US House war hawks write to Pompeo over UN arms embargo on Iran
Press TV – May 3, 2020
US lawmakers have written a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, urging him to take “increased diplomatic action” not to allow a United Nations arms embargo on Iran to expire in October.
“We write to urge increased diplomatic action by the United States to renew the expiring United Nations arms embargo against Iran and United Nations travel restrictions on those Iranian individuals involved with dangerous proliferation activities,” Hundreds of House lawmakers claimed in a letter released by The Hill. “America must continue its longstanding, bipartisan leadership in order to limit Iran’s destabilizing activities throughout the world… We look forward to working with you to reauthorize these expiring UN restrictions, which are essential to protecting our national security and the American people.”
The US claims that Washington has not quit the Iran nuclear deal and technically remains a “participant state.” The scheme is aimed at using a mechanism embedded within the Iran nuclear deal to make the UN restore a previously lifted arms embargo on Tehran.
The latest anti-Iran scheme was spearheaded by Democratic House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel and committee ranking member Michael McCaul.
“Nearly every member of the US House of Representatives is in agreement: Iran must not be allowed to buy or sell weapons,” McCaul claimed in a statement. “This isn’t a Republican or Democrat issue, or even just an American issue. We need to extend the UN arms embargo on Iran for the sake of international peace and security. I am proud the House is speaking with one voice to protect the world against Iran’s aggressive and destabilizing behavior.”
President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 and re-imposed harsh sanctions on Iran.
“US Security Council Resolution 2231 is unambiguous where the United States is a participant,” Pompeo claimed at a press briefing Wednesday. “We are going to make sure that come October of this year, the Iranians aren’t able to buy conventional weapons that they would be given what President Obama and Vice President Biden delivered to the world in that terrible deal.”
Tehran has called the allegation that the US is still a member of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action “a joke.”
Iran Under Siege from Humanitarian Imperialism amid Pandemic
NDI’s former President Kenneth Wollack and Chairman Madeleine K. Albright pose with Nazanin Boniadi. Credit: Margot Schulman/ Facebook)
By Danny Haiphong | American Herald Tribune | May 3, 2020
Iran is once again under siege from humanitarian imperialism. The United Nations (UN) has released multiple reports in recent weeks criticizing the Iranian government for supposed human rights violations in relation to the treatment of prisoners and its lockdown procedures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nazanin Boniadi, a board of director at the Center for Human Rights in Iran, authored a piece in The Washington Post that exploits the pandemic to paint Iran as a human rights catastrophe. An examination of just one of Boniadi’s claims exposes how far the U.S. and its imperialist allies will go to build the case for regime change in Iran.
Boniadi claims that Iran’s failure to maintain a humane release policy of prisoners within the country has contributed to undue suffering from COVID-19. Yet the individual she chooses to defend all but reduces her credibility to zero. Boniadi claims that several prisoners have been returned to prison prematurely, and names Samaneh Norouz Moradi as a victim of this policy. Sameneh Norouz Moradi is a leading activist in the campaign to return Prince Reza Pehlavi to Iran. Prince Reza Pehlavi is the eldest son of Mohammad Reza Pehlavi, otherwise known as the Shah of Iran. This is indeed the same monarch that butchered Iranians in the tens of thousands to ensure the country’s assets remained the property of the West. In just one sentence, Nazanin Boniadi reveals that the purpose of her article and her struggle for human rights is to reinstall the U.S. and Western friendly puppet regime that once reigned over Iran.
The discovery of what is thought to be the mummified body of #RezaShah could be seen as somewhat of an omen for Iranians who were chanting “Reza Shah Rest In Peace” in the recent #IranProtests https://t.co/zIyaMGUmTd https://t.co/kXyffRR3l5
— Nazanin Boniadi (@NazaninBoniadi) April 24, 2018
The human rights industry offers lucrative careers for the likes of Boniadi. Boniadi is a Hollywood star and an Iranian exile with extensive experience in the human rights industry. She served as a spokesperson for Amnesty International for six years from 2009 to 2015. Her service to Amnesty International coincides with the organization’s outright support for U.S.-led regime change wars. The so-called “human rights” organization defended the overthrow of Libya in 2011 and the ongoing invasion of Syria led by the U.S. and its Israeli, Gulf, and Western allies.
It is no surprise, then, that Boniadi now serves on the board of the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), a dubious human rights organization which fails to disclose its funding sources. A cursory look at Boniadi’s colleagues reveals how deeply the CHRI is embedded in the humanitarian imperialist agenda led by the United States. Chairwoman of the board Minky Worden is also the Director of Global Initiatives at Human Rights Watch. Throughout the 1990s, Worden served as an adviser to Hong Kong’s Martin Lee, a staunch anti-China proxy who has called for the British to recolonize Hong Kong. Lee has given deep support to the rightwing movement currently waging a violent campaign to separate Hong Kong from China under the guise of “human rights.” The rest of the CHRI’s staff is a who’s who of former NED-funded functionaries such as executive director Hadi Ghaemi or advisers to U.S. government and private sector posts such as Michael Eisner.
Humanitarian imperialist think-tanks and NGOs such as CHRI are not interested in human rights in Iran or anywhere else. Their selective focus on nations under siege from the U.S. and its imperial allies reveal that so-called “human rights” organizations are nothing but proxies of regime change. The U.S. military state has viewed the spread of COVID-19 in Iran as an opportunity to build upon this long-standing geopolitical objective. CHRI’s clamor for Iran to correct its alleged human rights abuses comes as the U.S. has escalated its forty-plus year war on Iran. Since mid-March, the U.S. has intensified sanctions on Iran, threatened outright U.S. naval aggression, and reinforced an arms embargo outlined in the nuclear agreement that the U.S. exited in 2018. For the architects of regime change, COVID-19 represents nothing more than opportunity to strike when their target is weakest.
What humanitarian imperialists fail to mention is that Iran has waged a largely successful campaign to reduce the spread of COVID-19 despite the presence of crippling sanctions and the threat of a U.S.-led war. Iran temporarily released seventy-thousand prisoners to prevent the virus’ spread behind prison walls. The World Health Organization’s envoy to Iran praised the country’s initiatives for bringing down the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in a relatively short period. Such initiatives include mandatory social distancing, the redirection of production toward masks and testing kits, and detailed contact tracing to isolate infected individuals. COVID-19 deaths have declined by around seventy percent since it was announced in mid-March that one Iranian every ten minutes was dying from the virus.
If humanitarian imperialists cared about the Iranian people, then they wouldn’t attempt to use the spread of a deadly pandemic to achieve the U.S.’ geopolitical objective of overthrowing the Iranian government. Furthermore, targeting Iran at this vulnerable time only exposes the truly hypocritical “human rights” framework employed by NGOS such as the Center for Human Rights in Iran. The United States has failed to institute any significant release program for its 2.3 million prisoners. This has led to a countless number of deaths in prisons across the country. Furthermore, the U.S. currently leads the world in the number of deaths from COVID-19 and has allowed the virus to genocidally murder Black Americans at rates upward of three times their percentage of the general population in states such as Michigan and Wisconsin.
COVID-19 has exposed the United States as a human rights train wreck which has no right to tell nations such as Iran how to conduct its domestic affairs. The U.S. is an expert at mass murder for the sake of private profit and found itself unprepared when COVID-19 began to spread within its borders. Instead of fostering cooperation with China, Iran, and the rest of the world in the fight against COVID-19, the U.S. has pirated medical supplies, threatened Iran and Venezuela with outright war, and refused to heed the call of the United Nations for a global ceasefire. That there is no NGO to address the ongoing war crimes of the United States is a lesson into the function of the “human rights” industry. NGOs represent the public relations arm of humanitarian imperialism, which is why their work is most prominently featured in the corporate media when Washington is escalating wars of regime change abroad.
Police brutality, incarceration, and state repression are serious human rights issues. Many people are rightfully concerned about human rights as they witness the horrifying and needless consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide. The U.S. and West have demonstrated in their response to COVID-19 that their societies are organized to stifle human rights in order to maximize the profits of a tiny capitalist class and the hegemony of the military state that protects this class. Activists and journalists must reject the humanitarian imperialists currently politicizing trendy social justice issues to undermine the self-determination of nations such as Iran. Iran is under siege as it battles a pandemic, and peace and social justice-loving people in the U.S. should demand that their government stops making the situation worse.
It is Time for Japan to Become a Truly Independent State
By Valery Kulikov – New Eastern Outlook – 03.05.2020
As the entire world suffers the tragic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, the latest anti-American scandals are gaining momentum in Japan.
