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What are SCALP Missiles and How May They Affect Ukraine’s Counteroffensive?

CC BY-SA 3.0 / David Monniaux / Storm Shadow missile
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 12.07.2023

French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to provide Ukraine with SCALP long-range cruise missiles won’t affect the existing status quo given the experience the Russian military gained while thwarting the weapon’s analog called “Storm Shadow”, a Russian military expert told Sputnik.

During the NATO summit in Vilnius, President Emmanuel Macron committed to providing dozens of SCALP long-range missiles to Ukraine. However, the French president did not specify when the weapons would be delivered to Kiev. France has become the second country, after the UK, to equip Ukraine with long-range rockets.

“In light of the situation and the counteroffensive being conducted by Ukraine, I have decided to increase deliveries of weapons and equipment and to provide the Ukrainians with deep strike capabilities,” Macron told journalists upon arrival at the summit.

What is the Difference Between SCALP and Storm Shadow?

The SCALP-EG (Emploi Général, meaning General Purpose) is a French name for “Storm Shadow,” the stealthy air-launched long range, conventionally armed, deep strike weapon, produced by European multinational missile-maker MBDA. The missile was based on the Apache, a French-developed, air-launched, anti-runway cruise missile.

“The French SCALP rocket is actually a joint development of Great Britain and France,” Russian military expert Yury Knutov told Sputnik. “And therefore, many aspects related to the production and use of these missiles are unified. Figuratively, we can say that the SCALP rocket is an analog of the British Storm Shadow.

What is the Range of a SCALP/Storm Shadow Missile?

“The only difference [between the SCALP and Storm Shadow] is the flight range. The export version of the Storm Shadow has a range of approximately 300 kilometers. The export version of the French missiles has a range of approximately 250 kilometers,” Knutov explained.

The SCALP is powered by a turbojet at Mach 0.8 (987.8 km/h). It weighs 1300 kg which includes a conventional warhead of 450 kilograms. The weapon’s length and diameter are 5.10 meters and 0.166 m, respectively, with a wingspan of 3 m. The missile costs approximately $3.19 million per unit.

How Do SCALP and Storm Shadow Operate?

The SCALP is a “fire-and-forget” missile, meaning that it is programmed before launch. Having been launched the missile cannot be controlled: it follows its path semi-autonomously. Close to its target, the weapon climbs to a higher altitude to maximize the odds of penetrating the target. Finally, it hits the target before a delayed fuse explodes the main warhead.

“If we are talking about the combat use of these cruise missiles, then we should not forget that this is a high-precision weapon,” said Knutov. “[The missile’s] warhead weighs over 400 kilograms and it is quite powerful. There are concrete-piercing variants with a special high-strength rod inside the rocket; together with the explosive, it allows one to pierce concrete ceilings up to 1.5 meters in thickness. And most importantly, the accuracy of hitting these missiles is very high.”

How Are SCALPs and Storm Shadows Carried?

The weapon can be carried by the Tornado GR4, Italian Tornado IDS, Eurofighter Typhoon, Dassault Mirage 2000 and Dassault Rafale aircraft. It was used by the UK, France and Italy in the Gulf, Iraq and Libya attacks.

When it comes to Ukraine, it was earlier reported that the nation’s air force would use the Su-24 – a supersonic, all-weather tactical bomber developed in the Soviet Union – for launching the Franco-British weapon. Initially, pictures released by the Ukrainian media showed a Su-24 with a Storm Shadow placed under the fixed-wing “glove” pylon. Ukraine’s Su-24 combat and Su-24MR reconnaissance warplanes have been modified to fire the stealthy long-range missile.

Can Russia Intercept SCALP and Storm Shadow Missiles?

The missile is very difficult to detect due to its extremely small radar cross-section (RCS), according to Knutov. “That is, the Storm Shadow [SCALP EG] has a radar cross-section of 0.01 to 0.03 square meters, which is very small,” he said.

Nonetheless, Russia’s air defenses are capable of detecting and destroying the Storm Shadow/SCALP cruise missiles, Knutov underscored. The Ministry of Defense has repeatedly reported about intercepting the Franco-British stealthy long-range missiles.

What’s more, Russian forces’ recent capture of a Storm Shadow missile may prove invaluable for studying ways to defeat the weapon. The rocket was shot down in the Zaporozhye region and remained mostly intact. Dissecting the missile could uncover its potential weaknesses and determine the optimal direction from which to strike the cruise missile with an interceptor.

“After our military was able to capture such a cruise missile, we now have more opportunities to study it, determine the composite materials from which the body is made, deal with the homing head: the frequencies at which it operates, and the principle of operation of this homing head,” said Knutov.

According to the military expert, that will allow Russia to improve its radars and missile guidance stations to better detect the stealthy missiles. He explained that studying the body of the rockets is important, because the Russian engineers will be able to see which range of radio waves transmitted by the missile is radio-transparent and which is partly reflected. “It will be possible to create electronic warfare systems that will more effectively affect the homing heads of both Storm Shadow and SCALP missiles,” Knutov said.

“I think that in the next month or two we will see that our air defense will operate more effectively [against SCALPs]. Moreover, electronic warfare stations will be mainly used, which is much cheaper than firing projectiles to intercept these cruise missiles,” he projected.

How Many SCALPs is France Sending to Ukraine?

In his statement, Macron did not specify the number of missiles, but Western media cite sources saying that France may deliver 50 units to Ukraine.

“If we are talking about 50 missiles (…) one should bear in mind that it could be more than 50,” Knutov said. “This may be a leak that is organized for the media. Of course, they play a certain role, because now the NATO bloc is trying to help the Kiev regime to somehow break through our defense line.”

Will SCALP Make a Difference on the Ukrainian Battlefield?

NATO is sending longer-range missiles to strike Russia’s personnel, ammo, equipment, and command posts which are currently kept at a distance of over 100 km from the frontline, according to the expert.

The US-made HIMARS are launching rockets with a strike range of 80 km which is not enough in the eyes of NATO war planners to exert pressure on the Russian Armed Forces. NATO member states sending missiles with a range of 300 kilometers, like Storm Shadow/SCALP (or, potentially, the US-made ATACMS), pose a certain challenge to the Russian military, the expert noted.

“But it is not critical, and the maximum that it can affect is the timing of the combat missions that Russia’s [military] units face,” Knutov concluded.

July 12, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Within hours of the Covid jab I had brain damage

By Anonymous | TCW Defending Freedom | January 27, 2023

I am 52 and I got brain tissue damage from my AstraZeneca vaccine on February 22, 2021, with a prognosis of seeing MS in my not-too-distant future by two consultants on the hospital ward. And this was after spending two weeks battling my GP surgery to be seen after developing serious symptoms within hours of having my dose.

No official diagnosis was given though I had and still have so many symptoms that align with Guillain–Barré syndrome, LMN, encephalitis and more which they have investigated and that I have since seen in my medical records but never told me they were going to look into.

My brain injury was noted as being linked to the vaccine on my hospital discharge papers after 11 days in hospital where I had CAT scans, MRIs, deep ophthalmic scans, and a lumbar puncture, the last of which I wish I’d never had due to the further issues I’ve been left with, and I didn’t actually need because it wouldn’t tell the doctors anything further, I was told.

I had further MRIs later in the year when my condition worsened and I was blue-lighted into hospital numerous times in August 2021 with associated brain inflammation that most vaccine-injured also seem to suffer from, sadly.

It’s coming up for the second anniversary of having my one and only vaccine that’s ruined my health and forced me to stop working and thereby stopped my love of bodybuilding and running but life is now about what we can do, day by day and not what you can’t do.

