The Vindication of William Bay
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | December 27, 2024
Australia was one of the most authoritarian countries in the world from 2020 onward. This week, however, we can celebrate a victory that reflects what Australians used to epitomize – no-nonsense courage and jovial determination.
The story begins in 2018, when Dr. William Bay foresaw the dangers of the Medical Board seeking to regulate doctors’ speech.
Dr. Bay stood firm against COVID restrictions, vaccine mandates, and the limiting of treatment options. But it was in 2022 that he caused quite the stir. At an Australian Medical Association (AMA) Conference he interrupted a lecture, calling out the attending doctors for their silence on vaccine harms. It was a scene to remember: doctors, masked and seated at round white tables, began standing up one by one, walking out in quiet protest. Dr. Bay was then escorted out by security. When asked how he managed to get in, his response was simply: “I’m a doctor!” The footage of his exit remains iconic and worth watching.
As seems to be the theme with dissenters, Dr. Bay was reported anonymously to the regulator. The complaint had nothing to do with his conduct as a doctor – in fact, he had an unblemished professional record. Yet, the Medical Board of Australia, under the supervision of the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA), suspended him.
Dr. Bay’s case highlights systemic failures within AHPRA and the Medical Board, particularly around free speech, informed consent, and medical autonomy. Under AHPRA’s 2021 position statement, health practitioners were pressured to align strictly with public health messaging, risking regulatory action if they shared views—on or off social media—that contradicted official vaccine campaigns. This created a chilling effect, stifling doctors’ professional independence and undermining their ability to provide balanced information, a cornerstone of free and informed consent for patients. Compounding this issue, AHPRA strongly encouraged — some would say coerced — doctors themselves to be vaccinated, eroding their personal autonomy to make medical decisions. In their overreach, AHPRA not only failed to respect informed consent but also demonstrated a lack of understanding of their own regulations, which are designed to safeguard patient choice and professional integrity. Dr. Bay’s courageous stand not only challenged these failures but reaffirmed the importance of free speech, informed consent, and ethical medical practice in patient care.
In June 2023, he lost his case in the High Court and was ordered to pay costs to AHPRA. Despite these setbacks, Dr. Bay – representing himself throughout – refused to give up.
His story then took a remarkable turn. As a Christian, Dr. Bay recounts a pivotal moment when he felt God instruct him to draft an amended application focusing on procedural fairness and bias and keep it ready, even though it seemed unnecessary at the time. On the final day of the appeal, the judge remarked that Bay had made excellent points on procedural issues but noted they weren’t in his original application. When Dr. Bay asked if he could submit an amendment, the judge agreed – on the condition that it be completed over the lunch break. No problem there – Bay delivered.
The case revealed a significant breach of fairness. Dr. Anne Tonkin, then Chair of the Medical Board of Australia, was present at the Australian Medical Association (AMA) National Conference where Dr. William Bay interrupted proceedings to voice his criticisms. During this event, Dr. Tonkin discussed the possibility of filing a complaint with Associate Professor Julian Rait, the AMA Chair at the time. Subsequently, Associate Professor Rait submitted a complaint regarding Dr. Bay’s conduct. Dr. Tonkin later chaired the Medical Board meeting that decided to suspend Dr. Bay’s medical registration.
On December 13, 2024, the Brisbane Supreme Court overturned the suspension, backdating the decision to when it originally occurred. Justice Thomas Bradley ruled that AHPRA and the Medical Board acted with bias and failed to afford Dr. Bay procedural fairness. The judge went further, condemning the regulators for their “animus” and “combative approach” toward Dr. Bay, noting their inability to prove that he had breached any laws or guidelines.
As a result, Dr. Bay’s suspension was lifted, and he was reinstated with costs awarded against AHPRA and the Medical Board. Notably, Bay’s costs were minimal – he had represented himself.
Now free to speak, he is continuing to voice his concerns in the style of a true Aussie lad, “I think the vaccines are shit, mate. They’re absolute shit.”
Dr. Bay’s triumph is not just personal; it sets a powerful precedent for doctors across Australia, and, we can hope, beyond. This ruling safeguards their right to speak freely, prioritize patient welfare, and challenge overreaching authorities without fear of retribution.
In the spirit of the “Aussie lad,” Dr. William Bay has shown what courage, conviction, and persistence can achieve – a victory for truth, justice, and freedom.
New York Governor Hochul Signs Controversial Online Safety Bill, Renewing Free Speech Concerns
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | December 28, 2024
A controversial legislative package signed by New York Governor Kathy Hochul is likely to once again ignite concerns over free speech; as critics argue – just like the last time she tried to enact such legislation – it promotes censorship under the guise of online safety. Among the measures is S895B/A6789B, a bill mandating social media companies disclose their terms of service regarding so-called “hate speech” and submit detailed reports to the state attorney general.
We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.
In a press release, Hochul’s office borrowed a turn from the pro-censorship UK government and touted the legislation as a step toward “Online Safety,” but many see it as a tool for stifling expression. The term “hate speech,” often deployed in ambiguous and subjective ways, has frequently been used to suppress dissenting opinions. This bill empowers both government entities and social media giants to arbitrarily regulate speech.
Assemblymember Grace Lee (D-District 65), a vocal proponent of the legislation, justified the measures by citing the spread of information during the COVID-19 pandemic. She argued that “hate and disinformation” were spreading like “wildfire,” necessitating stricter controls.
Lee further criticized Big Tech for failing to adequately police content, stating, “These companies have a responsibility to protect users from this hate, but have failed to do so.”
Similarly, NY State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal (D-District 47) framed his support for the bill in language emphasizing identity-based violence and discrimination. Hoylman-Sigal asserted that social media companies must act to prevent the spread of “disinformation and hate-fueled violence.”
He even pointed to the events of January 6, 2021, as evidence of the alleged dangers posed by unmoderated online speech, suggesting these platforms bear responsibility for addressing such issues.
Opponents of the legislation view these arguments as a pretext for imposing sweeping censorship measures. They argue that handing more control over speech to government officials and powerful corporations undermines fundamental freedoms.
Critics of this latest measure draw parallels to an earlier law championed by Hochul that was blocked by a federal court. The law, enacted last summer, sought to regulate “hateful conduct” online by requiring social media platforms to implement mechanisms for reporting content deemed “hateful.”
The broad definition of “hateful conduct,” which included content that could “vilify, humiliate, or incite violence” based on various identity categories, raised alarm among free speech advocates.
The legislation faced a legal challenge from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), free speech platform Rumble, and First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh. Judge Andrew L. Carter, Jr. of the Southern District of New York struck down the law, citing its chilling effect on constitutionally protected speech.
“The First Amendment protects from state regulation speech that may be deemed ‘hateful,’ and generally disfavors regulation of speech based on its content unless it is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest,” the court ruled. It further emphasized that the law compelled social media networks to adopt speech policies aligned with the state’s definitions, violating their editorial discretion and the First Amendment.
Telegram blocking Russian media in EU
RT | December 28, 2024
The Telegram channels of multiple major Russian news outlets were rendered inaccessible across the EU on Sunday. The affected channels now display a plaque stating that access to them has been restricted over alleged “violation of local laws,” with all the content unavailable.
