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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.

December 26, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

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.

December 25, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

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.

View the documents

December 25, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

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.

December 24, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Subjugation - Torture, Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

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.

December 24, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

The Case for Dismantling the Rules-Based International Order

By Professor Glenn Diesen | December 23, 2024

The so-called “rules-based international order” aims to facilitate a hegemonic world, which entails displacing international law. While international law is based on equal sovereignty for all states, the rules-based international order upholds hegemony on the principle of sovereign inequality.

The rules-based international order is commonly presented as international law plus international human rights law, which appears benign and progressive. However, this entails introducing contradictory principles and rules. The consequence is a system devoid of uniform rules, in which “might makes right”. International human rights law introduces a set of rules to elevate the rights of the individual, yet human-centric security often contradicts state-centric security as the foundation of international law.

The US as the hegemonic state can then choose between human-centric security and state-centric security, while adversaries must abide strictly by state-centric security due to their alleged lack of liberal democratic credentials. For example, state-centric security as the foundation of international law insists on the territorial integrity of states, while human-centric security allows for secession under the principle of self-determination. The US will thus insist on territorial integrity in allied countries such as Ukraine, Georgia or Spain, while supporting self-determination within adversarial states such as Serbia, China, Russia and Syria. The US can interfere in the domestic affairs of adversaries to promote liberal democratic values, yet the US adversaries do not have the right to interfere in the domestic affairs of the US. To facilitate a hegemonic international order, there cannot be equal sovereignty for all states.

Constructing the hegemonic rules-based international order

The process of constructing alternative sources of legitimacy to facilitate sovereign inequality began with NATO’s illegal invasion of Yugoslavia in 1999 without a UN mandate. The violation of international law was justified by liberal values. Even the legitimacy of the UN Security Council was contested by arguing it should be circumvented as Russia and China veto of humanitarian interventionism was allegedly caused by their lack of liberal democratic values.

The efforts to establish alternative sources of authority continued in 2003 to gain legitimacy for the illegal invasion of Iraq. Former US Ambassador to NATO, Ivo Daalder, called for establishing an “Alliance of Democracies” as a key element of US foreign policy.[1] A similar proposal suggested establishing a “Concert of Democracies”, in which liberal democracies could act in the spirit of the UN without being constrained by the veto power of authoritarian states.[2] During the 2008 presidential election, Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain argued in favour of establishing a “League of Democracies”. In December 2021, the US organised the first “Summit for Democracy” to divide the world into liberal democracies versus authoritarian states. The White House framed sovereign inequality in the language of democracy: Washington’s interference in the domestic affairs of other states was “support for democracy”, while upholding the West’s sovereignty entailed defending democracy.[3] The aforementioned initiatives became the “rules-based international order”. With an imperialist mindset, there would be one set of rules for the “garden” and another set for the “jungle”.

The rules-based international order created a two-tiered system of legitimate versus illegitimate states. The paradox of liberal internationalism is that liberal democracies often demand that they dominate international institutions to defend democratic values from the control of the majority. Yet, a durable and resilient international system capable of developing common rules is imperative for international governance and to resolve disputes among states.

International law in accordance with the UN Charter is based on the Westphalian principle of sovereign equality as “all states are equal”. In contrast, the rules-based international order is a hegemonic system based on sovereign inequality. Such a system of sovereign inequality follows the principle from George Orwell’s Animal Farm that stipulates “all animals [states] are equal but some animals [states] are more equal than others”. In Kosovo, the West promoted self-determination as a normative right of secession that had to be prioritised above territorial integrity. In South Ossetia and Crimea, the West insisted that the sanctity of territorial integrity, as stipulated in the UN Charter, must be prioritised over self-determination.

Uniform rules replaced with a tribunal of public opinion

Instead of resolving conflicts through diplomacy and uniform rules, there is an incentive to manipulate, moralise and propagandise as international disputes are decided by a tribunal of public opinion when there are competing principles. Deceit and extreme language have thus become commonplace. In 1999, the US and UK especially presented false accusations about war crimes to make interventionism legitimate. British Prime Minister Tony Blair told the world that Yugoslav authorities were “set on a Hitler-style genocide equivalent to the extermination of the Jews during the Second World War. It is no exaggeration to say that what is happening is racial genocide”.[4]