July 11, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Vaccines galore

But is more better?

By Dr Ros Jones | Health Advisory & Recovery Team | July 9, 2023

The picture above may shortly be out of date when the latest monoclonal antibody against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is added to the CDC list. The US approach stands in stark contrast to Europe’s.

So another dilemma for parents of young children who have already laboured long and hard over whether to give their children a covid-19 vaccine – will their children need this latest new immunisation?

An RSV vaccine developed in the 1960s got as far as human trials, but had to be hastily withdrawn when it became apparent that subsequent disease was far worse in the vaccinated than the controls. As expected, the babies made a good antibody response and there were no obvious serious side effects. Fast forward a few months to the next autumn’s RSV season and sadly for the drug company and even more sadly for the babies and their families, the vaccinated group developed much more severe disease than the controls (18/20 vaccinated infants hospitalised with 2 deaths versus 0 deaths and 1 hospitalisation in the 21 controls gives placebo efficacy of 100% against death and 95% against hospitalisation – wonderful stuff that normal saline!) Animal studies with the RSV vaccine had already highlighted such problems.

Similar difficulties were seen in candidate vaccines for SARS (SARS-CoV-1). No less than four new coronarvirus vaccines produced after the SARS outbreak in 2003 looked hopeful initially, until the animals were exposed to the SARS virus. Although the vaccinated animals cleared the virus more rapidly, they developed severe eosinophil infiltrates in their lungs, in contrast to the control animals, highly suggestive of an immune overreaction in the presence of the virus (a Th2 helper cell hypersensitisation).

Dengue vaccines have had similar problems, with Dengvaxia withdrawn after the vaccinated group experienced much more severe disease the following season.  In that case, the vaccine had been rolled out widely in the Philippines without awaiting the one-year trial follow-up, in a moment of political hubris which resulted in their Minister of Health facing criminal charges, but far more seriously it also resulted in the deaths of at least 10 healthy children.

What all these disasters had in common was a condition called ADE (Antibody Dependent Enhancement). In the presence of a large immune response, inflammatory markers are activated; this led to acquired respiratory distress in the case of the SARS vaccine, severe wheezing and airway inflammation in the case of the RSV vaccine, and a severe systemic reaction with the Dengue vaccine.

So what of this latest RSV prophylactic? There are two types, firstly monoclonal antibodies which give so-called passive immunisation i.e. the infant is given injections of antibodies to protect them against RSV in the early months of life but these just disappear naturally. There is an existing drug called palivizumab which has been around since 1998, so it is not clear why they need the new one, nirsevimab. The main advantage of the new product is that it is given as a single dose, rather than the monthly injections recommended for palivizumab, which makes it more practical, hence the new version has been authorised for all infants, rather than the high risk groups only for whom the monthly palivizumab injections were recommended. Nirsevimab was approved for use in the EU and the UK last November, following trials involving 3580 treated infants. The report combines various studies – one involving only infants at high risk from RSV such as preterm babies or those with heart or lung disease, for whom there was a reduction in hospitalisation from 4.1% in the placebo group to 0.8% in the nirsevimab group.  A second study then recruited healthy low risk babies and for them the reduction in hospitalisations was only from 1.6% to 0.6%. There was a reduction in overall infections, but it is not clear whether that means these infants will simply get RSV infection the following winter. Having said that, most hospitalisations for this condition are in infancy. But as so often, it seems that no longer-term outcomes are required for approval to be given.

Interestingly, the FDA have yet to approve it, although their advisory committee last month voted 21:0 to recommend it for all infants. A worrying observation in the FDA approval paperwork was an increase in all cause deaths in the nirsevimab arm of the various trials (12/3710 (0.32%) nirsevimab versus 4/1797 (0.22%) controls). I could find no mention of this on the European Medicines Agency or MHRA websites, although the same drug company results were submitted.

Meanwhile in April, the FDA approved a new RSV vaccine from GlaxoSmith Klein(GSK), Arexvy for use in over 60s, followed in May by approval of a similar Pfizer vaccine, Abrysvo. As with Covid-19 vaccines, Pfizer gave results as relative risk reductions, so an encouraging 66.7% efficacy, but much less impressive when looking at the absolute risk reduction of 0.24% (from 0.36% to 0.12%) for symptomatic lower respiratory tract infections. The number of hospitalisations was too small to look at efficacy. More worrying is that looking at the supporting information on the FDA website reveals both vaccines showing an increase in atrial fibrillation compared to the placebo and also neurological adverse events, namely Guillain-Barré syndrome and Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis (ADEM) in the vaccinated group, with one fatality and one woman requiring 6-months hospitalisation. In two of the studies, flu vaccine and the new RSV vaccine were given simultaneously making it impossible to know which of the vaccines to blame.

The Pfizer Abrysvo RSV vaccine is expected to be approved by the FDA in August for pregnant women, for whose infants there was a 0.8% reduction in hospital admissions for RSV infection over the following 6 months (from 1.3% to 0.5%). But the independent panel vote was not unanimous, and concerns were raised about an increase in preterm births. Indeed, the GSK RSV vaccine trial for use in pregnancy was already stopped for this reason. Because this is proposed for use in the mothers, it will need a large number to vaccinate to prevent one infant hospitalisation, given most babies don’t go anywhere near hospital for this condition. It is not at all clear whether those infants whose mothers have already been vaccinated, will also be offered the monoclonal antibody in a ‘belt-and-brace’ approach or whether the two different types of preventative are simply to provide a choice. GSK have specifically said that they do not anticipate their vaccine being used in infants: ‘evidence from an animal model strongly suggests that AREXVY would be unsafe in individuals younger than 2 years of age because of an increased risk of enhanced respiratory disease’ (remember the 1967 vaccine, whereas the Pfizer document only says of Abrysvo, ‘Pediatric studies should be delayed until additional safety or effectiveness data have been collected’.

It is noteworthy that approval for the vaccines has  progressed via the FDA’s Priority Review mechanism – the excuse for Covid-19 vaccines was of course that there was an emergency due to a novel and deadly virus sweeping across the world, with a saviour vaccine the only way out of endless lockdowns.  But what is the possible excuse for a priority vaccine for RSV? This virus was first isolated in 1956 and was presumably around long before that. But of course, if we’d been listening, we would have heard Sir Patrick Vallance in 2014 saying “In the future, medicines will come to market quicker with less data, with more research being conducted in the post-license phase”.  It seems that the future has arrived.

The plethora of new vaccines in the pipeline, in particular mRNA vaccines which will be developed at the new UK government-funded Moderna facility in Oxford, must be subject to the proper scrutiny which has sadly been totally lacking in recent years.

This begs the question: what of the multitude of existing vaccines shown so graphically in the picture at the top of this article? It struck me that as a retired paediatrician in my seventies, now being labelled by the government as a conspiratorial ‘antivaxxer’, I had of course only had 2 vaccines in my infancy, smallpox and diphtheria. At age 7, I received the new polio vaccine and as a 13-year-old BCG against tuberculosis (and that only after a negative skin test showed I wasn’t already naturally immune). And that was it, until I reached medical school where I got the new tetanus vaccine. Yellow fever and Typhoid vaccines followed for a student elective in South Africa and then nothing until Hepatitis B vaccine 20 years later.

The generation below mine had only diphtheria, tetanus and polio in infancy with measles at 13 months. This UK timeline makes interesting reading. But my grandchildren’s generation are apparently offered 15 in their preschool years (many of course are combinations so an 8-week infant is now vaccinated against 8 different diseases simultaneously). But this is still well below the number offered (and indeed mandated for many schools) to American children. Perhaps the JCVI are full of ‘anti vaxxers’, let alone the Danish authorities where infants are only vaccinated against 6 diseases and with a much more spaced out programme at 3, 5 and 12 months.

