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US shuts down ‘disinformation’ agency

RT | December 25, 2024

The US State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) has shut down after Republicans cut its funding. The agency was responsible for spreading propaganda abroad and, according to conservatives, censoring dissident thought at home.

The GEC announced on Monday that it would cease operations by the end of that day. “The State Department has consulted with Congress regarding next steps,” the statement added.

The organization employed around 120 people and had an annual budget of $61 million. Established in 2016, its stated goal was to “recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.”

In practice, the GEC spearheaded complex propaganda campaigns of its own. In two campaigns, the agency funded video games aimed at teaching children about the supposed dangers of anti-American narratives, releasing them in the UK, Ukraine, Latvia, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.

During the coronavirus pandemic, the GEC funneled money to a range of NGOs which then compiled lists of social media accounts supposedly spreading “disinformation” about the virus and its origins, which were then presented to the platforms to be banned or removed. Many of the accounts belonged to what Twitter’s former trust and safety chief, Yoel Roth, called “ordinary Americans,” raising concerns among conservatives that the GEC was violating its prohibition on operating within the US.

In 2023, the GEC was forced to cut ties with George Soros’ ‘Global Disinformation Initiative’, after it emerged that the agency was paying Soros’ organization to compile lists of “high risk” news outlets to use in an advertiser boycott campaign. These news sites were predominantly right-leaning and American-based.

X owner Elon Musk called the GEC a “threat to our democracy” last year, describing the agency as the “worst offender in US government censorship [and] media manipulation.”

Musk was instrumental in finally shutting down the GEC. A mammoth 1,547-page spending bill put before the House of Representatives by Speaker Mike Johnson last week would have preserved funding for the agency, until Musk threatened to fund primary election challenges to any Republican who voted for it.

Musk decried the bill – which also included pay raises for lawmakers – as “criminal,” “outrageous,” “unconscionable,” and ultimately “one of the worst bills ever written.” President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance then released a joint statement against the bill, forcing Johnson to replace it with a trimmed-down piece of legislation totaling less than 120 pages.

This Musk-approved bill failed in a 235-174 vote, with 38 Republicans joining 197 Democrats to block its passage. It eventually passed after Republicans added a section suspending the US debt ceiling for two years, a move that will add trillions more to the federal government’s $36 trillion debt.

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

Four Killed, 5 Injured in Ukraine’s Shelling of Lgov Town in Kursk Region

Sputnik – 25.12.2024

As a result of Ukraine’s shelling of the town Lgov in Russia’s Kursk Region four people have been killed and five have been injured, Governor Alexander Khinshtein said on Wednesday.

“According to preliminary information, three people were killed as a result of the barbaric shelling by the armed forces of Ukraine of the town of Lgov, and another person died later in hospital. Five victims were hospitalized, including one woman in serious condition. They are currently receiving all the necessary medical and psychological assistance,” Khinshtein said on Telegram.

Three residential buildings were seriously damaged, Khinshtein added.

“A five-storey residential building, two one-storey residential buildings, as well as a detached one-storey beauty salon were seriously damaged. Windows were blasted in neighboring private residential buildings, and at least 12 vehicles were damaged. Also, an insignificant section of the gas pipeline was destroyed due to the blast,” Khinstein said.

The operational headquarters of the government of the Kursk Region has been deployed in Lgov after the shelling, the governor added.

According to preliminary data, the attack was carried out using a HIMARS multiple launch rocket system (MLRS), a spokesperson for the military investigative authorities told Sputnik at the scene of the incident.

“During the inspection, fragments and shrapnel of a shell were discovered, presumably from a HIMARS MLRS. All of them will be seized and subsequently sent for examination to determine the specific type and kind of the shell,” the spokesperson said.

December 25, 2024 Posted by | War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Mauritian Prime Minister Rejects Blinken’s Call to Sign Deal With UK on Chagos – Reports

Sputnik – 25.12.2024

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged Mauritian Prime Minister Navinchandra Ramgoolam to sign the deal with the United Kingdom on the status of the Chagos archipelago, which was agreed by the previous Mauritian government, but he was refused, a news portal reported, citing sources.

Ramgoolam made it clear that he did not agree with the original agreement reached in October and told Blinken that he had sent a counter-offer to London, the report said on Tuesday.

The report noted that Ramgoolam thus confirmed his desire to achieve a better deal for Mauritius.

On October 3, the United Kingdom agreed to hand sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. Under the deal, the UK also promised to create a new trust fund and provide other support for the benefit of Chagossians, as well as to provide a package of financial support to Mauritius, including an “indexed annual payment for the duration of the agreement” and infrastructure investment, according to the UK-Mauritius joint statement. The UK however will retain control of the US-UK base on the Diego Garcia island for an initial period of 99 years. To enter into force, the deal must be ratified in the British parliament, which is expected next year.

Mauritius and the Chagos Islands had been colonial possessions of the British Crown since 1845. In 1968, Mauritius gained independence, but the islands remained a British overseas territory. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Chagos population was deported to the Seychelles and Mauritius. In 1966, the UK leased the largest island, Diego Garcia, to the United States for 50 years. The lease was extended for 20 years in 2016.