The rules-based international order fails to establish common unifying rules of how to govern international relations, which is the fundamental function of world order. Both China and Russia have denounced the rules-based international order as a dual system to facilitate double standards. Chinese Vice Foreign Minister, Xie Feng, asserted that the rules-based international order introduces the “law of the jungle” insofar as universally recognised international law is replaced by unilateralism.[5] Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov similarly criticised the rules-based international order for creating a parallel legal framework to legitimise unilateralism:

“The West has been coming up with multiple formats such as the French-German Alliance for Multilateralism, the International Partnership against Impunity for the Use of Chemical Weapons, the Global Partnership to Protect Media Freedom, the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, the Call for Action to Strengthen Respect for International Humanitarian Law—all these initiatives deal with subjects that are already on the agenda of the UN and its specialised agencies. These partnerships exist outside of the universally recognised structures so as to agree on what the West wants in a restricted circle without any opponents. After that they take their decisions to the UN and present them in a way that de facto amounts to an ultimatum. If the UN does not agree, since imposing anything on countries that do not share the same ‘values’ is never easy, they take unilateral action”.[6]

The rules-based international order does not consist of any specific rules, is not accepted internationally, and does not deliver order. The rules-based international order should be considered a failed experiment from the unipolar world order, which must be dismantled to restore international law as a requirement for stability and peace.

Article based on excerpts from my book: “The Ukraine War and the Eurasian World Order”

[1] I. Daalder and J. Lindsay, ‘An Alliance of Democracies’, The Washington Post, 23 May 2004.

[2] G.J. Ikenberry and A.M. Slaughter, ‘Forging a World of Liberty Under Law: U.S. National Security in the 21st Century’, Princeton, The Princeton Project on National Security, 2006.

[3] White House, ‘Summit for Democracy Summary of Proceedings’, The White House, 23 December 2021.

[4] N. Clark, ‘Fools no more’, The Guardian, 19 April 2008.

[5] Global Times, ‘US ‘rules-based intl order’ is ‘law of the jungle’ to contain others: Chinese vice FM tells US envoy’, Global Times, 26 July 2021.

[6] S. Lavrov, ‘Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s remarks at the 29th Assembly of the Council on Foreign and Defence Policy (CFDP)’, The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, 2 October 2021.

December 24, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Progressive Hypocrite | , , | Leave a comment

Let’s Retire Overused Words. First, ‘Misinformation’

By Dr. Pierre Kory & Mary Beth Pfeiffer | Real Clear Health | December 16, 2024

In a seismic political shift, Republicans have laid claim to an issue that Democrats left in the gutter—the declining health of Americans. True, it took a Democrat with a famous name to ask why so many people are chronically ill, disabled and dying younger than in 47 other countries. But the message resonated with the GOP.

We have a proposal in this unfolding milieu. Let’s have a serious, nuanced discussion. Let’s retire labels that have been weaponized against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nominated for Health and Human Services Secretary, and many people like him.

Start with discarding threadbare words like “conspiracy theory,” “anti-vax,” and the ever-changing “misinformation.”

These linguistic sleights of hand have been deployed—by government, media and vested interests—to dismiss policy critics and thwart debate. If post-election developments tell us anything, it is that such scorn may no longer work for a population skeptical of government overreach.

Although RFK has been lambasted for months in the press, he just scored a 47 percent approval rating in a CBS poll.

Americans are asking: Is RFK on to something?

Perhaps, as he contends, a 1986 law that all-but absolved vaccine manufacturers from liability has spawned an industry driven more by profit than protection.

Maybe Americans agree with RFK that the FDA, which gets 69 percent of its budget from pharmaceutical companies, is potentially compromised. Maybe Big Pharma, similarly, gets a free pass from the television news media that it generously supports. The U.S. and New Zealand, incidentally, are the only nations on earth that allow “direct-to- consumer” TV ads.

Finally, just maybe there’s a straight line from this unhealthy alliance to the growing list of 80 childhood shots, inevitably approved after cursory industry studies with no placebo controls. The Hepatitis B vaccine trial, for one, monitored the effects on newborns for just five days. Babies are given three doses of this questionably necessary product—intended to prevent a disease spread through sex and drug use.

Pointing out such conflicts and flaws earns critics a label: “anti-vaxxer.”

Misinformation?

If RFK is accused of being extreme or misdirected, consider the Covid-19 axioms that Americans were told by their government.

The first: The pandemic started in animals in Wuhan, China. To think otherwise, Wikipedia states, is a “conspiracy theory,” fueled by “misplaced suspicion” and “anti-Chinese racism.”

