts, and think tanks (some individuals appear in multiple categories).
Perhaps what is most shocking about this attack on American citizens is the fact that the Data Journalism Agency (TEXTY) has a long affiliation with the US Government itself! In fact, the founder of the publication Anatoly Bondarenko appears prominently on a US Government website as a participant in the US State Department’s “TechCamp” project.
The Data Journalism Agency (TEXTY) is listed as an “Implementing Partner” of the US Agency for International Development’s Transparency and Accountability in Public Administration and Services/ TAPAS Project.
The Ukrainians seemingly love to make lists of their “enemies.” One of their most notorious of these is the infamous “kill list” put out by the Mirotvorets Center in Kiev. From that list several have already been murdered by Ukraine, including prominent Russian journalist Daria Dugina.
One wonders how, for example, former US President Donald Trump and dozens of members of the US Congress will react when they hear that US tax dollars are being sent to Ukraine for US-backed Ukrainian organizations to make “hate lists” and “kill lists” of patriotic Americans like themselves.
Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and co-Producer/co-Host, Ron Paul Liberty Report. Daniel served as the foreign affairs, civil liberties, and defense/intel policy advisor to U.S. Congressman Ron Paul, MD (R-Texas) from 2001 until Dr. Paul’s retirement at the end of 2012. From 1993-1999 he worked as a journalist based in Budapest, Hungary, and traveled through the former communist bloc as a human rights monitor and election observer.
The European Union (EU) is planning to implement a new set of draconian mass surveillance rules shortly after Sunday’s EU Parliament election, a member of the EP has warned after the plans surfaced on the internet.
The conclusion that radical surveillance measures are in the works proceeds from documents detailing the meetings of working groups, dubbed “high level group(s) on access to data for effective law enforcement.”
The documents originate from the EU Commission, and contain a number of recommendations, including reintroducing indiscriminate retention of communications data in the bloc, creation of encryption backdoors, as well as forcing hardware manufacturers to give access to anything from phones to cars to law enforcement through what is known as “access by design.”
MEP Patrick Breyer announced that the plan contains 42 points produced by the EU Commission and governments of member-countries. The purpose of being able to access phones, IoT (such as “smart home”) devices, and cars is to make sure they can be monitored around the clock.
Meanwhile, the return of controversial data retention is planned despite a previous ruling of the EU Court of Justice, and could even be extended to include over-the-top services such as messengers (this is defined as retaining IP information data “at the very least”). That, Breyer explains, means that all internet activities will become trackable.
A favorite target of authorities actively undermining their image as democracies has for a while been end-to-end encryption. Here, the EU intends to ban secure encryption of metadata and subscriber data, as well as force messaging services who implement encryption to allow interception.
The EU further plans to “tackle” the use of encryption devices that it declares are “proven to be used solely” by criminals. In reality, the right to install encryption backdoors in phones and computers can be abused to spy on anyone, dissidents and critics included.
Technology providers will, if so ordered by judicial authorities, have to break encryption in order to “facilitate access to data at rest in user’s devices.” And there will be “mechanisms for robust cooperation with communication and technology providers” – meaning they will have to share data with governments and law enforcement.
If these agencies demand, service providers must activate GPS location tracking, according to these recommended “solutions for effective law enforcement.” Representatives of providers who refuse could end up in jail.
“This extreme surveillance plan must not become a reality, if only because it has been cooked up by a completely one-sided secret group of surveillance fanatics working without any real transparency or democratic legitimacy,” Breyer stated.
Technology is a tool and a weapon. It may enhance and empower or disempower and enslave. A simple hammer can be a tool to construct a house or a weapon to bludgeon a man’s skull. As technology enhances, optimally, it would enhance the human condition. There is a delicate balancing between technological advancement and the wisdom to manage that advancement without causing destruction. Unfortunately, the wisdom to manage technological advancement often lags behind.
We are continuously told that there needs to be a balance between freedom and security. This of course is a false narrative, as once there is no freedom, there will be no security. If we examine what has been done in the name of security, it is astounding.
Our conversations are listened to and stored in databases, every keystroke on our keyboards is recorded, there are cameras on street corners, and the list goes on. All of this is in the name of security. The post 911 security state is something out of George Orwell’s 1984 where big brother is always watching you. It is clear that if you induce enough fear and hate, coupled with enough drugs and entertainment, people will willingly give up their liberty for a false sense of security. The result, of course, is that they will end up with neither.
So why am I suggesting we need a new government surveillance program?
The answer is simple. We don’t have one. Sure, we can file a FOI request. Maybe if we are lucky, we will get documents months later that is often heavily redacted information, and if we are really lucky, as a result, expose illegal activity. As was reported by Emerald Robinson, this of course recently happened, when it was discovered by Congress, that NIH scientists appeared to deliberately circumvent the law for the purposes of obstructing justice by using private emails, and even miss spelling words to avoid searches. These actions seem to indicate a criminal intent to obstruct justice.