According to media reports, the affected channels include such Russian majors as RIA Novosti, Izvestia, Rossiya 1, Channel One, NTV and Rossiyskaya Gazeta. While it was not immediately clear whether the bans are EU-wide, the restrictions have been reportedly rolled out in Poland, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy and the Czech Republic.
The EU has taken multiple hostile steps against Russian media amid the ongoing conflict between Moscow and Kiev – and even before it. Some of the media affected in the apparent Telegram ban, namely Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Izvestia and RIA Novosti, were slapped with a broadcasting ban in the bloc in May. At the time, the EU Council claimed the outlets were under the “permanent direct or indirect control” of the Russian leadership, and played an “essential and instrumental” role in the hostilities.
No official statements have so far been made on the matter, either by Telegram, the EU as a whole or by individual members of the bloc.
How Speaking Out Against Harmful COVID Policies Can Get You Banned by the NHS
The story of a bizarre punishment
By MJ Sutherland | Health Advisory & Recovery Team | December 27, 2024
It’s been an incredible journey.
At the end of July 2021, I walked out of a well-paid job with Dumfries & Galloway Council. I resigned in protest—against fraudulent COVID testing, child maltreatment through misuse of tests and enforcement of mask mandates, and the complete disregard for their lack of authority to do any of it. What they were doing to Other People’s Children in schools was indefensible, and I wasn’t going to stay silent. Later I forced them to admit, via the Scottish Information Commissioner, that they had no legal authority for any of it. I’d long since left the council by this time.
At first, the threats were thinly veiled: hints that speaking out could jeopardise my job, suggestions that I should “be careful” what I said, because “we don’t want to lose you…” But when I refused to back down, their tactics became more direct. I was accused of spreading misinformation—despite providing mountains of evidence—and warned that my activism could “damage my reputation.” It was clear they wanted me to stop asking questions. I didn’t, and after being warned about my “behaviour” once too often, I walked out – but not before sending a damning email to hundreds, if not thousands, of council workers, accusing the council’s top brass of fraud, misfeasance and child abuse.
By October 2021, I was working with Phil Hyland of PJH Law, and together we sent the council a formal letter warning them of the crimes they’d be complicit in if they continued. It still feels surreal that I got to be part of that. I’d already sent similar notices and detailed evidence to the local health board, but both the council and NHS ignored everything I submitted.
Then, in December 2021, things escalated when an NHS “Consultant in Public Health” closed a local primary school, forcing children into self-isolation until they could produce a negative PCR test before they could return. Knowing the truth about these tests—their inaccuracies, their misuse—I couldn’t stay quiet. This wasn’t just bad policy; it was child abuse. We issued a Notice to Cease and Desist to Dr Regina McDevitt. We attached the PJH Law letter we’d sent to the council, along with the evidence pack detailing the harm these policies were causing.
This time, there was a reaction. But instead of addressing the harm to children or engaging with the evidence, NHS Dumfries & Galloway’s CEO, Jeff Ace, decided instead to ban me from all NHS premises for six months.
This was a bizarre move, especially since I hadn’t set foot in an NHS building for years. I was still entitled to go for medical appointments (although I had none), but presumably not allowed to visit patients, although I didn’t know anyone in hospital at the time, so no difference there. I was still entitled to submit FOI requests as I had been doing, but presumably not allowed to protest by waving placards outside NHS buildings, which I wasn’t doing anyway. But, as pointless and absurd as it may be, banned I was.
I can only suspect Jeff’s motive was to to feel better about himself, like he’d actually achieved something, but here’s the irony: while they were busy “punishing” me, they quietly dropped the requirement for children to produce negative PCR tests before returning to school. So, in the end, something got through. But the message was clear: dissent would not be tolerated.
Since then, I’ve kept busy. I’ve been prodding, poking, and shining a light on the fraud and abuse that fuelled the covid tyranny. This wasn’t just about masks or tests; it was about the false claims of authority that let these institutions get away with it all.
Last year, I had the honour of being interviewed by Dr Ahmad Malik about my activism. We discussed the council’s capitulation on masks, the informed consent documents I created, and how this fight has unfolded. And now, HART have invited me to share my story as someone who chose the difficult path by communicating the truth about covid policies and their effects.
Looking back, I’m pleased to say that the threats didn’t stop me. Neither did losing my career. And while I’ve chosen that difficult path, I wouldn’t change a thing.
Like I said, it’s been an incredible journey.
MJ Sutherland
Founder of Declaration of Dumfries
Global Engagement Center officially shuts down, but censorship efforts likely to persist through State Department offices
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | December 27, 2024
“The GEC is dead – long live the GEC!” That would be one way to summarize the situation around the US State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) that has formally shut down.
But judging by previous announcements, the move could prove to be by and large symbolic, as there are plans to continue the work by funding it, and assigning the 120 GEC staff to other offices and bureaus.
And the work has included surveilling Americans and flagging their social media posts for censorship in the US, critics have said.
Many Republican lawmakers have been among those critics over the previous years, and so has Elon Musk, who in 2023 did not shy away from branding GEC as “a threat to our democracy” – as the worst among the government entities that engaged in censorship and media manipulation.
Musk, who is now set to become a member of President Trump’s administration, and others raised the alarm when it came to light that the recent spending bill proposal included continued bankrolling of the GEC.
The GEC launched in 2016 and has been repeatedly accused and investigated as essentially an example of a “policy gun” supposedly designed to tackle foreign disinformation challenges, that the outgoing administration turned on its own citizens, threatening their right to free speech online.
The end of GEC as such came with the spending bill passed last week in Congress removing the approximately $61 million in funding that the agency received every year.
When it comes to “the next steps” regarding staff and unfinished GEC projects, the State Department said it was “consulting” with Congress on these issues.
The State Department now on its way out has insisted that the GEC worked to counter Russian, Chinese, etc., disinformation.
But one of the House investigations that looked into the activities of the agency, conducted by the Committee on Small Business, looked into the ways the government funded companies who then damaged competitiveness of small businesses online because of their lawful speech.
The GEC also shows up in an interim report by the House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government as coordinating with third parties to censor Americans ahead of the 2020 election.
Syrians take to streets nationwide against shrine desecration; HTS militants fire on protesters
Press TV – December 26, 2024
Protests have erupted across Syria over militants’ desecration of an Alawite shrine in Aleppo, with armed groups belonging to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) opening fire on protesters.
Tens of thousands took to the streets in Latakia, Tartus, Homs, Hama, and Qardaha on Wednesday, resulting in violent confrontations.
Protesters came out after video was circulated on social networks showing a fire inside the shrine of Sheikh Abu Abdullah al-Hussein al-Khasibi in Aleppo, with armed men walking inside and killing the guards of the shrine, an incident that has drawn strong condemnation from the Alawite minority.
According to reports from local sources, the protests were spread after armed individuals opened fire on protesters in Homs, resulting in the death of one person and injury of five others.
Video footage circulating on social media captured the moment when the armed groups targeted peaceful demonstrators expressing their outrage over the attack on the historical Alawite figure’s shrine.
The violence continued in the coastal city of Tartus, where deadly clashes broke out between members of the HTS administration’s “interior ministry” and protesters.
In addition to the protests against the attack on the shrine, demonstrators in the city of Masyaf, located in the northwestern countryside of Hama, condemned the assassination of three Alawite judges, which occurred just a day before.
Some residents said the demonstrations were linked to pressure and violence in recent days aimed at members of the Alawite minority.