Can anyone point me to the randomised trials showing that this huge sum total of vaccines is beneficial in terms of overall outcomes? Because I have failed to find it. Instead I have found interesting articles such as that from the Bandim project in Guinea Bissau, where the delayed introduction of childhood vaccinations in the 1970s gave a natural control group. In collaboration with the Statens Institute in Denmark, they found that killed vaccines were associated with an increase in childhood mortality. Or this one comparing the infant mortality of the healthiest 30 countries by number of vaccines given, which certainly showed no support for the idea that more is better.

Figure 1: Mean infant mortality rates and mean number of vaccine doses 2009

Statements from WHO, Gates Foundation etc that vaccination has been the biggest life-saving breakthrough does beg the question: if the same amount of money and effort had been put into ensuring every child had access to clean drinking water and adequate food (the most basic physiological need in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs), then how many more lives would have been saved?

Would ‘Big Plumbers’ now be dominating public health policy?

Dr Ros Jones is a HART member and retired Consultant Paediatrician.

July 10, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

How HART was discredited on no basis

Government funded take-down looks increasingly ridiculous

Health Advisory & Recovery Team | July 9, 2023

In summer 2021, the private messaging forum that HART used was illegally hacked and our private conversations downloaded. Within 24 hours we were contacted by a small company called Logically AI who told us they were going to publish the conversations. This small company had a contract with the government worth over a million pounds of taxpayer’s money. The government may have thought it got its money’s worth when MPs who had been talking to members of HART decided they needed to keep a wide berth. However, the basis of the ‘discrediting’ was laughable.

On 27th July 2021, this article was published concluding with the following “factcheck”:

Figure 1: Concluding figure from Logically AI’s attempt to discredit HART

Let’s see how each of those “facts” have held up over time.

1. mRNA vaccines cannot be considered vaccines

A vaccine has a particular meaning in the minds of the public as an injection that teaches the immune system in order to prevent an infection. Official definitions have changed the meaning so that it could include these novel products. The CDC changed the definition twice since 2015.

In early 2015 a vaccine was an “Injection of a killed or weakened infectious organism in order to prevent the disease.” That year it changed to,“The act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.”

Overnight the requirements that the intervention be inert and prevent disease were removed. By September 2021 the definition was changed again to: “The act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce protection from a specific disease.” Any internal treatment for any disease now fits the CDC definition of vaccine. However, whatever official definitions say does not change public understanding of a word.

While it was claimed that the covid vaccines could prevent infection which led to their regulatory approvals, these claims have all been abandoned in light of the real world evidence.

What the manufacturers say about their products in documents filed in accordance with financial regulatory requirements is instructive.

Moderna said, ““mRNA has been characterised as a Gene Therapy Medicinal Product… the association of our investigational medicines with gene therapies could result in increased regulatory burdens, impair the reputation of our investigational medicines, or negatively impact our platform or our business.” BioNTech also described their products as gene therapies.

Being a gene therapy does not mean that it will interfere with cellular DNA but it does mean that certain specific and more stringent testing is required. Instead, the shortened regulatory pathway designed for influenza vaccines (developed via a well-established egg based platform) was used. This pathway should never have been used for a novel platform like the covid vaccines.

2. Vaccine trials on children and young people were ‘rushed’

This point can be extended to all vaccine trials. The programme was, if you remember, referred to as “operation warp speed”. How can you have “warp speed” without rushing?

Basic medical ethics includes the principle that children are never given new drugs until there is a well established safety record in adults. For the covid vaccines the number needed to vaccinate in order to prevent a single death was a hundred thousand or more for young people, however the rate of serious adverse events, even in the trials, was 1 in 800.

The trials that were done on children were extremely small, with only 1131 adolescents vaccinated and followed for a minimum of 1 month from their second dose before approving for this age group. Efficacy calculations excluded all covid infections occurring prior to 7 days after the second dose.  Antibody levels were also assumed to be a marker for likely efficacy, despite there being no antibody level which ensures protection against covid infection. The government wording says, the product aims “to generate neutralising antibodies, which may contribute to protection against COVID-19.” This is not based on any scientific evidence, merely hope.

The worst children’s trial was the one for under 5 year olds where approvals were pushed through using antibody levels only, as a marker of success rather than expending more time to measure an impact on actual levels of covid. They also changed the efficacy requirement for approval from 50% to 30%. When the two planned doses failed to induce antibodies, they simply added a third dose in just a fraction of the children. This elicited an antibody rise, but also apparently resulted in more significant covid infections in those vaccinated. 97% of the covid cases in the study were ignored in the FDA presentation from Pfizer.

3. Lockdown policies are ineffective against covid

With the passage of time it is now clear that every covid wave rises and peaks naturally. The peaks fall at predictable times of year. The claims that all spread was through close contact, everyone was susceptible and asymptomatic spread was a key driver were all false assumptions.

Having considered the reality about these three claims it is clear that long distance aerosol transmission was a key driver of spread. Lockdowns can do nothing to prevent that. Since Logically AI wrote this article, it has become obvious that even the most brutal lockdowns, leaving people starving at home and killing their pets, did not stop the spread of covid in China. In fact every attempt at lockdown suppression in South East Asia and Australasia failed in January 2022.

A meta-analysis of 32 papers by a group at John Hopkins University analysed the effect of lockdown, concluding that “lockdowns during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic have had devastating effects. They have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, loss of life quality, and the undermining of liberal democracy. These costs to society must be compared to the benefits of lockdowns, which our meta-analysis has shown are little to none.”

4. Vaccine can make the recipient magnetic

Don’t rush to think this must be imaginary. Here is a video where unsuspecting recently vaccinated people were tested to see if their arms were magnetic. Most were not, but a surprising number were –  6 out of 15 tested. You can watch full video here.

Some HART members experienced this themselves and there was no question that this was magnetism – with a genuine pulling force.

So what was the cause of this? There are various steps to the manufacturing process including one in which separation of the mRNA is necessary. Some manufacturers used tiny magnetic beads to carry out this step, although which manufacturers used which techniques and to what extent is hard to know.

All that it would take to make someone’s arm magnetic would be for contamination of the vaccine vial with some of these beads. It is now well established that there was significant contamination with bacterial DNA and likely endotoxins. Is it possible that magnetic beads were also contaminants in some vials?

No-one in HART claims to be omniscient and we are constantly challenging and testing each other’s viewpoints. We believe in open scientific debate and that can only happen if people are allowed to occasionally be wrong.  However, looking back at the reviews that we wrote in March 2021, they have all stood the test of time (see our 2022 revisits for what changed).

Even the private, more speculative conversations that were had in private have also stood the test of time. The reason this is the case is that all were based on well-established basic science and on real-world evidence. It is a travesty that the same cannot be said for the official narrative. Powerful people claimed that fantasy modelling and beliefs based only on assumptions were “The Science” and when those proved to be baseless, they resorted to complaining that people had lost their trust in science. They have no-one to blame but themselves.

July 9, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Cluster Bombs for Ukraine? A Warning From Kosovo

By Phil Miller | Declassified UK | July 6, 2023

Gracanica, Kosovo – “In the village where we lived, there were nine bombs dropped by NATO in the space of two minutes,” Dzafer Buzoli recalls, as we discuss his traumatic childhood in Yugoslavia. A leading member of Kosovo’s Roma, his community went from pillar to post.