I recently suggested in an interview on the Absolute Truth with Emerald Robinson that FOI requests are obsolete. To elaborate on that discussion, instead of FOI requests, we as civilians should be able to access government employee communications in real time whenever we want to. We should simply be able to look up one of our government employees and track all of their communications while they are working. We should also be able to track their phone conversations in real time and access transcripts of these conversations as they are occurring. This should all equally apply to government contractors.
It isn’t enough to be able to monitor their communications. We should also be able to watch what they are doing at all times in real time as well. As a civilian employer, you should be able to look up a government employee and watch what they are doing at all times while they are on the clock. For higher up level employees, you should be able to watch them after hours if they are meeting with other employees or government contractors. Body cameras would do the trick.
That’s right. Those cameras need to be turned around. If those cameras were monitoring in real time the employees in the prison where Epstein was held do you really think he would have committed suicide?
Of course, I am not excluding politicians or their interactions with each other or their staff. Politicians, government employees, and government contractors need to sacrifice their freedom for our security. Would the undeclared war on Russia have started, let alone escalated, if we as civilians were able to watch every conversation? Would we have ended up on the precipice of global war?
Imagine if every conversation of a war criminal like Fauci and other conspirators was on video. Global genocide would not be occurring. The people you know and love, would not be getting turbo cancers, strokes, heart attacks, autoimmune diseases, chronic fatigue, and neurological, problems to name a few.
Again, politicians sacrificing their freedom, is not merely for our freedom and security, it is for their security too. If we had constant monitoring of their activities, it is true they would not be able to make as much money in bribes, still, they are less likely to compromise themselves for blackmail purposes. The odds are that the typical politician’s blackmailable behavior will significantly decrease after the first real time escapades are viewed all over the place. I would maintain that physical intimidation will also decrease if there is constant monitoring of the typical politician. So, you see, if they sacrifice their freedom, it is clearly to maintain their safety as well. It is our duty to save the typical politician or government employee from themselves.
The reality is that we have created an upside down world with unfettered government that has become a direct threat to the people. The privacy of individuals and basic private property rights, and human rights in general have been kicked to the curb. Politicians and the government have been captured. A government that has secrets is inherently oppressive and contrary to the concept of a Constitutional Republic. Secret agencies and secret budgets are devastating to humanity.
Individual privacy and even communications are under attack. The idea that your private texts can be monitored, let alone censored from being sent, on its own should cause upheaval. Social media acting under the color of law censored medical information that could have saved countless lives over the past four years. So called hate speech laws are seeking to outlaw common sense. Canada’s laws preventing healthcare professionals from protecting children from gender mutilation are an example.
Maybe we should pass laws restricting the free speech of elected officials and government employees instead of limiting the free speech of us, the civilian employers?
Okay, maybe I am taking it a bit too far… The point is that the government, i.e. deep state, is an uncontrollable monster that must be reined in. Literally, the government is waging war against the people. The tightening noose of oppression will continue until we stop it. The deep state envisions a world, where most of us no longer exist, and for those that do remain, it will be a world transformed into the airport, degrading, humiliating, and exhausting.
A shocking three-month investigation by the New York Times has revealed gruesome details of abuse, torture and mistreatment of Palestinians held at Israel’s Sde Teiman detention facility. The exposé, based on interviews with former detainees, Israeli military officers, doctors and soldiers who served at the site, paints a harrowing picture of the conditions endured by the roughly 4,000 Palestinian detainees who have passed through the facility since 7 October.
Sde Teiman, an army base in southern Israel, has become a makeshift interrogation site where most Gazans captured by the occupation army have been brought for initial questioning. Detainees, classified as “unlawful combatants” under Israeli legislation, can be held for up to 75 days without judicial permission and 90 days without access to a lawyer or a trial. Their location is withheld from rights groups and even the International Committee of the Red Cross, in what legal experts say contravenes international law.
Former detainees described a litany of abuses at the hands of their captors, including beatings, electric shocks, humiliating treatment and rape. Eight former detainees, whose detention at the site has been confirmed by the military, reported being punched, kicked, and beaten with batons, rifle butts, and a hand-held metal detector while in custody.
Two detainees said their ribs were broken as a result of the assaults, with one claiming he was kneed in the chest and another stating he was kicked and beaten with a rifle. Seven detainees said they were forced to wear only a diaper during interrogations, and three claimed to have received electric shocks.