According to Syrian media outlets, a curfew was imposed from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. on Thursday in Homs while authorities in Jableh and two other cities also announced a nighttime curfew.
The new Syrian “Interior Ministry” claimed on its Telegram account that video footage of the shrine’s destruction was outdated and related to earlier conflicts during the takeover of Aleppo in late November.
However, this assertion has not quelled the public anger, as thousands gathered in protests, demanding justice to be done for the perpetrators of the attacks on their religious heritage.
Alawites are increasingly concerned about potential reprisals against their community, stemming from their status as a minority religious group and their historical ties to the al-Assad family, including ousted President Bashar al-Assad.
Moreover, on Tuesday, hundreds of demonstrators protested in Christian areas of Damascus against the burning of a Christmas tree near Syria’s Hama. The HTS promised to restore it promptly.
The country’s new leaders have repeatedly pledged to hold accountable those responsible for the desecration of religious sites, claiming that they will respect the beliefs and rights of all sects and religions in Syria.
The situation remains very fluid and fragile, with potential risk for further clashes as sectarian sentiments continue to boil over amid the ongoing political instability and pressures on minority groups.
UN General Assembly Adopts Controversial Cybercrime Treaty Amid Criticism Over Censorship and Surveillance Risks
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | December 26, 2024
As we expected, even though opponents have been warning that the United Nations Convention Against Cybercrime needed to have a narrower scope, strong human rights safeguard and be more clearly defined in order to avoid abuse – the UN General Assembly has just adopted the documents, after five years of wrangling between various stakeholders.
It is now up to UN-member states to first sign, and then ratify the treaty that will come into force three months after the 40th country does that.
The UN bureaucracy is pleased with the development, hailing the convention as a “landmark” and “historic” global treaty that will improve cross-border cooperation against cybercrime and digital threats.
But critics have been saying that speech and human rights might fall victim to the treaty since various UN members treat human rights and privacy in vastly different ways – while the treaty now in a way “standardizes” law enforcement agencies’ investigative powers across borders.
Considerable emphasis has been put by some on how “authoritarian” countries might abuse this new tool meant to tackle online crime – but in reality, this concern applies to any country that ends up ratifying the treaty.
Another point of criticism has been that UN members individually already have laws that address the same issues, rendering the convention superfluous – unless it is to extend some of those authoritarian powers to the countries that don’t formally have them, and can’t outright pass them at home for political reasons.
Since the UN General Assembly adopted the resolution without a vote – after the text was previously agreed on by negotiators – it is not immediately clear how many countries might sign it next year, and ratify what would then become a legally binding document.
In the meanwhile, a spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres referred to the treaty as “a demonstration of multilateralism.”
Where opponents see potential for undemocratic law enforcement practices spilling over sovereign borders, UN representatives speak about “an unprecedented platform for cooperation” that will allow agencies to exchange evidence, create a safe cyberspace, and protect victims of crimes such as child sexual abuse, scams and money laundering.
And they claim all this will be achieved “while safeguarding human rights online.”
Begging for the Wonder Drug
Five years later, we resolve never to forget how US hospitals deprived critically ill patients of ivermectin and other commonly used drugs that could have saved them.
Satoshi Ōmura, 2015 Nobel Laureate for his discovery of the ”wonder drug” Ivermectin, stands next to the River Blindness sculpture. His discovery cured this great scourge of the tropical world.
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | December 13, 2024
As I was researching our book, The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, I was especially disturbed by countless stories of hospitals in various states who steadfastly refused to treat critically ill COVID-19 patients with ivermectin and other drugs (commonly used for other illnesses) that could have saved their lives.
I believe this episode constitutes the darkest chapter in the history of the U.S. hospital system. Strangely enough, the only serious legacy newspaper journalist in the entire country who covered it was Michael Capuzzo—formerly a reporter with the Miami Herald and the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he received four Pulitzer Prize nominations. Apart from Michael’s reporting . . . crickets.
Out of my conviction that we should never forget what U.S. hospitals did to patients who were consigned to die on ventilators instead of receiving FDA-approved, off-label drugs such as ivermectin, methylprednisolone, and even high dose aspirin, I am publishing our chapter on the extraordinary villains who committed this atrocity, and the good guys—including two great attorneys and humanitarians named Ralph Lorigo and Beth Parlato—who fought back. Please share this story with your friends and family and exhort them never to forget.
CHAPTER 28: Begging for the Wonder Drug
As Michael Capuzzo told the story in his long magazine piece “The Drug that Cracked Covid,” Judy Smentkiewicz was an eighty-year-old resident of Buffalo, New York. After working thirty-five years as an office manager for Metropolitan Life and raising two children, she had retired to her small house in the suburbs. A week after Senator Johnson’s second Senate hearing, she began preparing for Christmas, and looked forward to her two children, Michael and Michelle, visiting her for a few days. However, right after Michael and his wife arrived from Florida, she began to feel unwell. On December 22 she tested positive for Covid. Her kids were devastated and cancelled their Christmas celebration as Judy went into quarantine. A week later, she became short of breath and was rushed to the Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital. On New Year’s Eve she was admitted to the ICU.
It was a terrible moment in which Judy and her children realized they might never see each other again. In the days that followed, the doctors and nurses with whom Michael spoke didn’t offer much hope. They said there were no medications for treating COVID-19 approved by federal health agencies apart from remdesivir. This was administered to Judy, but it seemed to have no beneficial effect. On New Year’s Eve, as her condition deteriorated, her two children and six of their friends gathered on the street below her hospital window and prayed for her.
Shortly after New Year’s Day, Michael received from his mother-in-law a video of Dr. Pierre Kory being interviewed by a reporter for Fox 10 News Now, KSAZ-TV in Phoenix, Arizona. That morning, Dr. Kory had given his Senate testimony on ivermectin. Michael watched it and was moved by Dr. Kory’s passionate intensity and eloquence. Immediately he called the hospital and told Judy’s attending physician that he wanted her to receive ivermectin. The doctor refused on the grounds that it wasn’t approved for COVID-19, but Michael refused to take no for an answer, and finally a hospital administrator approved one, 15-milligram dose. Less than twenty-four hours later, Judy was taken off the ventilator, and the next day she sat upright in a chair for a Zoom call with her son. She still wasn’t out of the woods, and when her heart started racing, she was moved to a cardiac unit, and the hospital refused to give her a second dose of ivermectin. Michael insisted but the hospital refused to budge.
And so, he contacted his friend and attorney Ralph Lorigo, and explained the situation. At the time, Lorigo knew nothing about ivermectin, so he too watched the interview with Dr. Kory, and then sued the hospital. New York State Supreme Court Judge Henry Nowak heard the case and ordered the hospital to commence treating Judy with four more doses of ivermectin, per her family doctor’s prescription.
The hospital refused to obey the judge’s order, which resulted in additional legal wrangling, including another hearing. Finally, the hospital’s lawyer agreed to allow Judy’s family doctor to administer the drug. He was under the impression it was on hand in the hospital’s pharmacy, but when he arrived to carry out his charge, he was told that it would have to be couriered from another facility. This caused another delay. Finally, at 11:00 pm that night, the second dose was administered, and she started to improve. Ten days later she walked out of the hospital.