The Kyodo News agency was the first to report the announcement made by Japanese Defense Minister Taro Kono on April 17 that a joint investigation would be conducted by the Japanese and United States military into a leakage of carcinogenic organic substances (firefighting foam) at the US Marine Corps Air Station Futenma on the southern island of Okinawa. However, the Japanese Minister did not provide any details on the nature of this investigation. The article briefly mentions that before this announcement, the Vice Governor of Okinawa Prefecture Kiichiro Jahana had met with the Marine General in charge of the American air base to voice his protest over this spill.
The incident took place on April 10, when about 143 thousand liters of firefighting foam leaked out at the US Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, which contains PFOS, suspected to be carcinogenic to humans. In terms of area, 70% of all American military facilities in Japan are located on this island. All kinds of accidents have been a regular occurrence at the Futenma military base. Okinawa authorities have long been calling for the Futenma air base to be closed, which is located in the densely populated urban area of Ginowan City.
The incident that took place on April 10 has heightened the demands being made by Okinawa Island’s residents and the Okinawa Prefectural Assembly to have operations at the US Futenma air base shut down, but the US have not taken any action in response to these demands, nor have they done anything to prevent these undesirable accidents from taking place.
Another scandal that is gaining momentum also has to do with the military and political alliance between the United States and Japan. As noted in the Japanese Shūkan Gendai magazine, Japan has fallen into America’s trap, and is now effectively their loyal little “vassal state”, which is the cause of the new misfortunes than have befallen Japan. The publication emphasizes that America is to blame for the chaos that the Middle East has long been mired in, and now it seems that Japan will have to answer for all of America’s actions. However, is an alliance with America worth all of this? That is the question posed in the Shūkan Gendai, which has published information about the plight that the Japan Self-Defense Forces stationed in the Middle East have been suffering, who have practically been immured in their ships, as they come face-to-face with the coronavirus pandemic.
In order to get to the bottom of the problems Japan is currently experiencing, the Shūkan Gendai reminds readers of a special plan adopted by Abe’s Cabinet in December 2019 without having received prior approval from the Diet. Under the pretext of the worsening political and military situation “amid rising tensions between the United States and Iran”, two P-3C anti-submarine patrol airplanes with more than 100 flight and technical personnel were deployed to the region for “intelligence-gathering” purposes at the beginning of 2020, as well as a Takanami guided-missile destroyer, which began operating in the Gulf of Oman, where no coalition forces are providing Japan with any serious back up. The Japan Self-Defense Force Base is in Djibouti. It is worth noting that even though the United States invited more than 60 countries to participate in an anti-Iranian coalition (formally created by Washington in November 2019), only 6 countries have joined the US-led Persian Gulf naval coalition. Apart from America, they are the United Kingdom, Australia, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Albania. The coalition was joined by Lithuania at a later stage. Japan is not officially a member of the coalition, but the Japanese military says that if the Japanese troops were to pull out of the region, a gap would be created, leaving the coalition vulnerable.
Since March, the likelihood of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces remaining there has been seriously jeopardized due to the outbreak of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic. This is mainly due to restrictions on the 200 crew members on the Takanami destroyer, who are refraining from leaving the ship to avoid becoming infected with Covid-19, and also due to the closure of Djibouti’s borders, which is not allowing the crews and maintenance personnel for the two P-3C anti-submarine patrol airplanes to be rotated. As the sailors cannot leave the ship, they are living in cramped and crowded conditions, and the Japan Self-Defense Forces were deployed to the Middle East without the necessary medical test kits, have not had enough rest, and are suffering severe stress. Given this situation, the Shūkan Gendai questions whether it is worth risking the lives of these crew members in order to clean up the mess made by the US, whose actions have unleashed chaos in this region.
At the same time, the Japanese press recall a statement made by Defense Minister Taro Kono back in January after holding talks with Pentagon chief Mark Esper, who said that Japan would not be participating in US operations to protect the Persian Gulf from possible attacks from Iran. Even the largely conservative Mainichi Shimbun newspaper has stressed that Japan’s complete dependence on the United States has led to Japan “blindly” following American foreign policy, and the decision taken by Abe’s Cabinet to deploy a limited Japan Self-Defense Forces unit to the Middle East is a clear proof of this. The controversial plan to build a new American military base at Henoko is further proof of this. The newspaper emphasizes that the Japanese government is wrong to be cracking down on the protests held by local residents against this new base being constructed. The government also needs to take urgent action to address the numerous civil rights and security violations that citizens living on Okinawa Island have suffered at the hands of the US military. This erodes mutual trust between the parties to the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan and weakens it.
A common theme runs through an article published in the liberal Asahi Shimbun newspaper, which is the belief that since President Trump was elected with slogan “America first!”, America’s own short-sighted military and political decisions have exposed the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security Between the United States and Japan to risks. The question of how Japan should cooperate with America is currently a real headache, as the United States has gone from being the “guardian” of the current world order to the instigator of disorder and chaos.
The Hokkaido Shimbun daily recalls the mass protests that broke out in Japan when the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security Between the United States and Japan was signed in 1960, as well as the fact that its approval by the Diet was practically forced through.
The Akahata newspaper draws particular attention to the fact that a number of secret annexes were included when the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security Between the United States and Japan was signed, according to which the American army can deploy nuclear weapons on Japanese islands and carry out military operations from them without notifying Japan, and this is not limited to operations in the Far East, they can be anywhere in the world. The US has already used Japanese territory to launch attacks on Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.
To this day, Japan remains one of America’s closest partners in East Asia. This situation is certainly a paradox, given how many times the actions taken by the US have been unfriendly towards Japan and Japanese citizens. One example which stands out was the internment of Japanese Americans from March 17, 1942, when 120 thousand US residents who were ethnic Japanese or of Japanese descent were forcefully relocated and incarceration in concentration camps, even if these were American citizens who only had one Japanese ancestor, a great-grandmother or great-grandfather who was a Japanese national. What was happening to the Japanese on the territory of the United States at that time was purely fueled by racism, and there was no military justification for it. Then, on the night of March 9-10, 1945, the Bombing of Tokyo took place, which is regarded as the single most destructive bombing raid in human history, even more so than the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Time and time again over the 60 years that have passed since the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security Between the United States was signed, Japan has had to endure lawless acts committed by American occupying forces in their country.
It is therefore no wonder that although there is a desire among today’s Japanese government circles to demonstrate a practically servile willingness to follow in Washington’s footsteps, the Japanese public are taking to the streets in rather frequent demonstrations, and are clearly trying to voice their rejection of US policies and America’s actions, both in Japan and in other parts of the world.
How a US Government-Sponsored Outlet Sparked Media Hysteria About Kim Jong-un’s ‘Death’
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – May 3, 2020
After weeks of speculation fueled by a lengthy absence, the North Korean leader suddenly reappeared in public on May 1 at the opening of a new fertilizer plant, dispelling rumours that he was dead or ‘gravely ill’.
Kim Jong-un’s surprise reemergence in public after weeks of speculation regarding his health raise a couple of important questions, specifically: how did the rumours get started, and who was behind them?
Queries regarding the North Korean leader’s whereabouts began swirling in mid-April, after he missed the public celebration of the Day of the Sun, the all-important April 15 anniversary of the birth of Kim Il-sung, founder of North Korea and Kim Jong-un’s grandfather. Before that, Kim also missed the session of the Supreme People’s Assembly, making his last public appearance on April 11 at a meeting of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea politburo.
NED-Sponsored Rumours
It was Daily NK, a South Korean-based online newspaper which receives grant funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, a US government-funded non-profit with the stated goal of ‘promoting democracy abroad’, which began the rumour that Kim had undergone a “cardiovascular surgical procedure.” What was the paper’s information based on? An unnamed source inside North Korea.
CNN took the rumour and ran with it, with a US official ‘with direct knowledge’ of the situation telling the network on April 21 that US intelligence was monitoring reports that Kim was “in grave danger” after undergoing surgery.
South Korean officials, meanwhile, maintained at the time that Seoul had “seen no unusual signs with regard to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s health.” Also telling was the fact that US President Donald Trump, who initially ‘wished Kim well’ after hearing the reports, quickly corrected himself, saying he thought CNN’s reporting was “incorrect” and based on “old documents.”
On April 26, a senior advisor to South Korean President Moon Jae-in spoke to CNN directly, once again dismissing rumours regarding Kim’s health, and reiterating that as far as Seoul was aware, he was doing just fine.
As for North Korean media, it issued a series of statements about Kim’s regular back-and-forth communications with officials, foreign leaders, and construction workers in Samjiyon, a model city in the country’s north.