December 25, 2024 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

National Security Archive Publishes Key Records on Infamous MKULTRA Program

Agency Sought Drugs and Behavior Control Techniques to Use in “Special Interrogations” and Offensive Operations

Sidney Gottlieb’s CIA Personnel File, 1983 Deposition Testimony, Among Newly Available Documents

At the urging of Dr. Geschickter, the CIA provided $375,000 toward the construction of a new medical facility at Georgetown University Hospital. In return, Geschickter agreed to let the CIA use one-sixth of the new “Gorman Annex” as its “hospital safehouse” and to provide “human patients and volunteers for experimental use.”

Edited by Michael Evans | National Security Archive | December 23, 2024

Washington, D.C. – Today, the National Security Archive and ProQuest (part of Clarivate) celebrate the publication of a new scholarly document collection many years in the making on the shocking secret history of the CIA’s mind control research programs. The new collection, CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA, brings together more than 1,200 essential records on one of the most infamous and abusive programs in CIA history.

Under code names that included MKULTRA, BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, the CIA conducted terrifying experiments using drugs, hypnosis, isolation, sensory deprivation, and other extreme techniques on human subjects, often U.S. citizens, who frequently had no idea what was being done to them or that they were part of a CIA test.

Today’s announcement comes 50 years after a New York Times investigation by Seymour Hersh touched off probes that would bring MKULTRA abuses to light. The new collection also comes 70 years since U.S. pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Company first developed a process to streamline the manufacture of LSD in late 1954, becoming the CIA’s chief supplier of the newly discovered psychoactive chemical central to many of the Agency’s behavior control efforts.

Highlights of the new MKULTRA collection include:

  • A DCI-approved plan in 1950 for the establishment of “interrogation teams” that would “utilize the polygraph, drugs, and hypnotism to attain the greatest results in interrogation techniques.” (Document 2)
  • A 1951 memo that captures a meeting between CIA and foreign intelligence officials about mind control research and their shared interest in the concept of individual mind control. (Document 3)
  • A 1952 entry from the daily calendar of George White, a federal narcotics agent who ran a safehouse where the CIA tested drugs like LSD and performed other experiments on unwitting Americans. (Document 5)
  • A 1952 report on the “successful” use of ARTICHOKE interrogation methods that combined the use of “narcosis” and “hypnosis” to induce regression and later amnesia on “Russian agents suspected of being doubled.” (Document 6)
  • A 1956 memo in which MKULTRA chief Sidney Gottlieb signs off a project that would “evaluate the effects of large doses of LSD-25 in normal human volunteers” on federal prisoners in Atlanta. (Document 13)
  • The 1963 report from the CIA’s inspector general, which led CIA leadership to reexamine the use of unwitting Americans in their covert drug testing program. (Document 16)
  • The 1983 deposition of MKULTRA chief Sidney Gottlieb in a civil case brought by Velma “Val” Orlikow, a victim of CIA-sponsored projects conducted by Dr. Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. (Document 20)

The challenges facing this documentation project were considerable, as CIA director Richard Helms and longtime MKULTRA chief Sidney Gottlieb destroyed most of the original project records in 1973. It is a story about secrecy—perhaps the most infamous cover-up in the Agency’s history. It is also a history marked by near-total impunity at the institutional and individual levels for countless abuses committed across decades—not during interrogations of enemy agents or in wartime situations, but during ordinary medical treatments, inside prison hospitals, addiction clinics, and juvenile detention facilities, and in many cases led by top figures in the field of the behavioral sciences. Despite the Agency’s efforts to erase this hidden history, the documents that survived this purge and that have been gathered together here present a compelling and unsettling narrative of the CIA’s decades-long effort to discover and test ways to erase and re-program the human mind.

The bulk of these records were drawn from records compiled by John Marks, the former State Department official who filed the first Freedom of Information Act requests on the subject and whose 1979 book, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences (New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1979) remains the single most important source on this episode. Marks later donated his FOIA documents and other research papers to the National Security Archive. Many of the redactions in the documents have been effectively removed with the passage of time, as official investigations, civil depositions, and detailed histories have shed significant light on some of these episodes. In many cases, copies of declassified records donated by Marks to the National Security Archive bear his handwritten annotations.