As word spread about Judy’s happy outcome, Ralph Lorigo was contacted by countless others in the same situation, and soon his law firm had a new area of practice—trying to force hospitals to administer an FDA-approved, Nobel Prize winning, WHO “Essential Medication” to dying COVID-19 patients to whom nothing else was offered.
Mr. Lorigo was well-suited for the task. The energetic, punctilious attorney and Erie County Conservative party chairman has a formidable presence, with strong Italian good looks and a penchant for wearing beautifully tailored suit and power ties. Though he specialized in real estate law, he represented his clients seeking ivermectin with great care. A devoted family man with three children and multiple grandchildren, he empathized with the families who sought his help.
To be sure, it wasn’t an easy job, because the hospitals fought him tooth and nail, bringing multiple attorneys and expert witnesses to hearings. After a few more successes in which he prevailed and the patients recovered after receiving ivermectin, he received more queries than his staff could handle, so he contacted his friend, Beth Parlato, and asked her if she would be interested in taking some of the cases.
The 55-year-old attorney and mother of three had served as a judge in a New York State criminal court. Over the course of her career, she’d seen much of the good, the bad, and the ugly, but none of it had prepared her for the grueling path ahead. What she was about to witness would challenge all of her assumptions about the American healthcare and legal systems, and ultimately about human nature itself.
Most of her clients were referrals from the FLCCC, founded by Drs. Marik and Kory. The typical call would come into her office from a desperate husband or wife, daughter or son. Their stories were always the same. A much-loved family member had been languishing in hospital and was now headed for the ventilator and probable death. And though the doctors and nurses stated that the prognosis was poor, the hospital refused to administer ivermectin.
To patients and their families, the situation was incomprehensible. Many of Beth’s clients posed a variation of the question: “Mom [or dad] is declining and is probably going to die, so what’s the harm in her trying ivermectin?” Beth was at a loss for an answer. The hospital’s policy made no sense, neither as a matter of fact nor law. Many families wondered why “right to try” laws didn’t apply. Hospital attorneys claimed the “right to try” was only for experimental medications that were not yet FDA-approved. Ivermectin was FDA-approved, just not for the treatment of COVID-19.
Patients and their families found this argument perversely legalistic, but many judges—and all judges elected as Democrats—found it persuasive. Beth argued it was a legal, common, and longstanding medical practice to prescribe FDA-approved drugs off-label. Hospital attorneys retorted that the NIH guidelines for the treatment of COVID-19 did not recommend the off-label administration of ivermectin, and because the NIH was the final scientific arbiter of medical matters in the United States, the hospitals were required to follow its guidelines.
The trouble with the one-size-fits-all NIH guidelines for hospitalized COVID-19 patients was that they didn’t work. Almost a year into the pandemic, the United States had the highest COVID-19 death rate of the world’s top ten wealthiest nations and was in the top twenty nations with the highest death rates in the world. Approximately 80% of hospitalized patients who went on mechanical ventilation died. Also significant was the fact that that on January 14, 2021—in response to Senator Johnson’s letter requesting that the NIH review Dr. Kory’s presentation of evidence—the NIH dropped its recommendation against using ivermectin and adopted a neutral stance. Though far from satisfying for Dr. Kory and his colleagues, the NIH neutral stance at least gave doctors greater leeway to exercise their clinical judgement about the drug.
To make matters even more confusing, healthcare professionals were provided with broad legal immunity by the federal PREP Act (Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness) of 2005. This authorized the Secretary of Health and Human Services to deploy a wide array of “Emergency Countermeasures” in the event of an infectious disease outbreak. When invoked by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the PREP Act provides immunity for the “manufacture, testing, development, distribution, administration, and use of covered countermeasures.” On February 4, 2020, HHS Secretary Alex Azar declared COVID-19 an emergency and invoked the PREP Act.
The CARES Act of March 27, 2020, also provided immunity for healthcare workers treating COVID-19 patients. Additional immunity was granted by governors’ executive orders in all fifty states. The governor of New York State, in which Beth was practicing, provided the following immunity:
Conduct Covered: Civil liability for injury or death alleged to have been sustained directly as a result of an act or omission by person(s) covered.
Person(s) Covered: Physicians, physician assistants; specialist assistants; nurse practitioners; licensed registered professional nurses; licensed practical nurses.
Conduct Not Covered: Gross negligence.
Many observers who were documenting U.S. healthcare policy with respect to remdesivir wondered if all this liability protection could explain why the new, experimental drug was the hospital standard of care despite numerous red flags raised about its safety. The contrast of this policy with the strict policy against administering ivermectin was stunning.
Additionally, all the patients that Beth represented, and their families, stated in writing that they would indemnify the hospitals of liability for any adverse effects apparently caused by ivermectin, and that their primary care physicians would come to the hospital to administer it. Despite these multiple provisions of immunity, hospitals were still dead set against giving ivermectin to dying patients.
The hearings were brutal affairs in which hospital attorneys and expert witnesses portrayed Beth’s expert witness (on the safety and efficacy of ivermectin) as a delusional quack. Their most common line of attack was that Beth’s witness was a lone, eccentric voice in challenging the overwhelming scientific consensus that informed NIH guidelines. This rhetorical strategy ignored that many of mankind’s greatest scientific insights were the work of individuals who challenged the orthodoxy of their day. The growing body of evidence, including RCTs, cited by Beth’s witness was dismissed by hospital experts with the assertion that the evidence was “low quality.” Thus, the judge was presented with opposing expert witness claims about the evidence, only with the hospital’s witness also claiming he had “scientific consensus” and therefore the NIH on his side.
Beth tried to argue that the patient retained sufficient bodily autonomy to decide if he or she wished to take an FDA-approved drug off-label. The hospitals’ attorneys retorted that hospital patients had never had the right to decide their treatment, and that granting it with ivermectin would set a terrible precedent, opening a Pandora’s Box of future patients demanding treatments after hearing anecdotes about their efficacy. Beth regarded this argument as another legalistic dodge. Her clients weren’t presuming to practice medicine—they were dying men and women, desperately begging for the right to try an FDA-approved drug as a last and only hope when nothing else apart from remdesivir was being offered.
The hospitals claimed total sovereignty over the patient—a godlike power over all decisions affecting his life and death, with the patient afforded no say. For most gravely ill patients, the decision of this godlike power resulted in death. Thus, to sick patients and their families, the Lords of Healthcare were neither competent nor compassionate.
From: The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, by John Leake and Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH, Foreword by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Skyhorse, 2022.
POSTSCRIPT: As Dr. Pierre Kory noted in his book The War on Ivermectin, of the 80 lawsuits filed by lawyer Ralph Lorigo, in 40 the judge sided with the family, and in 40 with the hospital. Of those, in the 40 where patients received ivermectin, 38 survived, whereas of the 40 who did not, only 2 survived.
US shuts down ‘disinformation’ agency
RT | December 25, 2024
The US State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) has shut down after Republicans cut its funding. The agency was responsible for spreading propaganda abroad and, according to conservatives, censoring dissident thought at home.
The GEC announced on Monday that it would cease operations by the end of that day. “The State Department has consulted with Congress regarding next steps,” the statement added.
The organization employed around 120 people and had an annual budget of $61 million. Established in 2016, its stated goal was to “recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.”
In practice, the GEC spearheaded complex propaganda campaigns of its own. In two campaigns, the agency funded video games aimed at teaching children about the supposed dangers of anti-American narratives, releasing them in the UK, Ukraine, Latvia, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.