Still, the lack of photos or videos meant that speculation would go on, with political talking heads mulling over Kim’s possible successor, possibly his sister Kim Yo-jong, while the Washington Post and the New York Times chalked out various apocalyptic scenarios, from panic buying in Pyongyang stores to fears of a cross-border refugee crisis and even a possible military incursion into North Korea leading to nuclear war.
Kim Reappears
On May 1, following an absence of 20 days, North Korean television broadcast a report featuring Kim attending a ceremony opening a new fertilizer plant in Sunchon, an industrial city north of Pyongyang. Photos shared by Korean Central News Agency showed Kim cutting a ceremonial red ribbon at the factory, flanked by officials. Video footage of the event emerged a day later, showing Kim speaking with officials, seemingly in good health and good spirits.
Undeterred by the photo and video evidence challenging their claims, the rumour mill has continued to churn, with ‘health professionals’ telling NK News, a South-Korean-based online newspaper with alleged links to the CIA, that a mark on Kim’s arm seen in the footage actually “corroborates” earlier reports about his alleged heart surgery.
On Sunday, a senior official from the South Korean President’s office dismissed these claims, telling Yonhap that Seoul has “reasons to believe that there was no surgery, but cannot disclose such details.”
The swirling of rumours regarding Kim’s health led to an explosion of memes after his reemergence in public.
Still, only a handful of observers have called out the mainstream media for this latest bout of “fake news,” with journalist and The Grayzone assistant editor Ben Norton calling it “example number 92,730,274 of how the Western corporate media is a totally useless propaganda machine that prints lie after lie in service of Western governments.”
Meanwhile, in South Korea, the country’s ruling Democratic Party reportedly demanded an apology from two defector parliamentarians on Sunday for their alleged role in circulating the fake news regarding Kim’s health. Before the release of fresh photos and video of Kim, high-profile defector and lawmaker Thae Yong-ho publicly said he was confident that the North Korean leader “cannot stand up by himself or walk properly,” while Ji Seong-ho, another opposition lawmaker, claimed he was “99 percent sure” Kim was dead. Jung Choun-sook, Democratic Party lawmaker and spokesperson, called on the pair of MPs to apologize over their now demonstrably “groundless remarks.”
The Covid-19 “Manhattan Project” and its Ties to the CIA
By Daniel Espinosa Winder | Dissident Voice | May 2, 2020
On April 27, the Wall Street Journal reported about the creation of a “Manhattan Project” for Covid-19. A “secret group”, consisting in a dozen scientists and a few billionaires, was working “to cull the world’s most promising research on the pandemic” to then advise the White House in the best course of action.
As Rob Copeland wrote for the journal, the group is led by a 33-year-old physician-turned-venture-capitalist named Tom Cahill, a graduate from Duke University with extensive – maybe too extensive – contacts in the business world, as we will explore below. The “lockdown-era Manhattan Project”, as the group describes its own endeavor, is all about “distilling unorthodox ideas” from around the globe. As we can remember, the MP created the atomic bomb during WW II.
Cahill’s “secret group” is already influencing the Trump administration, which is taking advice from its 17-page memo, also made available by the journal. In other example of its influence, by the end of March Dr. Cahill made a phone call to Mike Pence’s aid, Nick Ayers, who managed to accelerate a lucrative FDA permission for Regeneron Pharmaceuticals – working on a potential vaccine for COVID-19 – to move its production to Ireland, where taxes and licenses are more lax.
Other policies included in the memo regard mandatory smartphone apps that will require people to report about their health and potential symptoms to a government agency on a daily basis.
But the brazen pecuniary nature of their enterprise comes to light when the WSJ informs us that the group of scientists working around Cahill – and their billionaire backers:
… has acted as the go-between for pharmaceutical companies looking for a reputable link to Trump administration decision makers. They are working remotely as (an) ad hoc review board for the flood of research on the coronavirus, weeding out flawed studies before they reach policy makers.
In other words, a private filter made of billionaires and scientists – who as we will see, own stock in some very profitable big pharma companies or work for them – is arbitrarily “weeding out” ideas from around the world regarding solutions to the pandemic… in the purported benefit of society?
Some could argue that that very same logic brought us to where we are right now: underfunded healthcare systems collapsed under a pandemic that was foreseen years or even decades in advance. As tens of writers and journalists have outlined in recent weeks around the world, what was needed for an up-to-the-task response to a threat like coronavirus, like stockpiles of specific medical equipment, more hospital beds and health professionals, was not a lucrative enough alternative for the privatized healthcare mercenaries in charge.
As few alternative media commented on the WSJ revelation, Naked Capitalism noted:
In essence, the country would be betting on venture capitalists and private equity specialists to solve the Covid-19 epidemic; oligarchs, in other words. I’m not entirely sure that’s a good bet… private equity is, after all, responsible for a range of social ills, including surprise billing from practices in privatized emergency rooms…
Just two months ago, when the pandemic was starting, Dr. Peter Hotez, from the Center for Vaccine Development at the Texas Children’s Hospital, told the US Congress that in 2016 he and his team of researchers had a vaccine for a strain of coronavirus “ready to go”, but by then, “nobody was interested…”, so they didn’t obtain funding to test it on humans. Hotez, who also stated that his vaccine “may have provided cross-protection from the (present) strain”, says that the SARS epidemic of 2003 and the MERS or camel flu of 2012, should have “triggered major federal and global investments to develop vaccines in anticipation…”
It didn’t. Our good doctor even approached big pharma companies after the recent outbreak regarding his would-be vaccine. He literally got this response from one of them: “Well, we’re holding back to see if this thing comes back year after year…”
Now some big pharma investors, hiding behind their scientists/employees –young Dr. Cahill is presented by the WSJ as an stoic “one suit” living in a “one bedroom rental near Boston’s Fenway Park”– are looking to make a kill among the biggest disaster in recent times, with an economic fallout yet to be seen.
And just as the billionaires behind the “Covid-19 Manhattan Project” are tied to big pharma and some of the most powerful investment trusts in the world, its head, Dr. Tom Cahill, is tied to the CIA’s venture capital, In-Q-Tel.
Cahill, Seventh Sense BioSystems, and the Gates Foundation
As former CIA director George Tenet stated in his memoirs: “… CIA identifies pressing problems, and In-Q-Tel provides the technology to address them. The In-Q-Tel alliance has put the Agency back at the leading edge of technology”. In-Q-Tel is notorious for investing in Keyhole, the technology that later became Google Earth.
As mentioned, Dr. Tom Cahill’s tender age didn’t stop him from developing a list of contacts among billionaire “philanthropists” like the notorious Michael Milken, and elite capitalist ventures like … well, the CIA’s investment fund.
Seventh Sense BioSystems was created in 2008 to develop a blood collection system that would facilitate diagnosis around the world, especially in the underdeveloped world. They designed a small device armed with micro-needles that would be fixed to the upper arm of the patient, drawing blood with a painless tap and storing it.
Dr. Cahill is a member of the board of directors at Seventh Sense. The medical technology start-up obtained money from In-Q-Tel for its very first round of funding ($4.2 million in total; the exact amount coming from the CIA’s front is unknown). Although the donation, made with tax-payer money, isn’t officially secret – the CIA’s venture fund works openly but discreetly –, the reasons why the agency could be interested in the project remain a mystery.
A few years after that, in 2011, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation granted Seven Sense BioSystems over $2 million for its second round of funding. We should note that Novartis, also a Gates Foundation grantee, was tied to the recently incarcerated Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s lawyer. Novartis, working on a hydroxychloroquine treatment for the virus, paid Cohen more than $1 million for “policy insights” after Trump’s election in 2016. After their relationship was leaked, Novartis apologized. Later, a congressional investigation revealed the real objective of Novartis, the company: “explicitly sought to hire Michael Cohen to provide the company ‘access to key policymakers’ in the Trump administration…”
Dr. Cahill’s access to the White House, on the other hand, is a benefit provided to him by his own powerful godfathers, like Steve Pagliuca, co-owner of the Boston Celtics and co-chairman of Bane Capital – involved in “some of the biggest investments in biotech” since 2016. According to the WSJ, Pagliuca passed on a version of Cahill’s Scientists to Stop Covid-19 memo and policy recommendations to a Goldman Sachs executive, David Solomon, who then handed it to Trump’s Treasure Secretary, Steven Mnuchin.
As the WSJ stated, Pagliuca, along with PayPal’s Peter Thiel, Jim Pallotta – owner of Raptor Capital, also invested in biotechnologies and Big Pharma – and Michael Milken (a “philanthropist” and convicted felon who invented the “junk bonds”) gave Cahill the “legitimacy” to reach the White House “in the middle of the crisis”.