The legacy of MKULTRA goes far beyond the various “subprojects” described in these documents and that were largely shut down by the mid-1970s. As author Stephen Kinzer points out, the CIA’s behavior control research programs “contributed decisively to the development of techniques that Americans and their allies used at detention centers in Vietnam, Latin America, Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and secret prisons around the world.” MKULTRA techniques were cited in the CIA’s 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual that was the basis for prisoner interrogations in Vietnam and later in anti-communist dictatorships in Latin America.[1]

While many of the MKULTRA projects were conducted in hospitals, laboratories, or other institutional settings, others were carried out in clandestine CIA safehouses staffed not by doctors or clinicians but by hard-nosed federal narcotics agents like George Hunter White. Under the direction of Gottlieb, White adopted the persona of a bohemian artist named “Morgan Hall” to lure unsuspecting victims to his “pad” where he and his CIA collaborators secretly experimented on them and recorded their behavior. An OSS veteran who had worked on “truth drug” development for the Army in World War II, White surreptitiously dosed many of his victims with LSD, a drug that the CIA had in abundance thanks to Eli Lilly, which had developed the capacity to produce the drug in “tonnage quantities” and had agreed to become the Agency’s supplier. Gottlieb, his deputy Robert Lashbrook, and CIA psychologist John Gittinger are among the CIA officials who frequently visited White’s safehouses.

Of particular interest is the mysterious 1953 death of Frank Olson, an Army chemist and aerosols specialist for the Special Operations Division (SOD) of the Army’s Chemical Corps, the CIA’s military partner in behavior control research. Officially ruled a suicide, Olson’s death from a 10-story fall in New York City came 10 days after Gottlieb and TSS staff spiked his cocktail with LSD during a CIA-SOD work retreat at Deep Creek Lake, Maryland. The drugging was later determined to have contributed to his death, but many, including members of his family, have questioned the conclusion that Olson—who was sharing a room with Lashbrook that night—threw himself out the window of the Statler Hotel.

At the center of it all was Sidney Gottlieb, the head of the Technical Services Staff (TSS) of the CIA’s Chemical Division and later director of the Technical Services Division (TSD). Gottlieb was “the CIA’s chief poison maker,” according to Kinzer, whose book, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (New York: Henry Holt, 2019), is the definitive work on the mercurial chemist. From his position deep inside the CIA’s secret corridors, Gottlieb led the Agency’s decades-long effort to find ways to use drugs, hypnosis, and other extreme methods to control human behavior and, it was hoped, turn them into usable tools for intelligence agencies and policymakers.

Stories about the CIA’s involvement in unsuccessful efforts to assassinate Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of Congo and Cuban leader Fidel Castro, among others, are among the most legendary, if not the most successful, examples of the Agency’s efforts to operationalize the tricks and tools assembled by Gottlieb’s unit. Less well known is his role in drug experiments and “special interrogation” programs that left hundreds of people psychologically damaged and others “permanently shattered,” according to Kinzer.[2]

Although MKULTRA was approved at the highest levels, it operated with virtually no oversight. As Marks notes, the initial MKULTRA budget authorization “exempted the program from the normal CIA financial controls” and “allowed TSS to start up research projects ‘without the signing of the usual contracts or other written agreements.’”[3] With little accountability, boundless resources, and the backing of CIA covert operations chief Richard Helms, Gottlieb and his staff at TSS developed a series of bizarre experiments that they believed would enhance covert intelligence operations while at the same time improving the Agency’s defenses against the use of similar techniques by enemy forces.

By the time Gottlieb arrived at CIA in 1952, Project BLUEBIRD, which explored “the possibility of control of an individual by application of Special Interrogation techniques,” was already well underway.[4] Led by Office of Security chief Morse Allen, the early BLUEBIRD experiments were performed by teams that included polygraph experts and psychologists and were conducted on detainees and suspected informants at secret U.S. interrogation facilities in Japan and Germany.

The elevation of Allen Dulles to deputy director of central intelligence in 1951 led to an expansion of BLUEBIRD programs under a new name, ARTICHOKE, and under the direction of Gottlieb at TSS. The new program was to include, among other projects, the development of “gas guns” and “poisons,” and experiments to test whether “monotonous sounds,” “concussion,” “electroshock,” and “induced sleep” could be used as a means to gain “hypnotic control of an individual.”[5]

It was under ARTICHOKE that the Agency first began to more systematically recruit the top researchers and court the most prestigious institutions to collaborate in its mind control research. One of the first to participate was the deputy director of Boston Psychopathic Hospital, Dr. Robert Hyde, who in 1949 was the first American to “trip” on LSD after the hospital acquired samples of the drug from Sandoz laboratory in Switzerland. In 1952, the CIA began to fund the hospital’s LSD research, under which Hyde used himself, his colleagues, student volunteers, and hospital patients as his subjects. Hyde would work on four MKULTRA subprojects over the next decade.

Shortly after Dulles became DCI in 1953, he authorized MKULTRA, expanding the Agency’s behavior control research and refocusing it on the development of “a capability in the covert use of biological and chemical materials” in “present and future clandestine operations.”[6] Many of the 149 MKULTRA subprojects were carried out through well-regarded universities like Cornell, Georgetown, Rutgers, Illinois, and Oklahoma. Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, the chairman of the Department of Pharmacology of Emory University, directed four MKULTRA subprojects, all of which involved the use of drugs, including LSD, to induce psychotic states. The horrifying series of experiments left many of his subjects—including prisoners at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary and juveniles housed at a detention facility in Bordentown, New Jersey—scarred for life.