Many were dragooned into Slobodan Milosevic’s Serb-dominated Yugoslav army or targeted by Albanian rebels as suspected collaborators, before Bill Clinton and Tony Blair launched their ‘humanitarian intervention’ in 1999.

“When the first bomb fell, we were just confused and wondered what was happening,” he reflects. “But after the second bomb I felt the hot air and fell down from the pressure of the blast.”

“Ever since then I’ve had a heightened sense of hearing. When there’s a loud noise or people yelling I have to really back up, because it’s too much for me.”

Buzoli was lucky to survive the airstrike. Two soldiers and a five year old boy were killed in the attack on his village of Laplje Selo, which was hit with controversial cluster munitions.

These scatter a blizzard of ball-shaped bomblets over target areas, like a minefield falling from the sky. Human Rights Watch said NATO killed between 90 and 150 civilians with this weapon across Serbia and Kosovo.

Thousands of bomblets failed to detonate on impact, posing a hazard to children who mistook their little yellow parachutes for toys. In the decade after the war, these remnants claimed another 178 casualties in Kosovo.

While this war might seem like a distant memory for those beyond the Balkans, it offers a cautionary tale to Western states now assisting Ukraine’s fight against Russia.

US officials are said to be seriously considering supplying Kyiv with cluster bombs, possibly as soon as next month.

That’s despite the weapon being banned by more than 120 countries including the UK, following a UN treaty in 2008.

The US refused to sign up to the ban and there are suspicions it uses a loophole to store them at its air bases in Britain.

Both Russia and Ukraine, fellow non-signatories, have already fired cluster bombs in their current conflict and supplies from America could further complicate the situation.

Lessons from Kosovo

Unexploded cluster munitions remain a hazard in Kosovo long after NATO’s 11 week air war ended in 1999.

Goran, a Kosovo Serb, recalls how the weapon almost killed a farmer in a vineyard near Gracacina’s orthodox monastery, a world heritage site.

“He drove his tractor straight over the bomb,” Goran tells me. “He was lucky not to get killed.”

Goran, who likes to hunt wild boars in the forest, says he found a cluster munition – which locals call ‘cassette bombs’ – back in 2013.

His dates tally with a British demining charity – the Halo Trust – which said it was “still finding hundreds of cluster bombs” in Kosovo that same year.

At one site near Junik in western Kosovo they cleared 171 cluster bombs dropped by NATO, which stubbornly refuses to provide aid workers with access to its official database of airstrikes.

Instead the charity relies on old maps from the Yugoslav army (who preferred to plant landmines), which lack details of where NATO fired cluster bombs, what type they used, the direction of the strike, release altitude and fuze settings – all details that could assist clearance operations.

Partly as a result of these difficulties, 44 hazardous sites were yet to be fully demined by the end of 2021.

While the Atlantic alliance justifies its wartime conduct by saying the targets were Serb soldiers, the people now living in the liberated areas are often ethnic Albanians – the very people NATO set out to save.

Responsibility to protect

The UK was a particularly prolific user of cluster bombs in Kosovo, where they accounted for over half the bombs dropped by the Royal Air Force. British pilots fired 531 of the devices, each containing 147 bomblets with over 2,000 pieces of shrapnel.

Up to 12% of the bomblets failed to detonate on impact, according to a report by parliament’s defence committee. The cross-party group of MPs said: “That means the RAF left between 4,000 and 10,000 unexploded bomblets on the ground in Kosovo”.

The type of cluster bomb used by Britain – the BL755 – was designed in the late sixties and entered service in 1972 despite manufacturing challenges. A year later, a Treasury official noted dryly: “This weapon has had a long and chequered history. We note with some relief that it has now successfully completed its trials”.

Over the next decade, the RAF acquired a stockpile of 18,000 cluster bombs. Another 26,000 were sold abroad on the lucrative export market, mostly to Germany but even future enemies like Iran and Yugoslavia.

Margaret Thatcher’s government exported them to Robert Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe, where the British High Commission was anxious to prevent “offering the French an opening into the armament market”.

Exports to Saudi Arabia would follow and ultimately the BL755 earned the dubious distinction of being fired in such bloody conflicts as the Iran-Iraq war, Congo and Yemen.

‘Overkill weapon’

Some in the Foreign Office were less impressed and tried to resist exporting the weapon.

One diplomat, Ivor Lucas, commented: “There is no doubt that Cluster Bomb [sic] is generally considered ‘an overkill weapon’ affecting wide areas with consequent danger to civilians and causing particularly unpleasant multiple wounding.”

Its greatest selling point however, was the ability to destroy tanks from the sky. But by 1982, even that was already in question.

In a formerly secret file seen by Declassified, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) admitted: “The penetration capability of current BL755 against the frontal armour of current Soviet tanks (T-64/T-72) is poor and there are relatively few regions where full penetration, and hence kills, could be expected.”

If the RAF attacked a column of ten T-64s, pilots were only expected to destroy one tank per sortie – even with an improved variant of the weapon. Military officials lamented: “Effectiveness has been degraded by introduction of modern Soviet tanks”.

Their performance in the Balkans was woeful. An operational analysis by the MoD reportedly found only 31% of sorties hit their targets, despite pilots flying directly overhead.

‘Regrettable collateral damage’

Since Britain banned the bomb in 2008, Conservative and coalition governments have blocked the disclosure of six files about trials of the weapon in the 1970-80s – perhaps fearful that further embarrassing details of its deficiencies might emerge.

More recent Cabinet papers from Tony Blair’s handling of the Kosovo conflict are publicly available.

These show his deputy prime minister John Prescott told colleagues on 1 April 1999 – a week into the war – that: “Public opinion in the West should be prepared for more extensive collateral damage.”

Labour’s defence secretary George Robertson (who went on to lead NATO), noted at the end of that month: “The air campaign needed to be intensified, despite the unintended and regrettable collateral damage which might be inevitable.”

By mid-May the foreign secretary, Robin Cook, grew frustrated at how “the international media tended to be diverted by rare incidents of NATO errors in conducting the campaign, away from the positive news of its successes.”

Cook, renowned for his ‘ethical foreign policy’, was probably referring to the cluster bombing of Nis, a city in southern Serbia where Dutch-NATO jets killed 15 civilians in a botched airstrike that hit a hospital and crowded market.

The tragedy led the US to pause its own use of cluster bombs, but the RAF pressed on. Years later, a Serbian lawyer from Nis is trying to sue Nato over the killings.

Activists from the city played an important role in passing the international ban on cluster bombs, but Serbia’s president is yet to endorse it.

That impasse allows Belgrade to keep any remaining BL755s that Britain sold to communist-era Yugoslavia.

Clearing the remnants of these weapons from Kosovo is not expected to finish until 2024 – a quarter century after the war ended.

That marathon process, coupled with dubious performance on the battlefield, might give Joe Biden pause for thought about sending cluster bombs to Ukraine.

Phil Miller is Declassified UK’s chief reporter. He is the author of Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away With War Crimes. Follow him on Twitter at @pmillerinfo

July 9, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Wind Industry Blackmails U.K. Demanding Huge Ramp-Up of Subsidies

BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JULY 5, 2023

In a move that gives the lie to years of propaganda claiming falling costs, the wind industry’s leading lobbyists have written to the Government threatening to abandon the U.K. unless subsidies for their companies are hugely increased.