Finally, in an even more unintendedly sarcastic manner, the WSJ piece assures its readers that: “no one in the group stands to gain financially”. Maybe not directly.
An elite club of interconnected billionaire investors
A recent short documentary from The Corbett Report’s, “How Bill Gates Monopolized Global Health”, carefully explains how the Gates Foundation (also) donates millions of dollars to many world renowned media like The Guardian, the BBC, NPR and ABC News, where its dollars fund health related news segments. Its influence in media, the World Health Organization and hundreds of grants for research and development let Gates set the agenda for human health, to the point that is: “almost impossible to find any area of global health that has been left untouched by the tentacles of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation…
“It was Gates who sponsored the meeting that led to the creation of GAVI, the vaccine alliance, a global public-private partnership bringing together state sponsors and big pharmaceutical companies…” as Corbett reports. The openly stated objective of GAVI is to ensure healthy markets (for vaccines and other pharma products).
Government reactions in the US and UK, he adds, were shaped by the advice of two research groups, one from London’s Imperial College and the other from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (Seattle), both heavily funded by – you guessed it – the Gates Foundation.
Despite dubious disclaimers, the fact is that the handful of billionaires and multimillionaires backing Cahill’s group of Scientists to Stop Covid-19 have important and overlapping investments in biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, and therefore could be expected to make huge deals out of the present pandemic and the proposed solutions. Jim Pallotta’s Raptor Capital made millions investing in Hospira, a pharmaceutical company bought by Pfizer in 2015. Steve Pagliuca’s Bain Capital Life Sciences also invests in two dozen biotech startups, with special mentions to a couple Pfizer spinouts.
All of the billionaires or multimillionaires mentioned throughout this article seem to deal with the same companies, venture funds and holdings, as if they were part of an elite club of investors. Peter Thiel, through the Founders Fund, invested in Stemcentrx, a company designing cancer treatments with stem cells that was bought by AbbVie, owned in part by the Vanguard Group. The latter also have interests in Pfizer and half a dozen big pharma names that overlap with those receiving “charitable” donations from the Gates Foundation. The Vanguard Group is also one of the top institutional shareholders of Class B shares from Berkshire Hathaway, where Warren Buffett is CEO.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, according to a recent investigation by The Nation, own stock from a dozen well-known names in pharmaceuticals like GSK, Merck, Pfizer or Eli Lilly, while at the same time – and in an open conflict of interests – the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation makes “philanthropic” donations to them.
Most of these firms, including “charities”, holdings and venture funds, have no qualms in dealing with pharmaceuticals and the kind of private companies that make them direly needed in the first place, like Coca-Cola, McDonalds or giants of the oil and agricultural industries, including the producers of glyphosate-carrying concoctions.
The so-called “Covid-19 Manhattan Project” is, in sum, an open door to the White House for an elite club of billionaires aiming at enlarging their already extravagant business portfolio at the expense of a catastrophic emergency. Far from new, it follows the same neoliberal logic that brought us to this point, putting in the hands of the superwealthy 0.01 % the future of health in the United States and the world just like another business opportunity.
As Joachim Hagopian once wrote for Global Research:
This is neither a new nor unique story. In fact, the story of big pharma is the exact same story of how big government, big oil, big agro-chem giants like Monsanto have come to power. The controlling shareholders of all these major industries are one and the same.
Daniel Espinosa Winder lives in Arequipa, second largest city of Peru. He graduated in Communication Sciences in Lima and started researching propaganda and mainstream media. He writes for a peruvian in print weekly, “Hildebrandt en sus trece” since 2018. His writings are a critique of the role of mass media in society”.
White House efforts to exonerate Michael Flynn could see America explode
By Robert Bridge | RT | May 1, 2020
As new information indicates the FBI set a ‘perjury trap’ for Trump’s former national security adviser, the gloves have come off between the Democrats and Republicans. The epic showdown could lead to a national existential crisis.
For much of the world – transfixed as it is with the Covid-19 pandemic and a crumbling global economy – Russiagate sounds like ancient history. From the perspective of the Trump administration, however, it is a lingering, festering wound that points to corruption and possibly even treason at the highest levels of the US political and intelligence circles. That is why Michael Flynn’s possible exoneration is, or should be, a very serious news story.
Yet for Americans searching for information on the subject, they will be greeted by the cacophony of crickets. The Drudge Report, for example, devoted just one short article to the controversy since the news broke on Thursday. And in the event that one of the Big Six media corporations reports on it, they can be trusted to do so without any modicum of objectivity. CNN, for example, fired up its snark machine to produce this whopper of an article-opener: “Trump went on a Twitter rampage Thursday about his former adviser Michael Flynn, flooding the zone with conspiracy theories and paper-thin allegations that crooked FBI investigators entrapped Flynn as part of a ‘deep state’ plot.”
Conspiracy theories and paper-thin allegations? Even for CNN, that is quite a stretch. Not even the dullest tool in the box could fail to see what appears to be a clear attempt to ensnare the 33-year military veteran in a perjury trap. “What is our goal,” an FBI agent reportedly asked in a memo shortly before Flynn was subjected to an ‘ambush interview’ inside of the White House. “Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?”
As it turned out, Flynn was fired for providing misleading information with regards to his conversations with then Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak; the perfectly legal conversations took place as the outgoing Obama administration was deliberately torpedoing US-Russia relations.
Now that there is an opportunity to set the historical record straight with regards to Michael Flynn, as well as the three-year political drama known as Russiagate, the media has decided once again to take a pass. That is both unfortunate and dangerous because, before long, it seems, these sorts of stories will blow up in America’s lap.
An approaching storm?
Since the media never discusses it, few people seem to know that back in May 2019 Trump launched an investigation into the origins of the Russiagate debacle. And unlike the notorious nothingburgers served up cold by the Democrats ever since the mogul from Manhattan entered the Oval Office, the Republicans actually have something that Joe Public can sink his teeth into.
It is no secret that the Obama-era FBI was responsible for organizing an extremely shady investigation into members of the Trump campaign. The operation, dubbed ‘Crossfire Hurricane,’ relied on the investigative work of former British spy, Christopher Steele, to dig up dirt on the Manhattan real estate developer turned political maverick. However, what the FBI failed to mention was that Steele had been funded by a firm doing political opposition research for the Democratic Party and for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Had the FISA Court been made aware of such gross conflicts of interest, the FBI would never have been granted a warrant to investigate the Trump campaign on suspicion of ‘colluding with the Russians,’ and the country could have been spared a four-year witch hunt.
Now, Donald Trump, a one-time Washington outsider who promised to ‘drain the swamp’ on the campaign trail, looks very determined to avenge himself for those past wrongs. And judging by recent comments from Attorney General William Barr, his chances of success appear better than average.
“I think the president has every right to be frustrated, because I think what happened to him was one of the greatest travesties in American history,” Barr said in an interview last month with Fox News Channel’s Laura Ingraham.
Barr went on to say that the FBI counterintelligence investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia served to “sabotage the presidency… without any basis.”
The implication here is that a lot of high-ranking people involved in the Russiagate scam – up to and including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton – could be expected to testify in a court of law to defend their behavior. The problem, however, is that so few Americans seem to understand that such a scenario could actually transpire.
America’s parallel reality
It has become a bit of a cliche, but the American people really are experiencing a parallel reality from inside the echo chambers of two camps that absolutely loathe each other. In fact, it is difficult to believe that the two groups are comprised of fellow American citizens. This deep fissure that now exists between America’s two predominant parties precludes any ‘meeting of the middle ground,’ as it were, a dilemma that harks back to the realities of the Civil War days (1861-1865) when members of the same family found themselves pitted against each other on the battlefield.
On the left, the corporate-owned media has created an image of Donald Trump as some sort of banana republic caricature who has placed the nation on the express lane to ruin. On the right, meanwhile, a handful of pro-Trump outlets comprised of Fox News and some alt-right sources, which largely owe their feudalistic existence to the overlords in Silicon Valley, are desperate to project a more sympathetic image of the US leader. Meanwhile, the cherished middle ground, where the Democrat and Republican camps could meet and civilly discuss and work out their differences, continues to be no-man’s land. Unless that changes, that vacant piece of real estate could eventually turn into a very real battleground.
If and when the other shoe drops, and Trump decides to seek justice for the past sins of Russiagate in a court of law, the streets of America may explode in pent-up political passions, which are already severely strained with presidential elections just months away. The American mainstream media would have to accept a large portion of the blame in the event of such a scenario considering how hard they have worked to keep the American people in the dark about the political realities, even if it goes against their political tendencies. It’s still not too late to bring the two sides together in some kind of mutual agreement, but the clock is ticking.