The Times’ investigation also uncovered allegations of sexual abuse and torture. Muhammad Al-Hamlawi, a 39-year-old senior nurse, recounted a horrific ordeal in which a female officer ordered two soldiers to lift him up and press his rectum against a metal stick fixed to the ground. The stick penetrated his rectum for roughly five seconds, causing it to bleed and leaving him in “unbearable pain.”
A leaked draft of a report by UNRWA, the main UN agency for Palestinians, cited similar accounts, including one detainee who said interrogators “made me sit on something like a hot metal stick and it felt like fire.” Another detainee according to the UN “died after they put the electric stick up” his anus.
Detainees described the dehumanising conditions they were subjected to, including being blindfolded, handcuffed and stripped naked except for their underwear. They were crammed into military trucks and driven to Sde Teiman, where they were held in open-sided hangars, forced to sit handcuffed in silence on mats for up to 18 hours a day. Exhausted detainees who fell asleep were summoned by officers and beaten as punishment.
The interrogation process itself was a nightmarish ordeal. Detainees were brought to a separate enclosure they dubbed the “disco room,” where extremely loud music was played to prevent them from sleeping – a form of torture that caused one detainee’s ear to bleed. Wearing nothing but a diaper, they were questioned and accused of being members of Hamas, then beaten when they denied any connection to the group.
The Israeli military has denied allegations of “systematic abuse” at Sde Teiman, claiming that any abuse of detainees is strictly prohibited and thoroughly investigated. However, the sheer number of consistent accounts from former detainees, coupled with the testimony of Israeli personnel at the site, suggests a disturbing pattern of mistreatment and torture.
Perhaps most disturbingly, of the 4,000 detainees held at Sde Teiman since October, 35 have died either at the site or after being brought to nearby civilian hospitals.
The revelations of the Sde Teiman detention facility have attracted growing scrutiny from the media. In May, CNN exposed gruesome details of abuse, torture and mistreatment of Palestinians in Sde Teiman. Israel’s Supreme Court has also begun hearing a petition from rights groups to close the site. As a result, Israel has begun moving Palestinians held in Sde Teiman to military-run prisons in the occupied West Bank.
US President Joe Biden told ABC News on 6 June that the Israeli government has listened to his “concerns” about a major military offensive in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah.
“They were going to go into Russia – into Rafah – full bore, invade all of Rafah, go into the city, take it out, move, move with full force. They haven’t done that. And what they’ve done is they’ve agreed to a significant agreement,” the US president said as Israeli warplanes continued their months-long blitz of residential areas and displacement camps in the city.
Residents of Rafah who spoke with Reuters on Friday morning described the latest raids as “one of the worst nights,” adding that “some people were wounded inside their homes before being evacuated this morning.”
Residents also said that Israeli tanks that have taken control along the border with Egypt made several raids towards the west and the center of the southern city.
“I think he’s listening to me,” Biden added when asked by ABC News if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heeded his warnings.
Elsewhere in the interview, Biden claimed Netanyahu will stick by his own ceasefire proposal. “He’s publicly said he is. Our European friends are in on it. We have to get a ceasefire.”
“What [Israel has] done is they’ve agreed to a significant agreement that if in fact Hamas accepts it,” the US president said before adding that the offer is backed by much of the Arab world.
“We’ll see. This is a very difficult time,” Biden said.
On Thursday, senior Hamas officials revealed that the Israeli ceasefire proposal “does not mention stopping the aggression or the withdrawal [of troops from Gaza].”
“The Israeli documents speak of open-ended negotiation with no deadline, and it speaks of a stage during which the occupation regains its captives and resumes the war. We had told the mediators that this proposal is unacceptable,” Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters on Thursday.
The Cradle columnist Khalil Harb earlier this week described the proposal presented by Biden as a “repackaging of last month’s Hamas-approved agreement, which he is now repositioning as an Israeli-sanctioned deal.
Remember Deborah Birx, the “scarf lady” United States bureaucrat who joined President Donald Trump and chief coronavirus fearmonger Anthony Fauci for regular televised briefings to whip up fear of coronavirus and support for crackdowns and new health practices supposedly required by “the science”?
In other words, Birx was a primary villain behind the coronavirus crackdowns in America.
Well, Birx is back. And she is pursuing a similar mission again. She is stirring up fear of a new disease du jour — bird flu — and calling for new crackdowns in response. In an interview this week at CNN, Birx declared, “we should be testing every cow weekly” with PCR tests for bird flu. She also wants to test every “dairy worker” as well as test “to really see how many people have been exposed and got asymptomatically infected.”
Birx seems to be jonesing for a replay of the coronavirus crackdown approach, this time in the name of countering bird flu. Indeed, she may want to take the crackdown bigger this time. In the interview, she suggests that the failure to already be doing the extensive testing she supports for bird flu means “we’re making the same mistakes today that we made with covid.” Got that? For Birx, a big mistake with the government response to coronavirus was that it didn’t do enough soon enough. With time, however, Americans have increasingly come to realize that government actions taken in the name of countering coronavirus created much more suffering than did coronavirus.