The industry lobbyists claim that unforeseen rising costs now require three actions:

  1. A revision to the auction rules so that the winners are not determined by lowest bids but by an administrative decision that weights bids according to their ‘value’ in contributing towards the Net Zero targets.
  2. Special new targets and thus market shares for floating offshore wind, one of the most expensive of all forms of generation;
  3. A vast increase in the budget for the fifth auction (AR5) of Contracts for Difference subsidies, with an increase of two and half times the current levels for non-floating offshore wind alone;

Such changes, were the Government to agree to them, would not only increase the total amount of subsidy to an industry that was until recently claiming no longer to need public support, but also provide the industry with protected shares of the energy market, eliminating risks for investors at the expense of the paying public. It would also clearly be an open invitation to corruption.

Climate lobby group Net Zero Watch has urged the Government to stand up for consumers by rejecting the wind industry’s latest demands.

Dr. John Constable, Net Zero Watch’s Energy Director, said: “It would be both absurd and counterproductive for Government to bail out the wind industry in spite of the evident failure to reduce costs. A refusal to learn from mistakes will be disastrous.”

In a press release, the organisation argued the Government should “reject the self-serving demands” because the U.K. economy should not be expected to continue to subsidise a sector “that is still uneconomic after nearly 20 years of above-market prices and guaranteed market share”.

“The wind experiment has failed and must be wound down,” it adds.

The Government should also be mindful that U.K. households and businesses are already experiencing extreme pressures on budgets, and a further burden on the energy bill should not be tolerated, it says.

This is particularly the case as the wind industry’s current cost difficulties are “neither unforeseen nor unpredicted but have been obvious to careful observers for over a decade”.

July 8, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | Leave a comment

UK requests for taking extreme care of ‘Challenger 2’ tanks make them useless for Ukrainian army

By Drago Bosnic | July 8, 2023

It has been only a few weeks after the entire world saw the absolute debacle of NATO’s much-touted heavy armor. The event was accurately predicted by various independent experts and analysts mere days before the wanton counteroffensive. At that point, it became obvious that decades of close cooperation between the former Ukrainian military and NATO were effectively pointless. This also includes nearly a decade of much more intensive cooperation between the belligerent alliance and the (then newly installed) Neo-Nazi junta that focused on interoperability and the implementation of NATO standards.

However, the Kiev regime forces’ performance against even the conscripted (although battle-hardened) Donbass militias within the Russian military has not only left much to be desired, but is essentially quite poor in comparison to the massive amount of funds the Neo-Nazi junta is getting. And although the counteroffensive is still ongoing, resulting in largely insignificant gains (that are still firmly under Russian fire control), the results for heavy armor have been catastrophic, to say the least. The mainstream propaganda machine initially kept trying to conceal the horrible losses of NATO-sourced tanks and armored vehicles.

However, ample battlefield footage published by alternative platforms (particularly those on Telegram) made this an impossible task. As a result, the delivery of Western-made weapons, munitions and other equipment that was previously spearheaded by countries such as the US, UK, Poland, the Baltic states, etc. seems to be slowing down. Although London was the first to pledge heavy armor and long-range missiles, as well as banned depleted uranium munitions that can leave disastrous consequences, it is now quietly backing down from its commitments to fight Russia “to the last Ukrainian”.

Namely, the UK command is now seeking “guarantees” from the Kiev regime forces that will “ensure” no UK-supplied “Challenger 2” MBTs (main battle tanks) are destroyed or captured by the Russian military. Apart from the effectively impossible ROE (rules of engagement), London wants the Neo-Nazi junta to follow other strict requirements that also apply to their every movement even in western parts of Ukraine, which is hundreds of kilometers away from the frontline. This includes special requests for storage to prevent long-range strikes, which effectively makes the “Challenger 2” the most pampered weapon system in the conflict.

“Imagine the propaganda coup of a captured, intact Challenger 2 being paraded in Red Square in Moscow! It doesn’t bear thinking about,” British Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Crawford told the British Daily Express a few months back.

It seems the UK is now “expressing frustration” at the way its MBTs are being used, complaining that the “guarantees” given by the Kiev regime forces are “simply insufficient”. Afraid of heavy losses, as demonstrated by the disastrous performance of German MBTs, long considered the best in NATO, London is looking for ways to limit their usage by the Neo-Nazi junta forces in order to prevent a similar fate for its prized MBTs. Interestingly, Washington DC seems to be doing the exact same thing, as it has also been strangely quiet, a stark contrast to the previously boastful pledge to send its M1 “Abrams” MBTs.

Back in January, I argued that Western heavy armor, including the British “Challenger 2”, American M1 “Abrams” and German “Leopard 2” are simply not suitable for the Kiev regime, as they weren’t designed to either fight in such terrain or under such conditions (complete lack of air superiority and extremely limited or even nonexistent CAS (close air support)). The same goes for the US-made “Bradley” armored fighting vehicle (AFV) and French AMX-10 wheeled tank destroyers. Western-made tanks are infamous for their size and weight, being up to 30% bigger and heavier than their Soviet/Russian counterparts.

Weighing 75 tonnes with additional combat armor modules, “Challenger 2” is nearly twice as heavy as the Ukrainian T-64BV (38 tonnes), which is the Kiev regime’s most commonly used tank. Extensive Soviet WWII-era experience and the pedological properties of the former USSR’s western areas prompted the superpower to build lighter tanks, as heavier vehicles would nearly always get hopelessly stuck in an ocean of mud caused by the infamous rasputitsa. Video and photo evidence shows even Russian and Ukrainian tanks getting bogged down, forcing their crews to abandon the vehicles to avoid ATGMs.

And indeed, even highly mobile targets have been picked off by infantry armed with ATGMs (anti-tank guided missiles) such as the Russian 9K135 “Kornet”, making immobile heavy armor a much easier target, even for artillery that is normally used against stationary objects. Even the much lighter Soviet-era APCs (armored personnel carriers) have trouble moving through the steppe mud, making it virtually impossible to conduct off-road maneuvers for either side. In turn, this forces military units to use roads, making them easier targets for warplanes, drones, artillery, attack helicopters and the aforementioned ATGM-armed infantry, etc.

With this in mind, fielding the much heavier Western-made tanks such as the “Challenger 2” (and other NATO-sourced armor) has proven to be not only militarily useless for the Kiev regime, but also quite deadly for countless forcibly conscripted Ukrainians that have been pointlessly killed during recent counteroffensive operations against the Russian military. With that in mind, by denying or at least postponing the usage of its “Challenger 2” MBTs in Ukraine, the UK might be sparing the lives of many Ukrainians. Of course, this is being done completely inadvertently, as London is one of the most prominent proponents of the “to the last Ukrainian” approach.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

July 8, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

How the Taliban crushed the CIA’s heroin bonanza in Afghanistan

The Taliban has not once, but twice eradicated Afghanistan’s poppy cultivation, the world’s largest source of heroin.

By William Van Wagenen | The Cradle | July 7, 2023

In the aftermath of the chaotic US and UK withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir warned in the Washington Post of the dangers of “ignoring one important consequence of the Taliban takeover: the coming boom in Afghanistan’s narcotics trade.”

Mir then boldly predicted that, “in the next few years, a flood of drugs from Afghanistan may become a bigger threat than terrorism.”

This projection of an international drug trade boom seemed plausible, considering the longstanding accusations that the Taliban funded their two-decade insurgency against the occupying forces by controlling opium production. In fact, it was believed that 95 percent of heroin used in Britain originated from Afghan opium.

It comes as a surprise then, that a June 2023 report published by Alcis, a British-based geographic information services firm, revealed that the Taliban government had all but eliminated opium cultivation in the country, wiping out the base ingredient needed to produce heroin. This outcome mirrored a similar move by the Taliban in 2000 when they were in power the first time.