Robert Bridge, an American writer and journalist, is the author of the book, ‘Midnight in the American Empire,’ How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream. @Robert_Bridge
Russia-China entente deepens in the shadow of the pandemic
By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | Indian Punchline | May 2, 2020
The Russian-Chinese entente emerged as one of the most significant templates of international politics in the recent period since the hugely consequential developments in Ukraine in 2014 that led to western sanctions against Moscow, which in turn galvanised the latter’s ‘pivot to Asia’.
Of late, this entente, which falls short of a formal alliance, assumes prominence, given the shift under way in regional and global alignments triggered by the coronavirus pandemic. The world economy faces recession and the US is threatened by a crisis unmatched since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits is soaring past 30 million.
The decline of the US as a global power is accelerating. But the US refuses to come to terms with this geopolitical reality and is determined to perpetuate its domination of the global arena, no matter what it takes. China and Russia have been cast in the ‘enemy’ image. In the short term at least, tensions will rise — in the US-China relations, in particular.
It was reported last week that the US is deploying missile defence systems near Russia’s borders with the potential to deliver a surprise nuclear strike. A Tass report quoted the First Deputy Chief of the Russian General Staff’s Main Operations Department Lt. Gen.Viktor Poznikhir as saying that the US has developed a concept of pre-launch interception and planned to destroy intercontinental ballistic missiles of Russia, China and other countries while they are still in launchers.
Suffice to say, it is in the common interests of Russia and China that in their growing confrontation with the US, they stand by each other and support each other. There is every indication that US imperialism will assume an even more violent and oppressive character in the prevailing world situation.
The Russia-China entente is driven by their leaderships. Within the period of a month in March-April, there have been two telephone conversations between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss the pandemic and its ramifications as well as the imperative need to jointly face the ensuing challenges.
The Chinese readouts (here and here) underscored that Putin was critical of the “provocation and stigmatisation by some country” (read the US) and the “attempt by some to smear China on the question of the origin of the virus.” Putin affirmed that since the start of COVID-19, Russia and China have “stood in unity and extended mutual support, which is a testament to the strategic nature and high quality” of their relationship.
The mutual support Russia and China are extending to each other creates space for both to effectively push back at the US. Earlier this week on April 29, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman endorsed the concerns expressed by Moscow from time to time in recent years over the presence of Pentagon’s labs in the countries of the former Soviet Union for weaponising diseases. Moscow has cited a specific lab near Tbilisi in Georgia, even claiming intelligence regarding visits by senior Pentagon officials to the centre recently.
The Russians claim that there are 11 such labs in Ukraine developed by the Pentagon. They say when Crimea rejoined Russia in 2014, they found out that in one such lab in Simferopol, which was apparently a hub for collecting materials and sending them to Europe, 104 pools of ectoparasites, 46 samples of internal organs of rodents and 105 samples of human blood serum were found ready for despatch.
Moscow alleges that these labs conduct study on dangerous diseases, targeting specific ethnic groups, and include projects that are banned within the US itself. On April 29, at a media briefing in Beijing, the Chinese spokesman said,
“We noted the Russian foreign ministry spokesperson’s remarks and related reports. The US established multiple biological laboratories in former USSR countries but kept its mouth shut regarding the labs’ functions, purposes and safety, causing deep concerns from local people and surrounding countries. As we know, some local people strongly demand the labs be closed. We hope the US will act in a responsible manner, heed the concerns from the international community, attach importance to local people’s health and safety, and take concrete measures to eliminate the doubts.”
As the legal successor of the Soviet Union, Russia inherited its status as a party to the Geneva Protocol and the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) in 1992. China too had acceded to the BWC in 1984. All Asian countries are signatories to the BWC. Interestingly, so is the US, which had ratified the protocol in 1975.
Now, the US Government has not officially accused China of intentionally developing the COVID-19 as a biological weapon, while Trump keeps talking in innuendos. According to the assessment of the US intelligence, the virus was not man-made or genetically modified. But Trump claims he has seen evidence suggesting the novel coronavirus originated in a virology lab in Wuhan — although he couldn’t provide any evidence to support that claim.
China has reacted strongly to Trump’s jabs while Russia has been supportive of the Chinese stance. The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recently spoke derisively about the talk in some European countries demanding compensation from Beijing for “failing to timely inform the world community” — and by Trump himself saying similar US claims would be “much bigger than hundreds of billions US dollars.”
Indeed, this may become serious stuff if Trump chooses to pursue a punitive strategy towards China. The Washington Post wrote on Thursday, “In private, Trump and aides have discussed stripping China of its ‘sovereign immunity,’ aiming to enable the U.S. government or victims to sue China for damages.”
For the present, Russia agrees with the Chinese perception that the Trump administration is ratcheting up the rhetoric over Covid-19 to draw public attention away from its incompetence in countering the pandemic. But Russian support becomes crucial for Beijing if push comes to shove with Trump in the coming months.
Up until now, neither Russia nor China has sought each other’s help while negotiating bilateral relations with the US. There is a paradigm shift taking place here, which becomes a leap of faith for both China and Russia as well as a qualitatively new phase in their entente, which has so far been focused on regional and global issues of common concern.
Why Foreign Interventionism?
By Jacob G. Hornberger | Future of Freedom Foundation | May 1, 2020
What is the point of U.S. foreign interventionism?
Why are U.S. troops killing and dying in faraway countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Somalia?
Why does the U.S. government have 165,000 troops stationed in more than 150 foreign countries?
Why is the U.S. government enforcing economic sanctions and embargoes against the people of Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and other countries?
Why are U.S. officials waging trade wars against foreign nations?
Why do the CIA and the Pentagon assassinate foreigners?
Why are U.S. officials provoking conflicts with Iran and Venezuela?
Why is regime change a core feature of U.S. foreign policy?
Why do U.S. officials partner with tyrannical foreign regimes?
Why does the U.S. government tax hard-pressed American citizens in order to send money to foreign regimes, including dictatorial ones?
Why does the U.S. government initiate wars of aggression against countries that have never invaded or even threatened to invade the United States?
Why do U.S. officials spend taxpayer money on foreign interventionism?
Why do U.S. troops inflict death, suffering, and destruction in foreign lands?
What are U.S. troops dying for in faraway lands?
After all, let’s acknowledge the obvious: No nation-state is invading the United States. No nation-state has the money, resources, personnel, equipment, and supplies to cross the ocean and invade and conquer the United States. There is no possibility of an invasion and conquest of the U.S. by Canada or any Latin American country.
Therefore, what is the purpose of all that U.S. meddling in overseas countries? We don’t like foreign regimes meddling in American affairs. Why should U.S. officials be meddling in the affairs of other countries, especially when the meddling involves the infliction of death, suffering, and destruction?
Consider Switzerland. It doesn’t have troops in the Middle East and Afghanistan. It doesn’t send foreign aid to regimes. It doesn’t assassinate people. It doesn’t initiate wars of aggression against Third World countries. It just devotes itself entirely to defending Switzerland against an invasion. And no one ever jacks with the Swiss.
In fact, have you ever wondered why U.S. officials call the Department of Defense by that name? I can see why Switzerland would use such a name. But the U.S.? it seems to me that the more truthful name would be the Department of Foreign Interventionism.
The Swiss model of non-intervention was actually the founding foreign policy of the United States. This was reflected by John’s Quincy Adams’ profound Fourth of July, 1821, speech to Congress entitled “In Search of Monsters to Destroy.” In that speech, Adams observed that if America were ever to abandon her founding foreign policy of non-intervention, “She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”
In fact, that was one of the reasons why the Framers and our American ancestors had such a deep antipathy for what they called “standing armies,” by which they meant large, overgrown military-intelligence establishments, or what President Dwight Eisenhower would later label “the military-industrial complex,” or what we call today a “national-security state.” The Framers and our ancestors didn’t want a “standing army” large enough to engage in foreign interventionism.
Where to go from here? Isn’t the answer obvious?
This post was written by: Jacob G. Hornberger
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
With apparently fabricated nuclear documents, Netanyahu pushed the US towards war with Iran
By Gareth Porter | The Grayzone | April 29, 2020
President Donald Trump scrapped the nuclear deal with Iran and continued to risk war with Iran based on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim to have proven definitively that Iran was determined to manufacture nuclear weapons. Netanyahu not only spun Trump but much of the corporate media as well, duping them with the public unveiling of what he claimed was the entire secret Iranian “nuclear archive.”