During the coronavirus pandemic, the GEC funneled money to a range of NGOs which then compiled lists of social media accounts supposedly spreading “disinformation” about the virus and its origins, which were then presented to the platforms to be banned or removed. Many of the accounts belonged to what Twitter’s former trust and safety chief, Yoel Roth, called “ordinary Americans,” raising concerns among conservatives that the GEC was violating its prohibition on operating within the US.
In 2023, the GEC was forced to cut ties with George Soros’ ‘Global Disinformation Initiative’, after it emerged that the agency was paying Soros’ organization to compile lists of “high risk” news outlets to use in an advertiser boycott campaign. These news sites were predominantly right-leaning and American-based.
X owner Elon Musk called the GEC a “threat to our democracy” last year, describing the agency as the “worst offender in US government censorship [and] media manipulation.”
Musk was instrumental in finally shutting down the GEC. A mammoth 1,547-page spending bill put before the House of Representatives by Speaker Mike Johnson last week would have preserved funding for the agency, until Musk threatened to fund primary election challenges to any Republican who voted for it.
Musk decried the bill – which also included pay raises for lawmakers – as “criminal,” “outrageous,” “unconscionable,” and ultimately “one of the worst bills ever written.” President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance then released a joint statement against the bill, forcing Johnson to replace it with a trimmed-down piece of legislation totaling less than 120 pages.
This Musk-approved bill failed in a 235-174 vote, with 38 Republicans joining 197 Democrats to block its passage. It eventually passed after Republicans added a section suspending the US debt ceiling for two years, a move that will add trillions more to the federal government’s $36 trillion debt.
National Security Archive Publishes Key Records on Infamous MKULTRA Program
Agency Sought Drugs and Behavior Control Techniques to Use in “Special Interrogations” and Offensive Operations
Sidney Gottlieb’s CIA Personnel File, 1983 Deposition Testimony, Among Newly Available Documents
At the urging of Dr. Geschickter, the CIA provided $375,000 toward the construction of a new medical facility at Georgetown University Hospital. In return, Geschickter agreed to let the CIA use one-sixth of the new “Gorman Annex” as its “hospital safehouse” and to provide “human patients and volunteers for experimental use.”
Edited by Michael Evans | National Security Archive | December 23, 2024
Washington, D.C. – Today, the National Security Archive and ProQuest (part of Clarivate) celebrate the publication of a new scholarly document collection many years in the making on the shocking secret history of the CIA’s mind control research programs. The new collection, CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA, brings together more than 1,200 essential records on one of the most infamous and abusive programs in CIA history.
Under code names that included MKULTRA, BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, the CIA conducted terrifying experiments using drugs, hypnosis, isolation, sensory deprivation, and other extreme techniques on human subjects, often U.S. citizens, who frequently had no idea what was being done to them or that they were part of a CIA test.
Today’s announcement comes 50 years after a New York Times investigation by Seymour Hersh touched off probes that would bring MKULTRA abuses to light. The new collection also comes 70 years since U.S. pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Company first developed a process to streamline the manufacture of LSD in late 1954, becoming the CIA’s chief supplier of the newly discovered psychoactive chemical central to many of the Agency’s behavior control efforts.
Highlights of the new MKULTRA collection include:
- A DCI-approved plan in 1950 for the establishment of “interrogation teams” that would “utilize the polygraph, drugs, and hypnotism to attain the greatest results in interrogation techniques.” (Document 2)
- A 1951 memo that captures a meeting between CIA and foreign intelligence officials about mind control research and their shared interest in the concept of individual mind control. (Document 3)
- A 1952 entry from the daily calendar of George White, a federal narcotics agent who ran a safehouse where the CIA tested drugs like LSD and performed other experiments on unwitting Americans. (Document 5)
- A 1952 report on the “successful” use of ARTICHOKE interrogation methods that combined the use of “narcosis” and “hypnosis” to induce regression and later amnesia on “Russian agents suspected of being doubled.” (Document 6)
- A 1956 memo in which MKULTRA chief Sidney Gottlieb signs off a project that would “evaluate the effects of large doses of LSD-25 in normal human volunteers” on federal prisoners in Atlanta. (Document 13)
- The 1963 report from the CIA’s inspector general, which led CIA leadership to reexamine the use of unwitting Americans in their covert drug testing program. (Document 16)
- The 1983 deposition of MKULTRA chief Sidney Gottlieb in a civil case brought by Velma “Val” Orlikow, a victim of CIA-sponsored projects conducted by Dr. Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. (Document 20)
The challenges facing this documentation project were considerable, as CIA director Richard Helms and longtime MKULTRA chief Sidney Gottlieb destroyed most of the original project records in 1973. It is a story about secrecy—perhaps the most infamous cover-up in the Agency’s history. It is also a history marked by near-total impunity at the institutional and individual levels for countless abuses committed across decades—not during interrogations of enemy agents or in wartime situations, but during ordinary medical treatments, inside prison hospitals, addiction clinics, and juvenile detention facilities, and in many cases led by top figures in the field of the behavioral sciences. Despite the Agency’s efforts to erase this hidden history, the documents that survived this purge and that have been gathered together here present a compelling and unsettling narrative of the CIA’s decades-long effort to discover and test ways to erase and re-program the human mind.
The bulk of these records were drawn from records compiled by John Marks, the former State Department official who filed the first Freedom of Information Act requests on the subject and whose 1979 book, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences (New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1979) remains the single most important source on this episode. Marks later donated his FOIA documents and other research papers to the National Security Archive. Many of the redactions in the documents have been effectively removed with the passage of time, as official investigations, civil depositions, and detailed histories have shed significant light on some of these episodes. In many cases, copies of declassified records donated by Marks to the National Security Archive bear his handwritten annotations.
The legacy of MKULTRA goes far beyond the various “subprojects” described in these documents and that were largely shut down by the mid-1970s. As author Stephen Kinzer points out, the CIA’s behavior control research programs “contributed decisively to the development of techniques that Americans and their allies used at detention centers in Vietnam, Latin America, Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and secret prisons around the world.” MKULTRA techniques were cited in the CIA’s 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual that was the basis for prisoner interrogations in Vietnam and later in anti-communist dictatorships in Latin America.[1]
While many of the MKULTRA projects were conducted in hospitals, laboratories, or other institutional settings, others were carried out in clandestine CIA safehouses staffed not by doctors or clinicians but by hard-nosed federal narcotics agents like George Hunter White. Under the direction of Gottlieb, White adopted the persona of a bohemian artist named “Morgan Hall” to lure unsuspecting victims to his “pad” where he and his CIA collaborators secretly experimented on them and recorded their behavior. An OSS veteran who had worked on “truth drug” development for the Army in World War II, White surreptitiously dosed many of his victims with LSD, a drug that the CIA had in abundance thanks to Eli Lilly, which had developed the capacity to produce the drug in “tonnage quantities” and had agreed to become the Agency’s supplier. Gottlieb, his deputy Robert Lashbrook, and CIA psychologist John Gittinger are among the CIA officials who frequently visited White’s safehouses.