Many other MKULTRA subprojects were established through grants from false foundations funded by the CIA. One of these, the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, run by Dr. Charles Geschickter, a professor of pathology at Georgetown University, steered millions of CIA dollars into research programs at Georgetown and other institutions. As part of the agreement, the CIA gained access to a medical safehouse at the newly constructed Gorman Annex of Georgetown University Hospital along with a ready supply of patients and students to use as subjects for MKULTRA experiments.

Another prominent MKULTRA “cutout” foundation, the Human Ecology Society, was run by Cornell Medical Center neurologist Dr. Harold Wolff, who wrote an early study of communist brainwashing techniques for Allen Dulles and later partnered with the CIA to develop a combination of drugs and sensory deprivation that could be used to erase the human mind. Among the most extreme MKULTRA projects funded through Wolff’s group were the infamous “depatterning” experiments conducted by Dr. D. Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute, a psychiatric hospital at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Cameron’s methods combined induced sleep, electroshocks, and “psychic driving,” under which drugged subjects were psychologically tortured for weeks or months in an effort to reprogram their minds.

These records also shed light on an especially dark period in the history of the behavioral sciences in which some of the top physicians in the field conducted research and experiments usually associated with the Nazi doctors who were tried at Nuremberg. While some medical professionals engaged by the CIA apparently struggled with the ethical issues raised by conducting harmful tests on unwitting human subjects, others were eager to participate in a program in which, according to one 1953 memo, “no area of the human mind is to be left unexplored.”[7] Just as CIA psychologists later oversaw the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and at CIA “black sites,” during the first decades of the 21st century, many of the doctors and clinicians recruited for MKULTRA work were leaders in the field, whose participation boosted the prestige of the program and drew others into it. Scholars and researchers looking at the involvement of psychologists and other medical professionals in the horrific U.S. detention and interrogation programs that have been exposed in recent years will find parallels and historical antecedents throughout this collection.

The collection is also of great value to those interested in learning more about the early years of the CIA and some of its major personalities, such as Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Richard Bissell, Franks Wisner, and others, who envisioned and created an intelligence agency that favored bold, often covert, action and where controversial projects like MKULTRA could secretly take root and flourish.

View the documents

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

Covid-19 Vaccines White Clots Results – 2024

Medical Embalmers Across The Country

Dr. John Campbell | December 21, 2024

Rumble

Former Air Force Major Thomas Haviland surveyed embalmers in 2024 about unusual clots being found in the bodies of vaccinated deceased.

NEW YORK – I’ve seen the clots vary from case to case, since the covid shot came around, we have had many young deaths i.e.: 50-60 year-olds with massive heart attacks and every one of them has had clots as discussed in this survey, seems many people just want to turn a blind eye to it all, it’s a shame. As someone who’s been around this for about 12 years, I have never seen anything like this.

VIRGINIA – I’m finding a lot of the white rubbery clots and had been taking pictures of them but it’s become the new normal… I don’t use a drain tube anymore because of all the clots. blood clots and the fibrous white ones. My angular forceps is my to go instrument to help remove them…

OHIO – The past few years I have seen a significantly larger percentage of clotting in almost all embalmings. These white fibrous clots are definitely unusual having never seen them before 2021. Although not seeing the white fibrous clots or micro clotting in a larger percentage of deceased, the number of grape jelly clots has significantly increased from years past in all decedents.

IDAHO – Sometimes I am given the information about if someone has had a certain vaccine. Sometimes I am aware they have had 5-6 doses of it. These are the people we are seeing with the abnormal clots or significant amount of clots.

FLORIDA – With many embalmings that I have seen these clots in, I have had to inject in multiple points. Both with case’s refrigerated and prep done within a couple of hours after death.

FLORIDA – Seems like traditional “chicken fat clots” are less frequent being replaced with Jelly, Fibrous, Micro-clotting.

IOWA – Very thick and large, I have had some the whole diameter of the arteries and longer than a foot long.

LOUISIANA – Some of these fibrous blots come out as a whole, if done carefully, that mimic the arterial system. These clots are clearly the cause of demise of these decedents, but were legally labeled as heart issues, which are not typically autopsied to fully determine actual cause of death.

NORTH DAKOTA – I have had SEVERAL cases in 2020-2023 of the white fibrous clots and most had COVID listed as a factor on their death certificates. However, in each case the family did not know if the decedent was vaccinated.

FLORIDA – Unusual clots has changed since COVID vaccine I only took 2 vaccine Pfizer refuse to take booster nor vaccine again.

Exclusive: 70% of Embalmers Report Finding Strange Blood Clots Beginning in Mid-2021
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/blood-clots-embalmers-report-mid-2021-covid-vaccines

Covid Vaccine Injury Global Study: http://www.react19.org/study

Covid vaccine injury medical expense fund: http://www.react19.org/donate

Original: https://youtu.be/sVpFs2VTgf8

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https://www.youtube.com/@Campbellteaching

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-john-campbell-5256223b

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Johnincarlisle

December 24, 2024 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | , | Leave a comment

Pentagon’s African Biolabs: Russia Warns of Global Pathogen Threat

Sputnik – 24.12.2024

The US military-biological presence on the African continent is growing at a rapid pace, Deputy Chief of the Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Forces of the Russian armed forces Major General Aleksey Rtishev said on Tuesday.