In early April 2018, Netanyahu briefed Trump privately on the supposed Iranian nuclear archive and secured his promise to leave the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). That April 30, Netanyahu took the briefing to the public in a characteristically dramatic live performance in which he claimed Israel’s Mossad intelligence services had stolen Iran’s entire nuclear archive from Tehran. “You may well know that Iran’s leaders repeatedly deny ever pursuing nuclear weapons…” Netanyahu declared. “Well, tonight, I’m here to tell you one thing: Iran lied. Big time.”
However, an investigation of the supposed Iranian nuclear documents by The Grayzone reveals them to be the product of an Israeli disinformation operation that helped trigger the most serious threat of war since the conflict with Iran began nearly four decades ago. This investigation found multiple indications that the story of Mossad’s heist of 50,000 pages of secret nuclear files from Tehran was very likely an elaborate fiction and that the documents were fabricated by the Mossad itself.
According to the official Israeli version of events, the Iranians had gathered the nuclear documents from various locations and moved them to what Netanyahu himself described as “a dilapidated warehouse” in southern Tehran. Even assuming that Iran had secret documents demonstrating the development of nuclear weapons, the claim that top secret documents would be held in a nondescript and unguarded warehouse in Central Tehran is so unlikely that it should have raised immediate alarm bells about the story’s legitimacy.
Even more problematic was the claim by a Mossad official to Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman that Mossad knew not only in what warehouse its commandos would find the documents but precisely which safes to break into with a blowtorch. The official told Bergman the Mossad team had been guided by an intelligence asset to the few safes in the warehouse which contained the binders with the most important documents. Netanyahu bragged publicly that “very few” Iranians knew the location of the archive; the Mossad official told Bergman “only a handful of people” knew.
But two former senior CIA official, both of whom had served as the agency’s top Middle East analyst, dismissed Netanyahu’s claims as lacking credibility in responses to a query from The Grayzone.
According to Paul Pillar, who was National Intelligence Officer for the region from 2001 to 2005, “Any source on the inside of the Iranian national security apparatus would be extremely valuable in Israeli eyes, and Israeli deliberations about the handling of that source’s information presumably would be biased in favor long-term protection of the source.” The Israeli story of how its spies located the documents “does seem fishy,” Pillar said, especially considering Israel’s obvious effort to derive maximum “political-diplomatic mileage” out of the “supposed revelation” of such a well-placed source.
Graham Fuller, a 27-year veteran of the CIA who served as National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia as well as Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, offered a similar assessment of the Israeli claim. “If the Israelis had such a sensitive source in Tehran,” Fuller commented, “they would not want to risk him.” Fuller concluded that the Israelis’ claim that they had accurate knowledge of which safes to crack is “dubious, and the whole thing may be somewhat fabricated.”
No proof of authenticity
Netanyahu’s April 30 slide show presented a series of purported Iranian documents containing sensational revelations that he pointed to as proof of his insistence that Iran had lied about its interest in manufacturing nuclear weapons. The visual aides included a file supposedly dating back to early 2000 or before that detailed various ways to achieve a plan to build five nuclear weapons by mid-2003.
Another document that generated widespread media interest was an alleged report on a discussion among leading Iranian scientists of a purported mid-2003 decision by Iran’s Defense Minister to separate an existing secret nuclear weapons program into overt and covert parts.
Left out of the media coverage of these “nuclear archive” documents was a simple fact that was highly inconvenient to Netanyahu: nothing about them offered a scintilla of evidence that they were genuine. For example, not one contained the official markings of the relevant Iranian agency.
Tariq Rauf, who was head of the Verification and Security Policy Coordination Office at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 2001 to 2011, told The Grayzone that these markings were practically ubiquitous on official Iranian files.
“Iran is a highly bureaucratized system,” Rauf explained. “Hence, one would expect a proper book-keeping system that would record incoming correspondence, with date received, action officer, department, circulation to additional relevant officials, proper letterhead, etc.”
But as Rauf noted, the “nuclear archive” documents that were published by the Washington Post bore no such evidence of Iranian government origin. Nor did they contain other markings to indicate their creation under the auspices of an Iranian government agency.
What those documents do have in common is the mark of a rubber stamp for a filing system showing numbers for a “record”, a “file” and a “ledger binder” — like the black binders that Netanyahu flashed to the cameras during his slideshow. But these could have easily been created by the Mossad and stamped on to the documents along with the appropriate Persian numbers.
Forensic confirmation of the documents’ authenticity would have required access to the original documents. But as Netanyahu noted in his April 30, 2018 slide show, the “original Iranian materials” were kept “in a very safe place” – implying that no one would be allowed to have any such access.
Withholding access to outside experts
In fact, even the most pro-Israeli visitors to Tel Aviv have been denied access to the original documents. David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security and Olli Heinonen of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies – both stalwart defenders of the official Israeli line on Iranian nuclear policy – reported in October 2018 that they had been given only a “slide deck” showing reproductions or excerpts of the documents.
When a team of six specialists from Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs visited Israel in January 2019 for briefings on the archive, they too were offered only a cursory browse of the supposedly original documents. Harvard Professor Matthew Bunn recalled in an interview with this writer that the team had been shown one of the binders containing what were said to be original documents relating to Iran’s relations with the IAEA and had “paged through a bit of it.”
But they were shown no documents on Iran nuclear weapons work. As Bunn admitted, “We weren’t attempting to do any forensic analysis of these documents.”
Typically, it would be the job of the U.S. government and the IAEA to authenticate the documents. Oddly, the Belfer Center delegation reported that the U.S. government and the IAEA had each received only copies of the entire archive, not the original files. And the Israelis were in no hurry to provide the genuine articles: the IAEA did not receive a complete set of documents until November 2019, according to Bunn.
By then, Netanyahu had not only already accomplished the demolition of the Iran nuclear deal; he and Trump’s ferociously hawkish CIA-director Mike Pompeo had maneuvered the president into a policy of imminent confrontation with Tehran.
The second coming of fake missile drawings
Among the documents Netanyahu flashed on the screen in his April 30, 2018 slide show was a schematic drawing of the missile reentry vehicle of an Iranian Shahab-3 missile, showing what was obviously supposed to represent a nuclear weapon inside.
Technical drawing from David Albright, Olli Heinonen, and Andrea Stricker’s “Breaking Up and Reorienting Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Program,” published by the Institute for Science and International Security on October 28, 2018.
This drawing was part of a set of eighteen technical drawings of the Shahab-3 reentry vehicle. These were found in a collection of documents secured over the course of several years between the Bush II and Obama administrations by an Iranian spy working for Germany’s BND intelligence service. Or so the Israeli official story went.
In 2013, however, a former senior German Foreign Office official named Karsten Voigt revealed to this writer that the documents had been initially provided to German intelligence by a member of the Mujaheddin E-Khalq (MEK).
The MEK is an exiled Iranian armed opposition organization that had operated under Saddam Hussein’s regime as a proxy against Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. It went on to cooperate with the Israeli Mossad beginning in the 1990s, and enjoys a close relationship with Saudi Arabia as well. Today, numerous former US officials are on the MEK’s payroll, acting as de facto lobbyists for regime change in Iran.
Voigt recalled how senior BND officials warned him they did not consider the MEK source or the materials he provided to be credible. They were worried that the Bush administration intended to use the dodgy documents to justify an attack on Iran, just as it exploited the tall tales collected from Iraqi defector codenamed “Curveball” to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
As this writer first reported in 2010, the appearance of the “dunce-cap” shape of the Shahab-3 reentry vehicle in the drawings was a tell-tale sign that the documents were fabricated. Whoever drew those schematic images in 2003 was clearly under the false impression that Iran was relying on the Shahab-3 as its main deterrent force. After all, Iran had announced publicly in 2001 that the Shahab-3 was going into “serial production” and in 2003 that it was “operational.”
But those official claims by Iran were a ruse aimed primarily at deceiving Israel, which had threatened air attacks on Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. In fact, Iran’s Defense Ministry was aware that the Shahab-3 did not have sufficient range to reach Israel.
According to Michael Elleman, the author of the most definitive account of the Iranian missile program, as early as 2000, Iran’s Defense Ministry had begun developing an improved version of the Shahab-3 with a reentry vehicle boasting a far more aerodynamic “triconic baby bottle” shape – not the “dunce-cap” of the original.