Not so fast. In a new 520-page report, a Congressional subcommittee linked the outbreak to risky U.S.-supported virus research at a Wuhan lab at the pandemic epicenter. After 25 hearings, the subcommittee found no evidence of “natural origin.”

Is the report a slam dunk? Maybe not. But neither is outright dismissal of a lab leak.

The same goes for other pandemic dogma, including the utility of (ineffective) masks, (harmful) lockdowns, (arbitrary) six-foot spacing, and, most prominently, vaccines that millions were coerced to take and that harmed some.

Americans were told, wrongly, that two shots would prevent Covid and stop the spread. Natural immunity from previous infection was ignored to maximize vaccine uptake.

Yet there was scant scientific support for vaccinating babies with little risk, which few other countries did; pregnant women (whose deaths soared 40 percent after the rollout), and healthy adolescents, including some who suffered a heart injury called myocarditis. The CDC calls the condition “rare;” but a new study found 223 times more cases in 2021 than the average for all vaccines in the previous 30 years.

Truth Muzzled? 

Beyond this, pandemic decrees were not open to question. Millions of social media posts were removed at the behest of the White House. The ranks grew both of well-funded fact-checkers and retractions of countervailing science.

The FDA, meantime, created a popular and false story line that the Nobel Prize-winning early-treatment drug ivermectin was for horses, not people, and might cause coma and death. Under pressure from a federal court, the FDA removed its infamous webpage, but not before it cleared the way for unapproved vaccines, possible under law only if no alternative was available.

An emergency situation can spawn official missteps. But they become insidious when dissent is suppressed and truth is molded to fit a narrative.

The government’s failures of transparency and oversight are why we are at this juncture today. RFK—should he overcome powerful opposition—may have the last word.

The conversation he proposes won’t mean the end of vaccines or of respect for science. It will mean accountability for what happened in Covid and reform of a dysfunctional system that made it possible.

Dr. Pierre Kory, M.D., a pulmonologist and critical care specialist, is president emeritus of the FLCCC Alliance. Mary Beth Pfeiffer is an investigative reporter and author.

December 21, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Sen. Eric Schmitt Urges Exclusion of State Department’s Global Engagement Center from Government Funding

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | December 21, 2024

Republican Senator Eric Schmitt has addressed the Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, asking for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) to be cut off from temporary government funding that’s currently negotiated in Congress.

Schmitt – who was, as Missouri attorney-general, behind the Missouri v. Biden free speech lawsuit (that became Murthy v. Missouri) said in a post on X that GEC “must be excluded from any subsequent piece of legislation for the remainder of the 118th Congress.”

The senator added that Americans “deserve to know their First Amendment rights are being protected.”

The letter to Schumer reveals that the temporary funding measure, known as “continuing resolution (CR)” among its original 1,500 pages provides for GEC as well.

(It has since been removed from the slimmer bill that passed on Friday.)

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

This office has been the subject of scrutiny by legislators and the public for finding a way to flag social media posts for censorship, despite being a part of the government.

Critics say this rendered its activities, conducted with third parties and affecting speech on social media, unconstitutional.

Democrats had hoped to get the CR approved through mid-March (but would extend GEC for another year) – however, President Trump, and consequently Republicans dashed their hopes of reaching a quick, bipartisan deal.

Now Schmitt’s letter shows one of the many objections Republicans have to the proposed CR, slamming it as an example of backroom deals that fly in the face of “transparency, accountability, and responsible government.”

Schmitt notes that GEC was set up to combat foreign propaganda, but then “mutated” into a censorship-facilitating outfit suppressing speech at home on a mass scale.

The senator states that since the target of censorship were narratives which “questioned established thinking” and involved a number of powerful actors (the government, social media), this “risks creating a government-endorsed ‘truth’ immune to public scrutiny.”

And, essentially – there goes true democracy, starting with the First Amendment.

For these reasons, Schmitt urges Schumer to make sure that GEC “under no circumstances” continues to receive public money.

The Republican senator is severely critical of the “giant ‘Christmas tree’ spending bill” itself, not only for undermining trust in government and the country’s institutions but also, due to its size and the rush to adopt it, for “slipping into the text” policies that would have GEC renewed and funded.

Schmitt therefore demands to exclude GEC from any legislation considered by the current Congress.

“I will strongly oppose any end-of-year bills that include reauthorization or funding of the GEC and urge my colleagues to do the same,” Schmitt’s letter concludes.