Don’t let Birx and other authoritarians succeed in using bird flu as an excuse to roll out a new crackdown dangerous to both health and liberty. Let’s end this tyrannical push now. Just say no to Birx and her new scheme.
A former engineer has accused Meta – the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – of being biased against Palestinians, according to Reuters.
Ferras Hamad filed a lawsuit in California on Tuesday, alleging discrimination and wrongful termination. He had been an engineer on Meta’s machine learning team from 2021 until February.
Meta was deleting internal employee messages by Palestinian-Amerians that mentioned the deaths of their relatives in Gaza and investigated their use of Palestinian flag emojis, Hamad alleged. By contrast, no such investigations were launched into employees using Israeli or Ukrainian flags, he said.
According to Hamad, he was fired after pointing out irregularities with an emergency procedure for handling “site events” (SEV), when it resulted in restrictions on Instagram posts by Palestinian personalities. In one case, he said in the complaint, a short video by photojournalist Motaz Azaiza showed a destroyed building in Gaza, but Meta had labeled it as pornographic.
When Hamad attempted to resolve that case, Meta told him he was violating the policy barring employees from dealing with the accounts of people they knew personally – although Hamad insists he is not personally acquainted with Azaiza.
The former engineer had handled SEV cases related to Gaza, Israel and Ukraine before, and obtained confirmation in writing that this was part of his job description. He filed an internal discrimination complaint in January, but was fired a few days later.
Meta did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Mark Zuckerberg’s social media behemoth has been widely criticized by human rights groups over its censorship of content related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – specifically, suppressing the Palestinian viewpoint. Almost 200 employees have raised concerns about the matter in an open letter to Zuckerberg and other executives, earlier this year.
On June 3, the former Marine Corps intelligence officer and Sputnik contributor was removed by US Customs and Border Protection officers from a plane bound for Russia, where he was to attend the 2024 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).
The US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) does not have the authority to seize passports without probable cause, former Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter told Sputnik, commenting on Monday’s incident.
Ritter recalled that as he prepared to board the plane, he was pulled out of line by three armed CBP officers who took control of his passport. He said that when he asked them “on what authority,” they cited orders from the US Department of State.
“They provided no warrant, no documentation, nor did they provide a receipt for my passport. They provided no explanation of what they were doing. They just did it,” the Sputnik contributor pointed out.
Ritter stressed that his constitutional rights under the Fourth Amendment were violated because the document requires CBP officers to provide a warrant or some other form of authority upon which to conduct the seizure of his passport.
“Under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution and others, I’m free to travel. The US government cannot restrict my travel without specific justification, none of which was articulated to me and none of which I believe exists. So it’s a violation of my Fifth Amendment,” the former Marine Corps intelligence officer added.
He suggested that “the real reason” behind all this “appears to be to prevent” him from participating in the SPIEF 2024 and to prevent the work he planned to do as a journalist with his documentary film crew. According to him, he was planning to make a documentary about “the reality of Russia”.
“This is my First Amendment right under freedom of speech and a free press. And this right was likewise violated by the US government, by the Biden administration,” Ritter noted.
The Sputnik contributor recounted that he had traveled to Russia “two times in the last year using this same passport,” and that on each time, the US government was notified in advance of his intent to travel and of his itinerary.
In an apparent reference to his planned trip to Russia to attend SPIEF 2024, Ritter said he was “not off on a secret mission” and that the US government “knew full well” what he was up to.
“And this is why I believe they acted in the way they did. This has a chilling effect, not just on me and the work I was doing, but on all Americans who choose to speak out against the policies of the United States that they disagree with and to travel abroad at the same time that they are criticizing the US government. And what the US government is saying is that we can control your movement. We can control your life. We can punish you for what you’ve been saying that we disagree with,” the former Marine Corps intelligence officer emphasized.
After years of build-up and anticipation, the 77th World Health Assembly has come and gone. So, what did the would-be lords of global health gavel down on? And what does it mean for the future of the fight for health freedom? Joining us today to talk about these important issues is James Roguski.
The old system is crumbling, and we must build its replacement quickly.If you are fed up with the government, hospital, medical, pharmaceutical, media, industrial complex and would like to help build a holistic alternative to the WHO, then feel free to contact me directly anytime.
Media interest in Saudi Arabian connections to the crimes of 9/11 has centered on calls for the release of the 28 missing pages from the Joint Congressional Inquiry’s report. However, those calls focus on the question of hijacker financing and omit the most interesting links between the 9/11 attacks and Saudi Arabia—links that implicate powerful people in the United States. Here are twenty examples. … continue
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