“The documents at our disposal confirm that the US military-biological presence on the African continent is increasing rapidly,” Rtishev told a briefing.
The United States deployed branches of naval military medical center in Ghana and Djibouti, Rtishev added.

“Active work in the region is being carried out by research organizations of the US Department of Defense. For example, branches of the military medical center of the naval forces are located in Ghana and Djibouti, where active work is being carried out in natural foci of diseases, isolation and sequencing of pathogens,” Rtishev said.

American specialists capable of enhancing the pathogenic functions of microorganisms are actively working in Africa, Rtishev said. He added that the US government views the region as a rich reservoir of dangerous infectious agents and a testing ground for experimental drugs, and Washington is using a biological risk management system in Africa that has already been tested in Georgia and Ukraine.

The US is actively engaged in:

  • Nigeria: A joint medical research center and a military medical laboratory for the armed forces were established in 2024.
  • Kenya: The US Army Military Medical Center has deployed a network of field stations to monitor the spread of infectious diseases throughout Equatorial Africa.
  • Senegal: A new $35 million laboratory facility is nearing completion. This project involves the same Pentagon contractors that have worked in the former Soviet Union, including Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine.
  • Ghana and Djibouti: The US. has established branches of the National Naval Medical Center and is actively addressing natural disease outbreaks and isolating pathogens.
  • The United States is conducting a project in 18 African countries to study the characteristics of infection occurrence and the resistance of pathogens to medical treatments.

According to Aleksey Rtishev, Washington is deliberately exploiting the economic challenges African nations face in the health sector to organize research initiatives, the general warns. Rtishev noted that the US fears that Russia and China could expose American military and biological programs.

The United States often does not disclose the ultimate goals of its experiments to partners, who are often unaware of the risks involved, he said.

December 24, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Frustrated by Incessant Missile Attacks, Israel Threatens to Start Assassinating Houthi Leaders

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 24.12.2024

Israeli terror bombing attacks targeting Yemen’s port and energy infrastructure and a year-long US-led naval deployment in the Red Sea at Tel Aviv’s urging have failed to deter Ansar Allah (better known as the Houthis) from launching increasingly impactful drone and missile attacks.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has threatened to start targeting the Houthis’ leaders.

“We will inflict a devastating blow to the Houthi terrorist organization in Yemen,” Katz said.

“Just as we took care of Sinwar in Gaza, Haniyeh in Tehran and Nasrallah in Beirut, we will deal with the heads of the Houthis in Sanaa or anywhere in Yemen,” Katz warned, referring to the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah assassinated by Israel this year. “We will act both against their infrastructure and against them to remove the threat.”

Katz also took a pot shot at Iran, whom the US and Israel have regularly accused of backing the Yemeni militia, warning that “whoever sponsors the Houthi terror in Hodeidah or Sanaa will pay the full price.”

Iran, which has long denied providing direct military support for the Houthis, said Tuesday that the militia’s operations have forced Israel and the US to alter their calculations.

“Even under the heaviest bombardments from the American-Israeli coalition, they target the heart of the occupied territories with their homemade missiles,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said at a press conference in Tehran. “The Yemenis have proven they need no external assistance. Despite dire economic and military conditions, they have stood firm and resisted,” he added.

The Israel Defense Forces reported early Tuesday morning that they had intercepted a Houthi missile outside Israel’s airspace. Sirens wailed across central Israel amid fears of the missile reaching its target, with over two dozen people injured (one seriously) while running for cover in the panic.

Houthi official Hezam al-Asad vowed the group would continue its attacks “until the aggression against our people in Gaza stops.”

On the diplomatic front, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar on Monday instructed Israel’s diplomats in the EU and the UK to label the Houthis as a terrorist organization (currently, only Israel, the US, several Gulf states, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Malaysia do so).

“The direct threat to freedom of navigation in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes is a challenge to the international community and the world order. The first and most basic thing is to define them as a terrorist organization,” Sa’ar said in the directive.

On Tuesday, Sa’ar sent a letter to US UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield asking her to convene an emergency session of the Security Council to condemn the Houthis for their “flagrant violation of international law.”

In addition to their drone and missile campaign, the Houthis have done major damage to Israel’s merchant shipping fleet by imposing a partial blockade of the Red and Arabian Seas targeting Israeli-linked and Israel-allied shipping.

A Houthi missile penetrated Israel’s much-touted missile defenses Saturday, injuring 16 people in Jaffa, just south of Tel Aviv. The IDF probe into the incident found that the warning system “was activated late for reasons that cannot be detailed.”

Another Houthi missile landed a direct hit in Tel Aviv last week, again overwhelming air defenses, with the militia characterizing the attack as their “natural and legitimate” right to respond to Israeli aggression.