Ironically, instead of praising Kabul’s new leaders for quashing the source of illicit drugs, the international community responded to this development with criticism. Even the US Institute for Peace (USIP), which is funded by the US government, argued that “The Taliban’s successful opium ban is bad for Afghans and the world.”

Such western displeasure towards the Taliban’s efforts to dismantle the global heroin trade may seem perplexing at first glance.

However, a closer examination of events in Afghanistan reveals a different perspective. Under the guise of the “War on Terror,” the 2001 US and UK invasion was driven in part by the desire to restore the heroin trade, which the Taliban had abruptly terminated just a year earlier.

The western powers sought to reestablish the lucrative flow of billions of dollars that the heroin trade provided to their financial systems. In fact, “For 20 years, America essentially ran a narco-state in Afghanistan.”

‘Dollar for Dollar’

To understand the origins of the Afghan heroin trade, a review of US involvement in the central Asian nation is necessary, beginning in 1979 when the CIA embarked on a covert program to undermine the pro-Soviet Afghan government in Kabul.

The US covertly supported an umbrella of Muslim guerrilla fighters known as mujahideen, with the hope that provoking an insurgency would entice the Soviet Army to intervene. This calculated move would force the Soviets into occupying Afghanistan and engaging in a protracted and costly counter-insurgency campaign, thereby weakening the Soviet Union over time.

To accomplish this, the CIA turned to its close allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, for help. Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan facilitated a meeting between CIA Director William Casey and Saudi King Fahd, in which the Saudis committed to matching “America dollar for dollar supporting the mujahedeen.”

The US and Saudi Arabia, with help from Pakistani’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), set up training camps for the mujahideen in Pakistan, and supplied them with advisors, weapons, and cash to fight the Soviets.

Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, the founder of the Hizb-i-Islami militia, was among the most prominent mujahideen leaders, receiving some $600 million in aid from the CIA and its allies.

Journalist Steve Coll writes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Ghost Wars that Hekymatyar recruited from the most radical, anti-western, transnational Islamist networks to fight with him, including Osama bin Laden and other Arab volunteers. CIA officers “embraced Hekmatyar as their most dependable and effective ally,” and “the most efficient at killing Soviets.”

Caravans of opium

Aid to Hekymatyar and other mujahideen leaders was not limited to cash and weapons. According to renowned historian Alfred McCoy:

“1979 and 1980, just as the CIA effort was beginning to ramp up, a network of heroin laboratories opened along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. That region soon became the world’s largest heroin producer.”

The process involved smuggling raw opium gum to Pakistan, where it was processed into heroin in laboratories run by the ISI. The finished product was then discreetly transported via Pakistani airports, ports, or overland routes.

By 1984, Afghan heroin supplied a staggering 60 percent of the US market and 80 percent of the European market, while devastatingly creating 1.3 million heroin addicts in Pakistan, a country previously untouched by the highly-addictive drug.

McCoy states further that, “caravans carrying CIA arms into that region for the resistance often returned to Pakistan loaded down with opium.” Reports from 2001 cited by the New York Times confirmed that this occurred “with the assent of Pakistani or American intelligence officers who supported the resistance.”

In May 1990, the Washington Post reported that the US government had for several years received, but declined to investigate, reports of heroin trafficking by its allies, including “firsthand accounts of heroin smuggling by commanders under Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.”

Rise of the Taliban

When the Soviets did finally withdraw in 1989, the country fell into civil war as the major CIA-backed factions began fighting among themselves for control of the country. Mujahideen leaders became warlords and committed terrible atrocities against the local population while fighting amongst themselves.

It was during this anarchy that religious students from the madrassas (seminary schools), the Taliban, emerged with the help of Pakistani intelligence to take control of the country in 1996, subsequently inheriting the opium trade, which continued unhindered for several years.

In July 2000, however, Taliban leader Mullah Omar ordered a ban on all opium cultivation. Remarkably, the Taliban successfully slashed the opium harvest by 94 percent, reducing yearly production to only 185 metric tons.

Five months later, in December 2000, the US and Russia used the UN Security Council to impose harsh new sanctions on Afghanistan, citing the Taliban’s refusal to hand over Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden following the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, in which 17 US sailors were killed. Bin Laden had taken refuge in the Islamic Emirate in 1996 after he was expelled from Sudan.

The New York Times reported that US officials sought to impose the new sanctions, despite warnings from the UN that “a million Afghans could face starvation in coming months because of a drought and continued civil war.”

Following the attacks on 11 September, 2001, Bush administration officials demanded the Taliban hand over Bin Laden once again. Mullah Omar insisted the US first provide evidence of Bin Laden’s guilt, but President Bush refused this request and ordered the US air force to begin bombing Afghanistan on 7 October.

In the wake of the bombing, Mullah Omar dropped the demand for evidence, and offered to hand over Bin Laden to US ally Pakistan for trial. Bush administration officials once again refused.

Journalist and author Scott Horton highlights in his book Fool’s Errand a peculiar aspect of the US campaign: the lack of a clear focus on capturing or eliminating Bin Laden. In fact, President Bush had already stated on 25 September that success or failure should not be defined solely by capturing Bin Laden.

Horton notes further that US planners made no initial effort to hunt down Bin Laden and the foreign Arab fighters supporting him. Instead, head of US Central Command, General Tommy Franks prioritized partnering with Afghan warlord Rashid Dostum to take control of the north of the country, and establish a “land link” to Uzbekistan.

Turning to the warlords

To also capture the capital, Kabul, and other key cities in the south, Alfred McCoy notes the CIA:

“Turned to a group of rising Pashtun warlords along the Pakistan border who had been active as drug smugglers in the south-eastern part of the country. As a result, when the Taliban collapsed, the groundwork had already been laid for the resumption of opium cultivation and the drug trade on a major scale.”

Though US forces were too late to prevent Bin Laden’s escape to Pakistan, the US bombing campaign came just in time for the beginning of poppy planting season. Poppies are planted in the autumn so that the juice from the plant, from which opium is extracted, can be harvested in spring.

McCoy clarified further that, “the Agency (CIA) and its local allies created ideal conditions for reversing the Taliban’s opium ban and reviving the drug traffic. Only weeks after the collapse of the Taliban, officials were reporting an outburst of poppy planting in the heroin-heartlands of Helmand and Nangarhar.”

In December, one of these rising Pashtun warlords, Hamid Karzai, was appointed Chairman of the Afghan Interim Administration and later president.

By the spring of 2002, large amounts of Afghan heroin were once again being transported to Britain via daily flights from Pakistani airports. The Guardian observed the case of a 13-year-old girl who was stopped after she stepped off a Pakistan International Airlines flight from Islamabad to London carrying 13kgs of heroin with a street value of £910,000.

Industrial scale

Thanks to the “land link” established by General Franks, heroin also immediately began flowing north from Mazar-e-Sharif, under CIA ally Rashid Dostum’s control, to Uzbekistan and then to to Russia and Europe.

The flow of heroin was witnessed by Craig Murray, the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, who explained that Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek, facilitated the smuggling of heroin from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan, where it was then shipped up the railway line, in bales of cotton, to Moscow and then Riga. As Murray noted:

“Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker… The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government – the government that our soldiers are fighting and dying to protect.”

‘A hands off approach’

In addition to Dostum, Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s younger brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, quickly secured a prominent role in the Afghan heroin trade.

Credible reports emerged that Wali Karzai was deeply involved in the heroin trade, however, according to the New York Times, the incidents were never investigated, “even though allegations that he has benefited from narcotics trafficking have circulated widely in Afghanistan.”