As Elleman told this writer, however, foreign intelligence agencies remained unaware of the new and improved Shahab missile with a very different shape until it took its first flight test in August 2004. Among the agencies kept in the dark about the new design was Israel’s Mossad. That explains why the false documents on redesigning the Shahab-3 – the earliest dates of which were in 2002, according to an unpublished internal IAEA document – showed a reentry vehicle design that Iran had already discarded.
The role of the MEK in passing the massive tranche of supposed secret Iranian nuclear documents to the BND and its hand-in-glove relationship with the Mossad leaves little room for doubt that the documents introduced to Western intelligence 2004 were, in fact, created by the Mossad.
For the Mossad, the MEK was a convenient unit for outsourcing negative press about Iran which it did not want attributed directly to Israeli intelligence. To enhance the MEK’S credibility in the eyes foreign media and intelligence agencies, Mossad passed the coordinates of Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility to the MEK in 2002. Later, it provided to the MEK personal information such as the passport number and home telephone number of Iranian physics professor Mohsen Fakhrizadh, whose name appeared in the nuclear documents, according to the co-authors of a best-selling Israeli book on the Mossad’s covert operations.
By trotting out the same discredited technical drawing depicting the wrong Iranian missile reentry vehicle – a trick he had previously deployed to create the original case for accusing Iran of covert nuclear weapons development – the Israeli prime minister showed how confident he was in his ability to hoodwink Washington and the Western corporate media.
Netanyahu’s multiple levels of deception have been remarkably successful, despite having relied on crude stunts that any diligent news organization should have seen through. Through his manipulation of foreign governments and media, he has been able to maneuver Donald Trump and the United States into a dangerous process of confrontation that has brought the US to the precipice of military conflict with Iran.
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist who has covered national security policy since 2005 and was the recipient of Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012. His most recent book is The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, just published in February.
Hopefulness Despite 2.9 Billion Lost Birds
By Jim Steele | Watts Up With That? | May 1, 2020
What’s Natural
In 2019 bird researchers published Rosenberg et al “Decline of the North American Avifauna”, reporting a decline in 57% of the bird species. They estimated a net loss of nearly 2.9 billion birds since 1970, and urged us to remedy the threats, claiming all were “exacerbated by climate change”, and we must stave off the “potential collapse of the continental avifauna.” Months before publication the researchers had organized an extensive media campaign. Typical doomsday media like the New York Times piled on with “Birds Are Vanishing From North America” and Scientific American wrote, “Silent Skies: Billions of North American Birds Have Vanished.”
As I have now been sheltering in place, I finally had ample time to thoroughly peruse Rosenberg’s study. I had a very personal interest in it, having professionally studied bird populations for over 20 years and had worked to restore their habitat. I also had conducted 20 years of surveys which were part of the study’s database. Carefully looking at their data, a far more optimistic perspective is needed. So here I join a chorus of other ecologists, as reported in Slate, that “There Is No Impending Bird Apocalypse”. As one ecologist wrote, it’s “not what’s really happening. I think it hurts the credibility of scientists.”
First consider since 1970 many species previously considered endangered such as pelicans, bald eagle, peregrine falcon, trumpeter swan, and whooping crane have been increasing due to enlightened management. Despite being hunted, ducks and geese increased by 54%. Secondly, just 12 of the 303 declining species account for the loss of 1.4 billion birds, and counterintuitively their decline is not worrisome.
Three introduced species – house sparrows, starlings and pigeons – account for nearly one half billion lost birds. These birds were pre-adapted to human habitat and are considered pests that carry disease and tarnish buildings and cars with their droppings. Across America, companies like Bird-B-Gone are hired to remove these foreign bird pests. Furthermore, starlings compete with native birds like bluebirds and flickers for nesting cavities, contributing to native bird declines. The removal of starlings is not an omen of an “avifauna collapse”, but good news for native birds.
When European colonists cleared forests to create pastures and farmland or provide wood for heating, open-habitat species “unnaturally” increased. Previously confined to the Great Plains, brown‑headed cowbirds quickly invaded the newly opened habitat. Unfortunately, cowbirds parasitize other species by laying its eggs in their nests. A cowbird hatchling then pushes out all other nestlings, killing the parasitized species’ next generation. The loss of 40 million cowbirds only benefits our “continental avifauna”.
Several bird species had evolved to colonize forest openings naturally produced by fire, or floods or high winds. Those species “unnaturally” boomed when 50% to 80% of northeastern United States became de-forested by 1900. Still, eastern trees will reclaim a forest opening within 20 years, so open habitat species require a constant supply of forest openings. However as marginal farms and pastures were abandoned, fires were suppressed and logging reduced, forests increasingly reclaimed those openings. With a 50% decline in forest openings, their bird species also declined; now approaching pre-colonial numbers. Accordingly, birds of the expanding forest interior like woodpeckers are now increasing.
White-throated Sparrows and Dark-eyed Juncos quickly colonize forest openings but then disappear within a few years as the forest recovers. Those 2 species alone accounted for the loss of another quarter of a billion birds; not because of an ecosystem collapse, but because forests were reclaiming human altered habitat. Nonetheless those species are still 400 million strong, and juncos remain abundant in the open habitat maintained by suburban back yards. If environmentalists want to reclaim the abundance of their boom years, they must manage forest openings with logging or prescribed burns.
Insect outbreaks also create forest openings. For hundreds of years forests across Canada and northeastern US have been decimated every few decades by spruce bud worm eruptions. So, forest managers now spray to limit further outbreaks. Today there are an estimated 111 million living Tennessee Warblers that have specialized to feed on spruce bud worms. But the warbler’s numbers have declined by 80 million because insect outbreaks are more controlled. Still they have never been threatened with extinction. Conservationists must determine what is a reasonable warbler abundance while still protecting forests from devastating insect infestations.
The grassland biome accounted for the greatest declines, about 700 million birds. Indeed, natural grasslands had been greatly reduced by centuries of expanding agriculture and grazing. But in recent times more efficient agriculture has allowed more land to revert to “natural” states. However fossil fuel fears reversed that trend. In 2005 federal fuel policies began instituting subsidies to encourage biofuel production. As a result, 17 million more acres of grassland have been converted to corn fields for ethanol since 2006.
Although still very abundant, just 3 species account for the loss of 400 million grassland birds: Horned Larks, Savannah Sparrows and Grasshopper Sparrows. Horned Larks alone accounted for 182 million fewer birds due to a loss of very short grass habitats with some bare ground. To increase their numbers, studies show more grazing, mowing or burning will increase their preferred habitat.
It must be emphasized that the reported cumulative loss of 2.9 billion birds since 1970, does not signify ecosystem collapses. But there are some legitimate concerns such as maintaining wetlands. And there are some serious human-caused problems we need to remedy to increase struggling bird populations. It is estimated that cats kill between 1 to 3 billion birds each year. Up to 1 billion birds each year die by crashing into the illusions created by window reflections. Collisions with cars and trucks likely kill 89 to 350 million birds a year. Instead of fearmongering ecosystem collapse, our avifauna would best be served by addressing those problems.
Questioning Bird Models
Population estimates for most land birds are based on data from the US Geological Surveys Breeding Bird Surveys (BBS). I conducted 2 BBS surveys on the Tahoe National Forest for 20 years. Each survey route consists of 50 stops, each a half‑mile apart. At each stop for a period of just 3 minutes, I would record all observed birds, the overwhelming majority of which are heard but not seen. Many birds can be missed in such a short time, but the BBS designers decided a 3-minute observation time allowed the day’s survey to cover more habitat. Each year on about the same date, the BBS survey was repeated.
Each BBS route surveys perhaps 1% the region’s landscape. To estimate each species’ population for the whole region, the survey’s observations are extrapolated and modeled. However, models rely on several assumptions and adjustments, and those assumptions can inflate final estimates. For example, in 2004 researchers estimated there were 6,500,000 Rufous Hummingbirds. By 2017, researchers estimated there were now 21,690,000. But that larger population cannot be deemed a conservation success. That tripling of abundance was mostly due to new adjustments.
Because singing males account for most observations, the number of observed birds is doubled to account for an unobserved female that is most likely nearby. Furthermore, it is assumed different species are more readily detected than others. The models assume that each stop will account for all the birds within a 400‑meter radius. Because a crow is readily detected over that distance, no adjustments are made to the number of observed crows. But hummingbirds are not so easily detected. The earlier surveys assumed a hummingbird could only be detected if it was within an 80‑meter radius. So, to standardize the observations to an area with a 400‑meter radius, observations were multiplied by 25. Recent survey models now assume hummingbirds can only be detected within 50 meters, so their observations are now adjusted by multiplying by 64.