Of particular interest is the mysterious 1953 death of Frank Olson, an Army chemist and aerosols specialist for the Special Operations Division (SOD) of the Army’s Chemical Corps, the CIA’s military partner in behavior control research. Officially ruled a suicide, Olson’s death from a 10-story fall in New York City came 10 days after Gottlieb and TSS staff spiked his cocktail with LSD during a CIA-SOD work retreat at Deep Creek Lake, Maryland. The drugging was later determined to have contributed to his death, but many, including members of his family, have questioned the conclusion that Olson—who was sharing a room with Lashbrook that night—threw himself out the window of the Statler Hotel.
At the center of it all was Sidney Gottlieb, the head of the Technical Services Staff (TSS) of the CIA’s Chemical Division and later director of the Technical Services Division (TSD). Gottlieb was “the CIA’s chief poison maker,” according to Kinzer, whose book, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (New York: Henry Holt, 2019), is the definitive work on the mercurial chemist. From his position deep inside the CIA’s secret corridors, Gottlieb led the Agency’s decades-long effort to find ways to use drugs, hypnosis, and other extreme methods to control human behavior and, it was hoped, turn them into usable tools for intelligence agencies and policymakers.
Stories about the CIA’s involvement in unsuccessful efforts to assassinate Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of Congo and Cuban leader Fidel Castro, among others, are among the most legendary, if not the most successful, examples of the Agency’s efforts to operationalize the tricks and tools assembled by Gottlieb’s unit. Less well known is his role in drug experiments and “special interrogation” programs that left hundreds of people psychologically damaged and others “permanently shattered,” according to Kinzer.[2]
Although MKULTRA was approved at the highest levels, it operated with virtually no oversight. As Marks notes, the initial MKULTRA budget authorization “exempted the program from the normal CIA financial controls” and “allowed TSS to start up research projects ‘without the signing of the usual contracts or other written agreements.’”[3] With little accountability, boundless resources, and the backing of CIA covert operations chief Richard Helms, Gottlieb and his staff at TSS developed a series of bizarre experiments that they believed would enhance covert intelligence operations while at the same time improving the Agency’s defenses against the use of similar techniques by enemy forces.
By the time Gottlieb arrived at CIA in 1952, Project BLUEBIRD, which explored “the possibility of control of an individual by application of Special Interrogation techniques,” was already well underway.[4] Led by Office of Security chief Morse Allen, the early BLUEBIRD experiments were performed by teams that included polygraph experts and psychologists and were conducted on detainees and suspected informants at secret U.S. interrogation facilities in Japan and Germany.
The elevation of Allen Dulles to deputy director of central intelligence in 1951 led to an expansion of BLUEBIRD programs under a new name, ARTICHOKE, and under the direction of Gottlieb at TSS. The new program was to include, among other projects, the development of “gas guns” and “poisons,” and experiments to test whether “monotonous sounds,” “concussion,” “electroshock,” and “induced sleep” could be used as a means to gain “hypnotic control of an individual.”[5]
It was under ARTICHOKE that the Agency first began to more systematically recruit the top researchers and court the most prestigious institutions to collaborate in its mind control research. One of the first to participate was the deputy director of Boston Psychopathic Hospital, Dr. Robert Hyde, who in 1949 was the first American to “trip” on LSD after the hospital acquired samples of the drug from Sandoz laboratory in Switzerland. In 1952, the CIA began to fund the hospital’s LSD research, under which Hyde used himself, his colleagues, student volunteers, and hospital patients as his subjects. Hyde would work on four MKULTRA subprojects over the next decade.
Shortly after Dulles became DCI in 1953, he authorized MKULTRA, expanding the Agency’s behavior control research and refocusing it on the development of “a capability in the covert use of biological and chemical materials” in “present and future clandestine operations.”[6] Many of the 149 MKULTRA subprojects were carried out through well-regarded universities like Cornell, Georgetown, Rutgers, Illinois, and Oklahoma. Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, the chairman of the Department of Pharmacology of Emory University, directed four MKULTRA subprojects, all of which involved the use of drugs, including LSD, to induce psychotic states. The horrifying series of experiments left many of his subjects—including prisoners at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary and juveniles housed at a detention facility in Bordentown, New Jersey—scarred for life.
Many other MKULTRA subprojects were established through grants from false foundations funded by the CIA. One of these, the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, run by Dr. Charles Geschickter, a professor of pathology at Georgetown University, steered millions of CIA dollars into research programs at Georgetown and other institutions. As part of the agreement, the CIA gained access to a medical safehouse at the newly constructed Gorman Annex of Georgetown University Hospital along with a ready supply of patients and students to use as subjects for MKULTRA experiments.
Another prominent MKULTRA “cutout” foundation, the Human Ecology Society, was run by Cornell Medical Center neurologist Dr. Harold Wolff, who wrote an early study of communist brainwashing techniques for Allen Dulles and later partnered with the CIA to develop a combination of drugs and sensory deprivation that could be used to erase the human mind. Among the most extreme MKULTRA projects funded through Wolff’s group were the infamous “depatterning” experiments conducted by Dr. D. Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute, a psychiatric hospital at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Cameron’s methods combined induced sleep, electroshocks, and “psychic driving,” under which drugged subjects were psychologically tortured for weeks or months in an effort to reprogram their minds.
These records also shed light on an especially dark period in the history of the behavioral sciences in which some of the top physicians in the field conducted research and experiments usually associated with the Nazi doctors who were tried at Nuremberg. While some medical professionals engaged by the CIA apparently struggled with the ethical issues raised by conducting harmful tests on unwitting human subjects, others were eager to participate in a program in which, according to one 1953 memo, “no area of the human mind is to be left unexplored.”[7] Just as CIA psychologists later oversaw the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and at CIA “black sites,” during the first decades of the 21st century, many of the doctors and clinicians recruited for MKULTRA work were leaders in the field, whose participation boosted the prestige of the program and drew others into it. Scholars and researchers looking at the involvement of psychologists and other medical professionals in the horrific U.S. detention and interrogation programs that have been exposed in recent years will find parallels and historical antecedents throughout this collection.
The collection is also of great value to those interested in learning more about the early years of the CIA and some of its major personalities, such as Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Richard Bissell, Franks Wisner, and others, who envisioned and created an intelligence agency that favored bold, often covert, action and where controversial projects like MKULTRA could secretly take root and flourish.
Sednaya: Investigating Syria’s most notorious prison
The Cradle | December 24, 2024
When militants from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by former Al-Qaeda leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani – who now goes by his real name Ahmad al-Sharaa – finally toppled Bashar al-Assad’s government on 8 December 2024, they quickly released the prisoners in Sednaya.
A flood of new media reports about the horrors of the prison quickly emerged.
But which reports about the crimes of Assad’s government are true, and which are fabricated as part of a new propaganda campaign to legitimize Julani’s rule and whitewash the opposition’s similar past atrocities?
Vast underground prison complex?
On 9 December, one day after Assad’s fall, The Guardian journalist William Christou was among the first journalists to reach Sednaya.
Christou claimed that a day after Julani’s forces had taken control of the prison, a door had been found leading to a “vast underground complex, five stories deep, containing the last prisoners of the Assad regime, who were gasping for air.”
He reported rumors that there “were 1,500 prisoners trapped underground that needed rescuing; perhaps your loved ones are among them.”
As a result, hundreds of panicked Syrians rushed to the prison, located 30 kilometers outside Damascus, to search for loved ones missing from the war. Due to the crowds, “Cars were ditched by the roadside and people began to walk,” Christou wrote.