December 21, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Palestinian child killed by Israeli landmine in West Bank

Palestinian Information Center – December 21, 2024

WEST BANK – A Palestinian child was killed on Saturday morning when a landmine left behind by the Israeli occupation army exploded in al-Rashayda area, east of Bethlehem in the West Bank.

The Palestinian health ministry said that seven-year-old Mohamed Rashayda was martyred when he stepped on a landmine left by the Israeli army in al-Rashayda area.

Unexploded ordnance left behind by the Israeli army is particularly concentrated in the southern West Bank areas and the northern Jordan Valley, where its military exercises take place.

The Israeli army routinely uses Palestinian land in the West Bank for training and live fire exercises, leaving behind unexploded shells and bombs, which pose a deadly threat to local residents.

In this regard, senior Hamas official Mahmoud Mardawi mourned the seven-year-old boy from the family of al-Rashayda who was martyred in a landmine explosion in the West Bank.

In a statement, Mardawi accused the Israeli army of deliberately leaving landmines and explosive objects in certain West Bank areas as part of its efforts to displace the local populations and take over their lands.

Mardawi also stated that the West Bank people and youths would remain a thorn in the side of the Israeli occupation and its agents until the liberation of the Palestinian land.

The Hamas official described the repeated Israeli raids and acts of rampage and destruction in the West Bank as “barbaric practices reflecting the nature of the fascist and criminal occupation state.”

He expressed his belief that the systematic attacks that are carried out by government-backed settler groups in the West Bank would not succeed in displacing Palestinians from their land and rather would increase their determination to remain steadfast in the face of Israeli plans.

December 21, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

IOF admit to opening fire on protesters in southern Syria

Al Mayadeen | December 21, 2024

The Israeli occupation forces acknowledged their use of live ammunition against protesters in southern Syria, claiming the action targeted what they described as a “threat.”

According to an IOF statement, one protester sustained a gunshot wound to the leg in the village of Maaria.

The incident unfolded during a demonstration against the Israeli military presence and its encroachment on agricultural lands in the area.

Syrians protest Israeli occupation of base in Yarmouk Basin

Residents of the multiple towns in the Yarmouk Basin, in the western Daraa countryside, in southern Syria, protested on Friday the presence of Israeli occupation forces in the area.

Locals demanded the withdrawal of Israeli occupation forces from the area, specifically the al-Jazeera barracks. Demonstrators demanded an immediate halt to Israeli incursions into Syrian territory, calling on the international community to intensify efforts and exert pressure on the Israeli entity to ensure compliance with international laws and sovereignty.

It is worth noting that the IOF recently occupied two villages in the Yarmouk Basin region of Daraa province in southern Syria. These actions are part of what appears to be an ongoing expansion of Israeli-occupied territories in Syria, particularly since the emergence of new regime forces in the country.

Elders protest Israeli occupation of Quneitra 

Sources had previously told Al Mayadeen that Israeli forces were raiding, detaining residents, and arbitrarily searching homes in southern Quneitra and the western Daraa countryside. These actions have become a cause of widespread panic among civilians without a clear response from the current Syrian regime.

Moreover, elders of clans residing in the buffer zone east of the Golan Heights in the Quneitra District issued a statement demanding Israeli occupation forces withdraw beyond the buffer zone.

Razing areas, constructing roads 

Sources also revealed that Israeli occupation forces are advancing toward the Al-Shahar Forest and the Al-Khashab Nature Reserve in northern Quneitra, while other forces are advancing into the nearby towns of Taranja and Ufaniya.

Moreover, occupation forces are razing agricultural lands and nature reserves to construct roads connecting Quneitra to Mount Hermon.

Additionally, a group of 30 Israeli soldiers, supported by bulldozers and armored vehicles,  advanced into a military point west of al-Rafid town in the southern Quneitra countryside. These forces bulldozed structures and uprooted trees, destroying military fortifications in the area before withdrawing.

So far, the Israeli entity has occupied around 500 km² of Syrian territory, demolishing and razing Syrian military bases and other assets on the slopes of Mount Hermon, Quneitra, and Daraa.

Additionally, Israeli forces have expanded their incursion into southern Syria, advancing eastward from the town of Sayda, reaching three significant water bodies in the area, including Sheikh Hussein, Sahm al-Golan Dam, and al-Bakar al-Gharbi.