Senior officials at the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) complained that the Bush “White House favored a hands-off approach toward Ahmed Wali Karzai because of the political delicacy of the matter.”

The Times later reported that according to a top former Afghan Interior Ministry official, a major source of Wali Karzai’s influence was his control over key bridges crossing the Helmand River on the route between the opium-growing regions of Helmand Province and Kandahar. This allowed Karzai to charge huge fees to drug traffickers to allow their drug-laden trucks to cross the bridges.

Like Dostum and Hekmaytar, Wali Karzai built his heroin empire while on the CIA payroll. The agency began paying Karzai in 2001 to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operated at the agency’s direction in and around Kandahar and to rent a large compound for use as the base of the Kandahar Strike Force. The CIA also appreciated Karzai’s help in communicating and sometimes meeting with Afghans loyal to the Taliban.

Karzai also served as the head of Kandahar’s elected provincial council. According to a senior US military officer in Kabul quoted by the Times, “Hundreds of millions of dollars in drug money are flowing through the southern region, and nothing happens in southern Afghanistan without the regional leadership knowing about it.”

The blame game 

In late 2004, as reports of Karzai’s involvement in the heroin trade were emerging, Alfred McCoy writes that “the White House was suddenly confronted with troubling CIA intelligence suggesting that the escalating drug trade was fueling a revival of the Taliban.”

A proposal from Secretary of State Colin Powell to fight the heroin trade was resisted by US ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, and then-Afghan finance minister Ashraf Ghani. As a compromise, the Bush administration used private contractors for poppy eradication, an effort that New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall later described as “something of a joke.”

Additionally, reports of a 2005 cable sent by the US embassy in Kabul to Powell’s successor, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, viewed Britain as being “substantially responsible” for the failure to eradicate poppy cultivation. British personnel chose where the eradication teams worked, but those areas were often not the main growing areas, and “the British had been unwilling to revise targets.”

The cable also faulted President Karzai, who “has been unwilling to assert strong leadership.” The State Department nevertheless defended him, saying, “President Karzai is a strong partner, and we have confidence in him,” despite reports of his brother’s key role in the heroin trade.

But the problem went beyond Wali Karzai. A UN report for the World Bank published in February 2006 concluded the Afghan heroin trade was operating with the assistance of many top Afghan government officials and under the protection of the Afghan Ministry of Interior.

As evidence of CIA and Afghan government involvement in the heroin trade grew, the focus of the western media shifted towards blaming the Taliban for using drug profits to fund their insurgency against foreign forces.

However, historian Peter Dale Scott challenged this narrative, citing UN estimates that the Taliban’s share of the Afghan opium economy was a fraction compared to that of supporters of the Karzai government. Scott emphasized that the largest share of the drug trade was controlled by those aligned with the Afghan government.

The surge

In early 2010, the Obama administration announced a “surge” of 33,000 US troops to help pacify the country, with a particular focus on key districts known for poppy cultivation. One such district was Marja in Helmand province, which McCoy referred to as “the world’s heroin capital.”

Despite the surge’s mission, US commanders seemed unaware of Marja’s significance as a hub for heroin production, fueled by the surrounding opium fields that accounted for 40 percent of the world’s illicit opium supply.

In September 2010, eight months after the start of the surge, “unsubstantiated” reports emerged that British soldiers were involved in trafficking heroin out of Afghanistan using military aircraft at airports in Camp Bastion and Kandahar.

Camp Bastion, jointly operated by the UK and the US, was located near Lashkar Gah, another major center of poppy cultivation. In 2012, it was alleged that poppy cultivation was taking place just outside the base’s perimeter, with British soldiers providing protection to farmers against Afghan security forces.

By late 2014, British and US forces withdrew from Camp Bastion, handing it over to Afghan forces, who renamed it Camp Shorabak. However, according to a UN report, “the opium-growing area around Britain’s main base in Afghanistan nearly quadrupled between 2011 and 2013.”

Despite the withdrawal, opium exports from Camp Shorabak apparently continued, and a small number of British military personnel returned in 2015 in what was described by the Ministry of Defense as an advisory role.

In 2016, Obaidullah Barakzai, a member of the National Assembly of Afghanistan, claimed, “It’s impossible for a few local drug smugglers to transfer opium in thousands of kilos. This is the work of the Americans and British. They transport it by air from Camp Shorabak.”

After US forces chaotically withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban once again succeeded in eliminating poppy cultivation, showing it was far from a “dedicated drug cartel” after all.

Follow the money

In November 2021, an opium merchant claimed that “All the profits go to the foreign countries. Afghans are just supplying the labor.”

Peter Dale Scott noted that according to the UN, some $352 billion in drug profits had been absorbed into the western financial system, including through the US’ largest banks in 2009. As a result, Scott said the “United States involvement in the international drug traffic links the CIA, major financial interests, and criminal interests in this country and abroad.”

In 2012, the Daily Mail reported that HSBC, Britain’s biggest bank, faced up to £640million in penalties for allowing “rogue states and drugs cartels to launder billions of pounds through its branches,” and for becoming “a conduit for criminal enterprises.”

The billions in profits flowing from the Afghan heroin trade into western banks have now been eliminated by the Taliban not once, but twice in the past two decades.

Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s pronouncement in July 2000 that poppy cultivation was “un-Islamic” was, therefore, a more likely cause of the US sanctions imposed in December of the same year, and of the US invasion of Afghanistan a year later, than was any US desire to apprehend Bin Laden and dismantle Al-Qaeda.

In March 2002, just six months after the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan, a journalist asked President Bush, “Where’s Osama bin Laden?” Bush replied, ‘I don’t know. I don’t really think about him very much. I’m not that concerned.”

The Afghan drug trade serves as a stark reminder of the intricate connections between geopolitics, illicit economies, and global finance, and the need for greater transparency and accountability in addressing these complex issues.

The historical evidence also challenges the simplistic narrative that the Taliban largely controlled the Afghan drug trade, highlighting the dominant role played by the US-backed Afghan government and its allies in the CIA.

July 7, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , , , | Leave a comment

Russian Troops Seize Near Intact UK Storm Shadow Missile, To Be Checked By Specialists

Sputnik – 07.07.2023

On May 11, Ukraine affirmed that it had received the first, long-anticipated, British-made Storm Shadow cruise missiles, which were sent by the United Kingdom. The weapon is designed to destroy bunkers and other rugged, hard-to-reach targets.

Russian servicemen from the BARS-11 volunteer unit and the Tsar’s Wolves captured an almost intact British Storm Shadow cruise missile from the line of contact and handed it over to specialists for examination, said Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Tsar’s Wolves military and technical center.

“I’m glad it was our unit that did it. Now our air defense will shoot this thing down, and it will gradually become useless,” Rogozin stressed.

According to him, the missile was almost undamaged.

“The missile was dismantled into several parts by our technicians right on the battlefield, the high-explosive and shaped-charge parts separately, and the control unit separately, while the wing was folded up for easy transportation,” Rogozin clarified.

“A functioning GPS tracker was there, which could have directed the strike team to the opponent. Even though we blocked it, our fighters had to relocate all the time and even engaged in battle — the enemy’s sabotage and recon unit tried to catch the car with the rocket and an accompanying vehicle on the road,” Rogozin added.

It took two days to evacuate the captured missile, but now it will benefit the Russian Armed Forces.

July 7, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

Keep Ukraine out of NATO, US experts argue

RT | July 7, 2023

Welcoming Ukraine into NATO would force the US to choose between nuclear war with Russia or abandoning its security commitments to Kiev, two American analysts claimed on Friday.