The militia also scored a major PR victory against Israel’s US allies last week, reporting the shootdown of an F/A-18 jet during an attack on the USS Harry Truman supercarrier. The Pentagon said the jet was downed in a friendly fire incident. Whatever the case, the Houthis have confirmed kills of nearly a dozen US Reaper drones, and are known to have downed a number of US and NATO-made helicopters and fighter jets from the mid-2010s onward in their war against a US-backed Gulf State coalition.

December 24, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

Sednaya: Investigating Syria’s most notorious prison

The Cradle | December 24, 2024

When militants from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by former Al-Qaeda leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani – who now goes by his real name Ahmad al-Sharaa – finally toppled Bashar al-Assad’s government on 8 December 2024, they quickly released the prisoners in Sednaya. 

A flood of new media reports about the horrors of the prison quickly emerged.

But which reports about the crimes of Assad’s government are true, and which are fabricated as part of a new propaganda campaign to legitimize Julani’s rule and whitewash the opposition’s similar past atrocities?

Vast underground prison complex?

On 9 December, one day after Assad’s fall, The Guardian journalist William Christou was among the first journalists to reach Sednaya. 

Christou claimed that a day after Julani’s forces had taken control of the prison, a door had been found leading to a “vast underground complex, five stories deep, containing the last prisoners of the Assad regime, who were gasping for air.”

He reported rumors that there “were 1,500 prisoners trapped underground that needed rescuing; perhaps your loved ones are among them.” 

As a result, hundreds of panicked Syrians rushed to the prison, located 30 kilometers outside Damascus, to search for loved ones missing from the war. Due to the crowds, “Cars were ditched by the roadside and people began to walk,” Christou wrote.

In subsequent days, numerous fake videos professing to show prisoners in the underground complex went viral, while CNN journalist Clarissa Ward faked the discovery of a prisoner in a detention facility in Damascus.

“We came to see the prisons under the ground,” one woman wandering the halls of Sednaya told The Cradle during its visit to the prison. 

She said her brother had been missing since 2018. She first went to the Mezzeh military prison in Damascus, and now she was looking for any sign of him at Sednaya. 

However, despite efforts by the White Helmets and Turkish rescue organizations, no secret underground complex holding thousands of prisoners has been found.

During its visit to Sednaya, The Cradle was able to walk freely through the facility and verified that there is just one underground basement level containing small individual isolation cells and an adjoining toilet.

Human slaughterhouse?

In the days after Assad’s fall, more and more western journalists visited Sednaya and filed reports. Virtually all begin by citing a 2017 investigation by Amnesty International, which called the prison a “human slaughterhouse.” The investigation claimed up to 13,000 civilians were executed in mass hangings over a four-year period.

The US State Department tried to reinforce the findings of the Amnesty report by claiming the bodies of the executed were burned in a “crematorium” located in a building adjacent to the main prison.

However, the State Department gave zero proof of the crematorium, and no one has claimed to find it since the prison was opened.

Further, Amnesty’s report acknowledges the number killed was just an “estimate” (between 5,000 and 13,000) based on testimony from alleged former guards and prisoners taken by the rights group in Turkiye. The report said the mass execution process was “secret” but then somehow claimed to reveal its intimate details.

The report also ignores that the Syrian government was detaining people during this period in the context of facing an Al-Qaeda-led insurgency, including from the Nusra Front and ISIS.

When The Cradle asked a Syrian who is supportive of the opposition about his view of the Sednaya issue, he noted that the prison is Syria’s “Guantanamo.” In other words, the prison is reserved for high-security prisoners from Islamist armed groups detained on terrorism charges.

This is evident by the famous Sednaya prison uprising in 2008, in which primarily Islamist prisoners revolted against their guards.

But Amnesty claims that the prisoners were held in Sednaya and mass executed “as part of an attack against the civilian population.”

Iraqi and US forces have also long held large numbers of Al-Qaeda militants in prisons in Iraq, such as at Abu Ghraib. However, the fact that the Syrian government was holding Al-Qaeda militants in its prisons is somehow ignored by Amnesty and others.  

Psychological operations

Another question is whether the testimony of the former alleged prisoners and guards given to Amnesty in 2017 and to western media outlets after the prison was opened in 2024 is reliable. 

A Spanish journalist who visited Sednaya in the days after Assad’s fall told The Cradle that he was suspicious of the testimony given to him by alleged former prisoners. Fixers associated with Julani’s new government had arranged the interviews, he said, and some of the details of their testimony seemed too fantastic to be true. “But there was no way to verify if they were true or not,” the journalist said.

As a case in point, recent western media reports almost all include interviews with Omar al-Shogre, an alleged former Sednaya prisoner who was the star witness of the 2017 Amnesty report.

However, a close review of Shogre’s testimony shows it was clearly fabricated.

For example, he told Amnesty the guards would regularly force the prisoners to rape each other while being escorted from their cells to the bathroom.

“As we walked to the bathroom, [the guards] would select one of the boys, someone petite or young or fair. … They would then ask a bigger prisoner to rape him … No one will admit this happened to them, but it happened so often,” Shogre claimed.