In subsequent days, numerous fake videos professing to show prisoners in the underground complex went viral, while CNN journalist Clarissa Ward faked the discovery of a prisoner in a detention facility in Damascus.
“We came to see the prisons under the ground,” one woman wandering the halls of Sednaya told The Cradle during its visit to the prison.
She said her brother had been missing since 2018. She first went to the Mezzeh military prison in Damascus, and now she was looking for any sign of him at Sednaya.
However, despite efforts by the White Helmets and Turkish rescue organizations, no secret underground complex holding thousands of prisoners has been found.
During its visit to Sednaya, The Cradle was able to walk freely through the facility and verified that there is just one underground basement level containing small individual isolation cells and an adjoining toilet.
Human slaughterhouse?
In the days after Assad’s fall, more and more western journalists visited Sednaya and filed reports. Virtually all begin by citing a 2017 investigation by Amnesty International, which called the prison a “human slaughterhouse.” The investigation claimed up to 13,000 civilians were executed in mass hangings over a four-year period.
The US State Department tried to reinforce the findings of the Amnesty report by claiming the bodies of the executed were burned in a “crematorium” located in a building adjacent to the main prison.
However, the State Department gave zero proof of the crematorium, and no one has claimed to find it since the prison was opened.
Further, Amnesty’s report acknowledges the number killed was just an “estimate” (between 5,000 and 13,000) based on testimony from alleged former guards and prisoners taken by the rights group in Turkiye. The report said the mass execution process was “secret” but then somehow claimed to reveal its intimate details.
The report also ignores that the Syrian government was detaining people during this period in the context of facing an Al-Qaeda-led insurgency, including from the Nusra Front and ISIS.
When The Cradle asked a Syrian who is supportive of the opposition about his view of the Sednaya issue, he noted that the prison is Syria’s “Guantanamo.” In other words, the prison is reserved for high-security prisoners from Islamist armed groups detained on terrorism charges.
This is evident by the famous Sednaya prison uprising in 2008, in which primarily Islamist prisoners revolted against their guards.
But Amnesty claims that the prisoners were held in Sednaya and mass executed “as part of an attack against the civilian population.”
Iraqi and US forces have also long held large numbers of Al-Qaeda militants in prisons in Iraq, such as at Abu Ghraib. However, the fact that the Syrian government was holding Al-Qaeda militants in its prisons is somehow ignored by Amnesty and others.
Psychological operations
Another question is whether the testimony of the former alleged prisoners and guards given to Amnesty in 2017 and to western media outlets after the prison was opened in 2024 is reliable.
A Spanish journalist who visited Sednaya in the days after Assad’s fall told The Cradle that he was suspicious of the testimony given to him by alleged former prisoners. Fixers associated with Julani’s new government had arranged the interviews, he said, and some of the details of their testimony seemed too fantastic to be true. “But there was no way to verify if they were true or not,” the journalist said.
As a case in point, recent western media reports almost all include interviews with Omar al-Shogre, an alleged former Sednaya prisoner who was the star witness of the 2017 Amnesty report.
However, a close review of Shogre’s testimony shows it was clearly fabricated.
For example, he told Amnesty the guards would regularly force the prisoners to rape each other while being escorted from their cells to the bathroom.
“As we walked to the bathroom, [the guards] would select one of the boys, someone petite or young or fair. … They would then ask a bigger prisoner to rape him … No one will admit this happened to them, but it happened so often,” Shogre claimed.
However, during its visit to Sednaya, The Cradle observed that each cell has its own toilet and sink. In one cell, The Cradle observed items of clothing hanging on lines above the sink to dry after washing. There was no possibility that the guards were escorting prisoners out of their cells to go to the bathroom, as Shogre’s scenario claims.
Over the years, Shogre has made many wild and completely implausible claims, which further undermine his credibility.
The Nation wrote that according to Shogre, “Guards would deliberately execute a prisoner right before serving inmates their only meal of the day, often placing the corpse’s head over the platter of food, so that it would bleed into the daily mound of bread and potatoes.”
The former prisoner’s fabrications have long been part of a broader propaganda campaign to impose crushing sanctions on Syria.
Shogre works for the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a group established and funded by the US government to facilitate the overthrow of the Syrian government. SETF provided alleged non-lethal aid to US-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) groups that fought the Syrian army starting in 2011.
While working for the SETF, Shogre advocated for the US Congress to impose the Caesar sanctions on Syria, which helped strangle his home nation’s economy and resembled the US sanctions on Iraq, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in the 1990s.
The Caesar sanctions were themselves named after a psychological operation claiming that a Syrian military photographer had smuggled 55,000 photographs out of the country, documenting the torture and killing of some 11,000 detainees by the Syrian government.
But as journalist Rick Sterling observed, Human Rights Watch (HRW) acknowledged that almost half of the photos do not show people tortured to death by the Syrian government. Instead, they show dead Syrian soldiers and victims of car bombs and other violence from the opposition groups. Such deaths are normal for any government to document in a time of war.
Syria’s missing
Despite the propaganda surrounding Sednaya, there are many indications that the Syrian government detained large numbers of Syrians during the war who were either tortured to death or shot and killed.
While in a restaurant in Damascus shortly after Assad’s fall, The Cradle witnessed two employees, a father and his son, emerge from the back room in tears. They told the owner and fellow staff that they had just received word that the names of their three uncles, taken by the government and missing since 2014, had been found in the records at Tishreen military hospital, confirming their deaths.
One reason that many Syrians may have been detained and disappeared is because Syrian intelligence operated in many ways like a mafia. The feared ‘mukhabarat’ often abused their power to extract bribes from Syrians in many aspects of everyday life.
One Syrian from Damascus told The Cradle that there was little rule of law in Syria. Instead, Syrians lived by the “rule of the phone numbers.” Your privileges and ability to protect yourself depended on whether you had the phone number of someone powerful to call if the local security agents tried to extort you, or worse.
Those with money or political connections were often released, including those detained on terrorism charges, while others continued to rot in prison. As a result, many were tortured and killed.
Writing for Al-Akhbar in 2013, journalist Qassem Qassem stated it is an “undeniable fact” that the Palestinian filmmaker from the Yarmouk Palestinian camp in Damascus, Hassan Hassan, was “killed in the regime prisons.” He said that Hassan was not a terrorist or “takfiri,” and “never carried a gun nor blew himself up with an explosive vest,” but was killed anyway.
The “Repentance” prison
But in addition to those who disappeared or were tortured by the government, the armed opposition groups also tortured and disappeared huge numbers of people.
When asked about the issue of those gone missing in Assad’s prison, one Syrian from Aleppo told The Cradle that the militant groups fighting the former president ran mafia-style kidnapping rings of their own.
“The opposition, since the start of the war, has killed tens of thousands of Syrians, and the ones they didn’t bury in mass graves, they sent, in parts, to several families when the ransoms weren’t paid. Try also asking them where the missing are.”
While walking through Sednaya prison, The Cradle spoke with a man who was looking for his missing son – a commander in a militant opposition group called Burkan al-Sham in the eastern Ghouta area of Damascus.
The man said he and his son were accused of being Syrian government agents by another armed opposition group, the Saudi-backed Jaish al-Islam.
Led by Zahran Alloush, the son of a prominent Salafist preacher in Ghouta, the group was described by the UK foreign office as part of the “moderate armed opposition.”