“The security benefits to the United States of Ukrainian accession pale in comparison with the risks of bringing it into the alliance,” Justin Logan and Joshua Shifrinson of the libertarian Cato Institute wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine.

If Ukraine were to join the alliance amid the ongoing hostilities, Logan and Shifrinson argued, the US and all of NATO’s European members would immediately be pulled into open war with Russia, with the potential for a nuclear exchange. However, even if the conflict were to be resolved, Ukraine and Russia will still have competing territorial claims, and a membership offer would risk reigniting the conflict, this time with NATO as a direct participant, they added.

“Under these circumstances, an American commitment to fight for Ukraine would be open to question,” they continued. If Ukraine were a NATO member and US policymakers chose not to intervene on its behalf, the bloc’s entire collective defense principle would be undermined, resulting in “a true credibility crisis for NATO.”

Furthermore, with the US protected by its nuclear arsenal and the vast Atlantic Ocean, the two analysts argued that America faces no direct threat from Russia, while Ukraine – due to its geography – forms “a bulwark” between Western Europe and Russia “irrespective of NATO membership.”

“American time, attention, and resources are needed elsewhere,” Logan and Shifrinson wrote, concluding that “the United States should accept that it is high time to close NATO’s door to Ukraine.”

Since the 2008 Bucharest Declaration, NATO’s official policy is that Ukraine will become a member of the bloc at an unspecified future date. Kiev, however, is unhappy with this non-commitment, with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky reportedly threatening not to attend NATO’s upcoming summit in Lithuania unless the US-led bloc offers “concrete” security guarantees or a roadmap to full membership.

Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda has already ruled out a membership offer at the Vilnius summit. French President Emmanuel Macron, however, has called on the alliance’s leaders to offer Kiev bilateral or multilateral security guarantees, as well as a “path” to full-fledged membership. British Defense Minister Ben Wallace and a number of Eastern European leaders have called for Ukraine to be fast-tracked into the bloc without the usual “membership action plan” that prospective members must complete.

The White House, meanwhile, maintains that Ukraine “would have to make reforms to meet the same standards as any NATO country before they join.”

July 7, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Mike Pence, Other Prominent Hawks Back Regime Change in Iran at MEK Rally in Paris

By Connor Freeman | The Libertarian Institute | July 3, 2023

Former Vice President Mike Pence participated in a rally outside Paris led by the exiled Iranian terrorist cult, the Marxist-Islamist Mujahideen-e-Khalq headed by Maryam Rajavi, and their political front the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), over the weekend.

Pence, a current GOP presidential hopeful, along with a host of other prominent hawks, including British ex-Prime Minister Liz Truss as well as former CIA director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, made calls for regime change in Tehran and railed against engagement with the Islamic Republic. Pence said “One of the biggest lies the ruling regime has sold to the world is that there is no alternative.” He added “no oppressive regime can last forever.”

Truss declared “[authoritarian] regimes have been emboldened as the free world has not done enough. I will never give up hope for a free and democratic Iran… Democracy is under threat around the world. Now is the time to turn our backs on accommodation and appeasement.”

Pompeo chimed in via video link, proclaiming any deal with Iran over its nuclear energy program would be a “calamity for the Iranian people and the world.” Per the NCRI, also in attendance at the event were former NATO Supreme Allied Commander General Wesley Clark and erstwhile US Senator Joseph Lieberman.

These condemnations of diplomacy come as the White House is reportedly making some efforts to de-escalate tensions with Iran in an attempt to secure an interim nuclear deal. The new “understanding” could see Iran cap its enrichment of uranium at 60% purity in exchange for some limited sanctions relief.

Tehran has previously pledged not to enrich beyond this upper limit, which is still well below the 90% required for weapons-grade uranium. Iran took this step, for leverage at the negotiating table, after Israel attacked its Natanz uranium enrichment facility in April 2021 causing an explosion, damaging centrifuges, and power outages.

A Western official recently told Reuters that Washington is seeking this alternative agreement because Israel may launch a military assault against Iran, a potential escalation which the Joe Biden administration until now had repeatedly green-lighted.

In May, The Intercept reported that – according to the Discord Leaks – even the CIA is unsure whether Israel is truly preparing to unilaterally launch a war against Iran. Such a conflict would spread violently across the region and quickly draw in the United States.

During previous years, Israel and the MEK cult, who are trained, funded, and armed by the Mossad, have collaborated on the extrajudicial executions of several Iranian nuclear scientists. By likely working with the terrorist group, Tel Aviv assassinated the Iranian scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, outside of Tehran in November 2020.

Both Israel and the MEK were suspected in the May 2022 murder of a senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander, Col. Hassan Sayyad Khodaei. Later, a US official confirmed to CNN that Israel was behind the hit. The latter killing touched off an unprecedented wave of assassinations in the country which targeted members of the IRGC and Iran’s aerospace industry.

Moreover, investigative journalist Gareth Porter has reported extensively on how the MEK and Mossad forged documents used to cultivate the propaganda narrative behind the phantom Iranian nuclear weapons program which Israel alleges was once headed by Fakhrizadeh.

The MEK lacks any support inside Iran, particularly after having murdered dozens of Iranian officials and allied with Saddam Hussein’s forces during the Iran-Iraq war. Nevertheless, Pence once dubbed the group a “perfectly qualified and popularly supported alternative” to the Islamic Republic.

Similarly, in 2017, ultra-hawk John Bolton told an MEK rally “There is a viable opposition to the rule of the ayatollahs, and that opposition is centered in this room today… The behavior and objectives of the regime are not going to change, and therefore the only solution is to change the regime itself.”

Bolton among other US political figures like Rudy Giuliani are paid handsomely for speaking at the terrorist cult’s events. “Estimates are in the range of $30,000 to $50,000 per speech. Bolton is estimated to have received upwards of $180,000 to speak at multiple events for [MEK]. His recent financial disclosure shows that he was paid $40,000 for one speech at an [MEK] event last year,” The Guardian reported in 2018.

As foreign policy analyst and Antiwar.com contributing editor Daniel Larison has written, “This is a group that has American blood on its hands, and it routinely abuses its own members. It is an oppressive and fanatical organization, and it would be a nightmare if it ever managed to gain power over a larger population. There is a reason it has sometimes been likened to the Khmer Rouge.”

The group’s base headquarters in Albania was recently raided by security police for unsanctioned activity being carried out at the camp in contravention of a US-mediated deal. The agreement had allowed the MEK to relocate to the Balkan country as they were no longer welcome in Iraq once Hussein was removed from power after the US invasion.

However, according to Responsible Statecraft, the cult was reportedly using “their presence in Albania as a base for political activities, including, at the very least, cyber-attacks directed against third countries (presumably Iran) and mass online trolling and harassment of the group’s many opponents.” The outlet also notes that, post Saudi-Iran rapprochement, Rajavi’s funding may be drying up as well. As Riyadh was long suspected of being one of the MEK’s major benefactors.

July 5, 2023 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Countess “Absolutely Terrified” After Bank Accounts Closed Without Explanation

Richie Allen | July 5, 2023

More and more evidence is emerging that banks and building societies are closing the accounts of customers who hold controversial views.

Countess Alexandra Tolstoy told LBC’s Nick Ferrari this morning that she was left “absolutely terrified” after her accounts were closed without explanation.

Tolstoy claims that someone at her bank told her that they were not obliged to provide her with any explanation.

She was left wondering if her Russian sounding surname led to the closure of her accounts.

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt have both criticised banks for closing the accounts of customers with controversial views.

July 5, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

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