However, during its visit to Sednaya, The Cradle observed that each cell has its own toilet and sink. In one cell, The Cradle observed items of clothing hanging on lines above the sink to dry after washing. There was no possibility that the guards were escorting prisoners out of their cells to go to the bathroom, as Shogre’s scenario claims. 

Over the years, Shogre has made many wild and completely implausible claims, which further undermine his credibility.

The Nation wrote that according to Shogre, “Guards would deliberately execute a prisoner right before serving inmates their only meal of the day, often placing the corpse’s head over the platter of food, so that it would bleed into the daily mound of bread and potatoes.”

The former prisoner’s fabrications have long been part of a broader propaganda campaign to impose crushing sanctions on Syria. 

Shogre works for the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a group established and funded by the US government to facilitate the overthrow of the Syrian government. SETF provided alleged non-lethal aid to US-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) groups that fought the Syrian army starting in 2011.

While working for the SETF, Shogre advocated for the US Congress to impose the Caesar sanctions on Syria, which helped strangle his home nation’s economy and resembled the US sanctions on Iraq, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in the 1990s.

The Caesar sanctions were themselves named after a psychological operation claiming that a Syrian military photographer had smuggled 55,000 photographs out of the country, documenting the torture and killing of some 11,000 detainees by the Syrian government.

But as journalist Rick Sterling observed, Human Rights Watch (HRW) acknowledged that almost half of the photos do not show people tortured to death by the Syrian government. Instead, they show dead Syrian soldiers and victims of car bombs and other violence from the opposition groups. Such deaths are normal for any government to document in a time of war.

Syria’s missing

Despite the propaganda surrounding Sednaya, there are many indications that the Syrian government detained large numbers of Syrians during the war who were either tortured to death or shot and killed. 

While in a restaurant in Damascus shortly after Assad’s fall, The Cradle witnessed two employees, a father and his son, emerge from the back room in tears. They told the owner and fellow staff that they had just received word that the names of their three uncles, taken by the government and missing since 2014, had been found in the records at Tishreen military hospital, confirming their deaths. 

One reason that many Syrians may have been detained and disappeared is because Syrian intelligence operated in many ways like a mafia. The feared ‘mukhabarat’ often abused their power to extract bribes from Syrians in many aspects of everyday life. 

One Syrian from Damascus told The Cradle that there was little rule of law in Syria. Instead, Syrians lived by the “rule of the phone numbers.” Your privileges and ability to protect yourself depended on whether you had the phone number of someone powerful to call if the local security agents tried to extort you, or worse. 

Those with money or political connections were often released, including those detained on terrorism charges, while others continued to rot in prison. As a result, many were tortured and killed.

Writing for Al-Akhbar in 2013, journalist Qassem Qassem stated it is an “undeniable fact” that the Palestinian filmmaker from the Yarmouk Palestinian camp in Damascus, Hassan Hassan, was “killed in the regime prisons.” He said that Hassan was not a terrorist or “takfiri,” and “never carried a gun nor blew himself up with an explosive vest,” but was killed anyway.

The “Repentance” prison

But in addition to those who disappeared or were tortured by the government, the armed opposition groups also tortured and disappeared huge numbers of people.

When asked about the issue of those gone missing in Assad’s prison, one Syrian from Aleppo told The Cradle that the militant groups fighting the former president ran mafia-style kidnapping rings of their own.

“The opposition, since the start of the war, has killed tens of thousands of Syrians, and the ones they didn’t bury in mass graves, they sent, in parts, to several families when the ransoms weren’t paid. Try also asking them where the missing are.”

While walking through Sednaya prison, The Cradle spoke with a man who was looking for his missing son – a commander in a militant opposition group called Burkan al-Sham in the eastern Ghouta area of Damascus.

The man said he and his son were accused of being Syrian government agents by another armed opposition group, the Saudi-backed Jaish al-Islam.

Led by Zahran Alloush, the son of a prominent Salafist preacher in Ghouta, the group was described by the UK foreign office as part of the “moderate armed opposition.”

The man told The Cradle that he and his son were both held at Jaish al-Islam’s “Tawba,” or “repentance,” prison in the town of Duma, in the Ghouta region. He said they were tortured in ways “worse than in Sednaya.” 

The father said he was later released, but his son remains missing. He later heard rumors his son had ended up in a government prison in Mezzeh. After looking there and finding nothing, he came to Sednaya to search.

Pro-opposition Enab Baladi reported in 2017 that while there is a large network of activists in Duma, there are no accurate statistics on the number of detainees in Tawba.

Abu Khaled, a 31-year-old media activist from Duma, told the outlet he was surprised by the absence of such reports.

“Random arrests take place all around Eastern Ghouta,” he stated. These prisons, especially Tawba, “are as bad as those of the Syrian regime, and, according to former prisoners, many detainees stay in prisons for months without trial.”

“A man’s body was recently returned to his family three days after his arrest,” pro-opposition Syria Direct reported in 2017. “Jaish al-Islam directly threatened them, telling them that if they spoke to the media or published pictures of the body, they would all be killed.”