Thus, depending on their detection adjustments, one real observation could generate 50 or 128 virtual hummingbirds. That number is further scaled up to account for the time‑of‑day effects and the likely number of birds in the region’s un-surveyed landscapes.
Setting aside assumptions about the regional homogeneity of birds’ habitat, one very real problem with these adjustments that has yet to be addressed. If one bird is no longer observed at a roadside stop, the model assumes that the other 127 virtual birds also died.
Survey routes are done along roadsides and up to 340 million birds are killed by vehicles each year. Many sparrows and warblers are ground nesters and will fly low to the ground. Many seed eating birds like finches will congregate along a roadside to ingest the small gravel needed to internally grind their seeds. Every year I watched a small flock of Evening Grosbeaks ingesting gravel from the shoulder of a country road, get picked off one by one by passing cars. Roadside vegetation often differs from off-road vegetation. Roads initially create openings that are suitable for one species but are gradually grown over during the lifetime of a survey to become unsuitable habitat. So, it should never be assumed that the loss of roadside observations represents a decline for the whole region.
The larger the models’ detectability adjustments are for a given species, the greater the probability that any declining trend in roadside observations will exaggerate a species population loss for the region. The greatest population losses were modeled for warblers and sparrows and most warbler and sparrow data are adjusted for detectability by multiplying actual observations 4 to 10-fold. It is worth reporting good news from recent studies in National Parks that used a much greater density of observation points and were not confined to roadsides. Their observation points were also much closer together and thus required fewer assumptions and adjustments. Of the 50 species they observed, all but 3 populations were stable.
Pushing a fake crisis, Rosenberg et al argued that declining numbers within a species that is still still very abundant doesn’t mean they are not threatened with a quick collapse. He highlighted the Passenger Pigeon was once one of the most abundant birds in North America and they quickly went extinct by 1914. That doomsday scenario was often repeated by the media. But comparison to the Passenger Pigeon’s demise is a false equivalency. Passenger Pigeons were hunted for food when people were suffering from much greater food insecurity.
Rosenberg et al summarized their study with one sentence: “Cumulative loss of nearly three billion birds since 1970, across most North American biomes, signals a pervasive and ongoing avifaunal crisis.” But it signals no such thing. Wise management will continue. With better accounting of the natural causes of each species declines, plus more accurate modeling, it will be seen that Rosenberg’s “crisis” was just another misleading apocalyptic story that further erodes public trust in us honest environmental scientists.
Jim Steele is director emeritus of the Sierra Nevada Field Campus, SFSU and authored Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism.
‘President Biden’ would not erase Trump’s concessions to Israel
By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | April 30, 2020
US Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden will not reverse the Trump administration’s unilateral decision to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem if elected president. “The move shouldn’t have happened in the context as it did, it should happen in the context of a larger deal to help us achieve important concessions for peace in the process,” he has declared.
From one US president to another, the Palestinian people can only ascertain for themselves the varying degrees of ongoing international capitulation to Israeli demands. Biden might have wished for a different context, but still requires concessions by the Palestinian leadership to the detriment of the people. Meanwhile, asserting that the embassy would remain in Jerusalem indicates that despite opposing US President Donald Trump’s actions in terms of context, Biden sees no obstacle for US foreign policy on Palestine in the decision.
Reopening the US consulate in occupied East Jerusalem “to engage the Palestinians” is the most that they can hope for in terms of diplomatic relations. This rhetoric ties in to the two-state compromise and diplomatic negotiations. According to advisor Tony Blinken, Biden would pursue the two-state diplomacy if elected, but only for Israel’s benefit. As reported in the Times of Israel, Blinken argued, “In many ways, pulling the plug on a two-state solution is pulling the plug, potentially, on an Israel that is not only secure but is Jewish an democratic – for the future. That’s not something any of us, who are ardent supporters of Israel, would like to see.”
If the US once again aligns itself with the two-state paradigm, the purported discord between Washington and the international community will be eliminated. However, a return to the defunct hypothesis does not include a reversal of the unilateral decisions which Trump has implemented. Israel’s gains will still be losses for the Palestinians regardless of who wins the presidential election.
Biden’s opposition to annexation must be analysed separately from his comments regarding the embassy relocation to Jerusalem. Disagreement does not equal a reversal of actions. Recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was the first step taken by the US in a series of political manoeuvres which paved the way for the current annexation plans. If Biden is stating that he will not consider reversing the embassy decision, he is signalling tacit approval for the momentum created by Trump to facilitate Israel’s colonial project in Palestine.
The international community has also played a treacherous game. In promoting two states as the only solution, it created an illusion of Trump being against the international consensus. However, the political disagreements will only be temporary. If the US elects a president who endorses the two-state paradigm, the international community will not refer to the unilateral US actions taken by the Trump administration, but rather focus on the US diplomatic engagement within international consensus post-Trump. There will be no effort to reclaim what Palestinians lost during Trump’s presidency, in much the same manner as the UN prefers to commemorate violations against the Palestinian people as opposed to upholding accountability and the right of return.
Moscow: UN Weapons Embargo on Iran Can’t Be Prolonged Despite US Efforts
Sputnik – April 30, 2020
The UN embargo on conventional weapons sales to Iran, which expires in October 2020, can’t be extended despite US efforts to prevent its expiration, the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister has stated.
“For us, the case of the existing ban on arms deliveries to and from Iran was closed with the adoption of Resolution 2231. The embargo regime expires in October this year”, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov stated.
Ryabkov went on to blame the US for its selective approach to Resolution 2231. He recalled that Washington itself had stopped adhering to its provisions two years ago and has since spared no effort to prevent other nations from remaining in compliance with the resolution by introducing unilateral sanctions.
“Instead of discussing which provisions of Resolution 2231 could be used to achieve certain political goals, the US would be better off ensuring the full and comprehensive implementation of the provisions of this resolution, and return to full compliance with the JCPOA”, the Deputy Foreign Minister added.
UN Resolution 2231 adopted back in 2015 alongside the Iran nuclear deal, prohibited the sale of conventional weapons to the Islamic Republic until 18 October 2020 and separately the sale of missiles until 2023. However, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated yesterday that Washington is planning to do anything in its power to extend the ban beyond October 2020 and will apply to the UN to do that.
Pompeo mulled resorting to a mechanism that renews international sanctions against the Islamic Republic by declaring that it violated the nuclear deal inked in 2015, but was later abandoned by the US in 2018. The secretary of state claims the US is still formally a party to the deal and that Washington will seek help from its European allies, signatories to the deal, in this matter. UN inspections, however, revealed that Iran complied with the deal as it promised in 2015.
Featured Video
Weaponized Journalism: 2021 Sayer Ji Interview with NPR
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
How Rothschild Banking Clan Uses Its Vast Wealth to Influence World Events and Control Governments
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 15.09.2024
How powerful is the Rothschild banking family? How did they amass their fortune? Just how rich are they? Do they secretly control the world? Sputnik explores. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- London tourism expo promotes Israeli agency linked to theft of Palestinian land
- Dockworkers launch global strike against Israeli and US military shipments
- Europe facing gas price shock – Gazprom chief
- Ukraine continues recruiting people with disabilities
- Weaponized Journalism: 2021 Sayer Ji Interview with NPR
- Beyond Netanyahu: what Israel’s election means for Palestinians
- Lithuania plans universal conscription
- Lies, Damn Lies, and Ukraine News
- Financial Times rejects Nordic demands to correct Putin call story – media
- The Case for Less Unity in Europe
- If Americans Knew
- The Long Arm of AIPAC
- Genocidal intent behind Hebron assault, rights group says
- This week, Israel killed 8-year-old who survived bombing that wiped out her family
- DAILY UPDATE: Latest essential news on Palestine, Israel, & region
- Israeli soldier poses at damaged Lebanon church, sparking anger
- New Report. Manufacturing the Great Replacement: Is Israel behind one of the largest racist influence campaigns ever documented?
- ‘Arab voice doesn’t count’: Jewish Israeli blocs reject Palestinian support
- Whether Bibi Stays or Goes, the ‘Special Relationship’ Must End
- AIPAC Isn’t Retreating. Here’s How It’s Already Shaping the Next Congress.
- With ‘Largest Coordinated Port Action Ever,’ Dockworkers in 22 Countries Strike Against Gaza Genocide
- No Tricks Zone
- Germany’s Green Energy Transition Becoming Increasingly Expensive…Another 6 Trillion Euros!
- Sudden Stratospheric Warming, Powerful El Niño Combination May Lead To Extreme Europe Cold, Energy Crisis!
- Two New Studies Find Thwaites Glacier Melt Cannot Be Driven By Human Activity Or A Warming Ocean
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