The man told The Cradle that he and his son were both held at Jaish al-Islam’s “Tawba,” or “repentance,” prison in the town of Duma, in the Ghouta region. He said they were tortured in ways “worse than in Sednaya.”
The father said he was later released, but his son remains missing. He later heard rumors his son had ended up in a government prison in Mezzeh. After looking there and finding nothing, he came to Sednaya to search.
Pro-opposition Enab Baladi reported in 2017 that while there is a large network of activists in Duma, there are no accurate statistics on the number of detainees in Tawba.
Abu Khaled, a 31-year-old media activist from Duma, told the outlet he was surprised by the absence of such reports.
“Random arrests take place all around Eastern Ghouta,” he stated. These prisons, especially Tawba, “are as bad as those of the Syrian regime, and, according to former prisoners, many detainees stay in prisons for months without trial.”
“A man’s body was recently returned to his family three days after his arrest,” pro-opposition Syria Direct reported in 2017. “Jaish al-Islam directly threatened them, telling them that if they spoke to the media or published pictures of the body, they would all be killed.”
Julani’s prisons
Abu Mohammad al-Julani’s Nusra Front also imprisoned and tortured many Syrians. We know this from the testimony of Theo Padnos. A freelance journalist from the US, Padnos was kidnapped by the FSA in 2012 and handed over to Nusra. He remained a hostage for two years before Qatar paid a large ransom to release him.
While imprisoned at the Eye Hospital, the Nusra guards beat and shocked the journalist with an electric cattle prod. Other prisoners were hung by their wrists from ceiling pipes. Their feet mimicked the riding of a bicycle in the air.
When Julani’s Nusra conquered Idlib province in 2015 and formed a National Salvation government, the group established new prisons where torture was also common.
An opposition media activist, Jawdat Malas, was imprisoned by the group in a dark and dirty cell, Enab Baladi reported.
For hours every day, he would be tortured until his body was heavily bruised. “I reached a point where I was constipated. My whole body was dark blue,” he said. “Other detainees were taking care of me. I had no idea what I did wrong. I was terrified.”
In April 2020, Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ) issued a report stating that women were detained and killed in Idlib, including for “insulting deity,” “espionage” for the benefit of the Syrian army, and “adultery.”
Conclusion
No one in Syria now knows what the future holds. But what is sure is that Syrians have suffered from more than a decade of horrific war and economic sanctions. Violence has been inflicted on Syrian civilians by the former government under Bashar al-Assad, but also by the foreign-backed extremist groups who functioned as tools of the US and its allies to topple Assad. Most crucial to recall is that the vast majority of this violence occurred after 2011, when the US launched its covert war on Syria on Israel’s behalf.
Violence at recruitment centers in Ukraine escalating
By Lucas Leiroz | December 24, 2024
Ukraine’s draconian recruitment policies are reaching intolerable levels of violence, resulting in more and more victims. Recently, a man was murdered by the military while trying to prevent his son from being forcibly sent to the front. This is just one of many scandals involving the brutal way in which recruitment officers treat ordinary Ukrainian citizens, which shows how Kiev is completely lost, with no chance of continuing the war in the long term.
Recently, a video began circulating on the internet showing the murder of a man inside a Ukrainian training center. According to reports from photographers and internet users, the motive for the murder was that the man was trying to prevent the forced recruitment of his son by Ukrainian officers. The case was reported by Artyom Dmitruk, a former Ukrainian parliamentarian exiled in London who has become a critic of Zelensky’s policies. Ukrainian authorities are still silent about the incident, neither confirming nor refuting Dmitruk’s claims.
The video is absolutely disturbing. A woman can be heard screaming as soldiers force a man to walk down a stair. Two shots are then heard, with the man falling to the ground and the woman screaming desperately. According to Dmitruk, the incident took place in Odessa. He claims that not only was the recruit’s father killed, but the soldier himself is now at risk of death, as the Ukrainian military may want to eliminate him to prevent the truth about the case from coming to light.
Dmitruk also claims that incidents like this have become commonplace in recruitment centers. The use of force to recruit new soldiers is becoming a serious problem in the country, as soldiers’ families repeatedly try to prevent their relatives from being captured by officers, resulting in cases of extreme violence, with recruiters often beating and apparently even killing ordinary civilians who do not want to see their loved ones sent to the front.
It is important to emphasize that the case was not reported by any pro-Russian source, but by ordinary Ukrainians, who filmed the incident, and by Artyom Dmitruk, who is a radical nationalist activist, although a critic of Zelensky. Dmitruk is an example of how the Zelensky dictatorship acts violently against any Ukrainian citizen, even officials and parliamentarians loyal to the regime, who dare to criticize any policy implemented by the president. In Dmitruk’s case, he was persecuted along with his family simply for opposing the infamous law that banned the Orthodox Church in the country. Previously, Dmitruk was a recruiter for a nationalist battalion in the Odessa region, being a fierce supporter of the regime, but this was not enough to save him from persecution.
In other words, Ukrainians themselves, both ordinary citizens and nationalists critical of Zelensky, are showing the truth about the regime’s recruitment policies. There seems to be a consensus among all sides that the regime’s draconian measures to supply the front lines are causing more problems than strategic benefits. Poorly trained young people are being sent to certain death while their families turn against the Ukrainian authorities, generating instability, social polarization and a serious crisis of legitimacy.
It is shocking how international organizations remain inactive in the face of this reality. Clearly, Ukraine is experiencing one of the most serious humanitarian crises in recent times, with thousands of young people being forcibly sent as cannon fodder to the front lines – which have already become an actual meat grinder, where most of the conscripts die within a few days, if not hours, due to the high precision of Russian artillery and aviation.
Maintaining a policy of total mobilization in the current conditions in Ukraine is unfeasible and anti-strategic. The regime no longer has a chance of victory, considering the constant territorial losses and the low capacity to replace military personnel. Instead of contributing to operations on the battlefield, the policies of forced conscription seem like a strategic suicide, since they worsen the morale of the troops and the collective psychological conditions among the soldiers, in addition to destabilizing society as a whole by generating friction between the families of the conscripts and the authorities. In practice, Kiev is actually accelerating its own collapse with such measures.
This is further proof that the only hope for the Ukrainian people is a quick Russian military victory, as the Kiev regime does not care about the lives of its own citizens.
Lucas Leiroz, journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.
You can follow Lucas on X (former Twitter) and Telegram.
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- No Tricks Zone
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- 3 More New Drought And Temperature Reconstructions Do Not Support The Climate Alarm Narrative
- 2024 Registrations Of New Electric Cars Plummet 27.5% In Germany…”Petrol Dominates”
- Physicists: Increasing CO2 By 100% Only Reduces Radiative Cooling To Space By An Imperceptible 1%
- Japanese Scientist: The IPCC’s Climate Models Are Fundamentally Flawed, Use False Assumptions
- Cambridge Scientists: Climate Change Is Not The Cause Of Megafauna Extinctions
- Scientists: Greenland July 14°C Warmer With 35% Less CO2 250,000 Years Ago!
- Germany Already Rationing Energy…”Avoid Using Electric Appliances Until After 11 A.M.!
- Central Greenland Was Recently Ice-Free And Covered With Plants When CO2 Was Under 300 ppm
- 2025 Looks Bleak For Germany…Energy The Most Expensive In Europe …Growing Speech Tyranny
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