December 21, 2024 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | , , | Leave a comment

Documents Show CISA Monitored and Influenced Domestic Speech on COVID-19 Through Private Sector Partners

Private entities were enlisted to flag content, even accurate information.

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | December 20, 2024

America First Legal (AFL) has revealed new information from a document it has been able to obtain through the lawsuit filed against the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

CISA is part of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which has a “foreign disinformation” unit, the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force (CFITF).

However, as early as mid-February 2020, CISA (via CFITF) had already started to monitor domestic speech about Covid – nearly a month before the pandemic was officially declared by the UN’s WHO, and before orders started to be issued to shut down schools and businesses in the US.

Even though several layers deep, CFITF was still a government entity, and in order to circumvent constitutional issues related to censorship of online speech, the document indicates that the unit turned to what AFL brands “the censorship industrial complex” – specifically, its private sector component.

These were “fact checkers,” “bias raters” and similar that keep cropping up in revelations about the Covid-era censorship: Atlantic Council DFR Lab, Media Matters, Stanford Internet Observatory, Alliance for Securing Democracy, Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) (a UK-based group, which now passes as “British-American”), Global Disinformation Index (GDI), and even an openly foreign government project, EU’s “EU vs. Disinfo.”

Among the kinds of speech CFITF would monitor and/or flag was that of President Trump, his comments about Hydroxychloroquine going back to 2020. The document reveals that CFITF (via Atlantic Council, DFR Lab) knowingly chose to give itself the right to flag even accurate information, justifying a thing as serious as censorship by presenting hypothetical scenarios:

“Once-accurate information can become misinformation as it ages, leading to erroneous conclusions and misinterpretation of the current situation,” the document reads. This was put in the context of the rapidly changing “nature” of the pandemic.

However, it took years for the same awareness – that information related to Covid was constantly changing – to start reversing some censorship decisions (e.g., the Covid origin theory).

As for CISA/CFITF early pandemic activities affecting online speech, AFL believes that they may represent “a violation of what’s known as the Supreme Court’s ‘major questions’ doctrine, which holds that government agencies must not stray from the specific legal authorities given to them by Congress.”

December 20, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

UK’s Online “Safety” Act Enforced: Ofcom Pushes for Increased Platform Censorship and Encryption Backdoors

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | December 18, 2024

UK’s Online Safety Act has come into force and the Office of Communications (Ofcom) regulator has quickly set out to start enforcing it, with noncompliance resulting in high fines.

What those opposed to the legislation consider to be a censorship law and a sweeping one at that, is, according to Ofcom, a way to “protect” online users in the UK from illegal harms by legally requiring tech companies to “start taking action to tackle criminal activity on their platforms” as well as “make them safer by design.”

But what the law’s provisions in reality do, say critics, is bring in even more censorship, while at the same time providing for possibilities to undermine encryption via backdoors.

Then there are those who don’t think the Online Safety Act goes far enough, and are in particular upset by the gradual way it has been designed to boil this particular “frog.”

Right now, the deadline of March 15, 2025, has been given to tech companies to come up with risk assessments regarding the consequences that illegal content has on their users, and then starting two days later, they will have to begin putting measures in place to reduce those risks.

But going forward, Ofcom, which says the current requirements are “just the beginning,” plans to introduce more measures, including “crisis response protocols for emergency events (such as last summer’s riots).”

Here, the fear is that newsworthy content about various forms of protests could get censored as well.

Citing crimes like child abuse and terrorism as the reason, Ofcom also reserves the right to force tech firms to build and implement what are effectively encryption backdoors.

Ofcom says the Online Safety Act allows it to, “where we decide it is necessary and proportionate, make a provider use (or in some cases develop) a specific technology to tackle child sexual abuse or terrorism content on their sites and apps.”

Coupled with this, another provision – hash-matching – starts to gain sinister overtones, contrary to what the stated reason for it is, namely, preventing the sharing of “non-consensual intimate imagery and terrorist content.”

Ofcom is for now short on details regarding this, but the two requirements combined could easily be used for encryption backdoors.

Privacy is one victim of weakened encryption that immediately comes to mind, however, harm to online security, and the economy is often overlooked.

“Creating an encryption ‘backdoor’ for law enforcement would effectively be a blackmailer’s charter, allowing criminals and hostile foreign actors to exploit security flaws,” notes the Adam Smith Institute, and adds:

“Such measures would undermine the growth and competitiveness of the UK technology sector, potentially resulting in large companies withdrawing from the market entirely.”

December 20, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

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