Julani’s prisons

Abu Mohammad al-Julani’s Nusra Front also imprisoned and tortured many Syrians. We know this from the testimony of Theo Padnos. A freelance journalist from the US, Padnos was kidnapped by the FSA in 2012 and handed over to Nusra. He remained a hostage for two years before Qatar paid a large ransom to release him.

While imprisoned at the Eye Hospital, the Nusra guards beat and shocked the journalist with an electric cattle prod. Other prisoners were hung by their wrists from ceiling pipes. Their feet mimicked the riding of a bicycle in the air. 

When Julani’s Nusra conquered Idlib province in 2015 and formed a National Salvation government, the group established new prisons where torture was also common.

An opposition media activist, Jawdat Malas, was imprisoned by the group in a dark and dirty cell, Enab Baladi reported.

For hours every day, he would be tortured until his body was heavily bruised. “I reached a point where I was constipated. My whole body was dark blue,” he said. “Other detainees were taking care of me. I had no idea what I did wrong. I was terrified.”

In April 2020, Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ) issued a report stating that women were detained and killed in Idlib, including for “insulting deity,” “espionage” for the benefit of the Syrian army, and “adultery.”

Conclusion

No one in Syria now knows what the future holds. But what is sure is that Syrians have suffered from more than a decade of horrific war and economic sanctions. Violence has been inflicted on Syrian civilians by the former government under Bashar al-Assad, but also by the foreign-backed extremist groups who functioned as tools of the US and its allies to topple Assad. Most crucial to recall is that the vast majority of this violence occurred after 2011, when the US launched its covert war on Syria on Israel’s behalf.

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

The Case for Dismantling the Rules-Based International Order

By Professor Glenn Diesen | December 23, 2024

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

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

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

Constructing the hegemonic rules-based international order

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

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

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

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

Uniform rules replaced with a tribunal of public opinion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MRNA VACCINES POSE ONGOING CONCERNS IN CHILDREN

The HighWire with Del Bigtree | December 19, 2024

A new pediatric study on the effectiveness of the COVID vaccinations on children aged 6 months to 4 years in age has a shocking conclusion. Meanwhile, Moderna is developing an mRNA vaccine for RSV for children that has undergone several safety pauses because of severe injury to babies.

December 23, 2024 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | | Leave a comment

American Tax Dollars: $4.8M for Ukrainian Influencers

Sputnik – 23.12.2024

The US State Department spent nearly $5 million on Ukrainian influencers, a move highlighted by Republican Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky as one of the most absurd expenditures by the US government in 2024.

Despite American taxpayers providing nearly $174 billion in aid and military assistance to Kiev since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, “someone over at State thought it was a brilliant idea to drop an additional $4.8 million for ‘Ukraine public affairs – Influencer Staff’,” Paul noted in his annual Festivus Report on government waste.

The senator urged a return to “serious diplomacy” instead of relying on social media strategies, emphasizing that many American taxpayers struggling to meet their basic needs are funding this spending on Ukraine.

Paul said it is “baffling” to see the US government burning through taxpayer dollars at a time when Americans are “scraping by.”

In total, the 41-page report covers over $1 trillion in what the senator describes as “government waste.”

Earlier, in an interview with NBC News, US President-elect Donald Trump remarked that under his administration, Kiev is unlikely to receive the same levels of aid it enjoyed during Joe Biden’s presidency.

December 23, 2024 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

Fact-checking Fortune: Has Polio Vaccine Saved 20 Million Children From Paralysis?

The Defender | December 23, 2024

A Dec. 13 article in Fortune called the polio vaccine used in the U.S. today “not only safe but also effective.”

The article also claimed that because 3 billion children have been vaccinated against polio since 1988, according to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, that means “20 million people who would’ve otherwise been paralyzed by polio are walking today.”

How accurate is the 20 million figure?

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) website, in 1988, there were 350,000 reported polio cases worldwide in a global population of 5.1 billion people. If, as the WHO website states, “One in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis,” that would amount to 1,750 cases of irreversible paralysis linked to polio in 1988.

Using that figure — 1,750 cases in 1988 — and factoring in 1.2% annual population growth, the estimated number of cases of irreversible paralysis between 1988 and 2024 would total approximately 80,910 — not 20 million, as Fortune reported.

Here are four other facts about polio vaccines the Fortune article doesn’t address.

1. Polio vaccines used in U.S. don’t prevent infection or transmission.

According to Fortune, the polio vaccine is “safe and effective.” Here’s why that statement oversimplifies the issue of polio vaccines and leads to misleading conclusions.

There are two kinds of polio vaccines used in the world today, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They are the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) and the oral polio vaccine (OPV).

The OPV is used for mass vaccination campaigns of children outside the U.S., as was recently done in Gaza. However, the U.S. exclusively uses IPV polio vaccines, according to the CDC.

The IPV products, which are injected, contain an inactivated — or dead — poliovirus. According to the CDC, the IPV protects against “severe disease caused by poliovirus” but “does not stop transmission.”

According to the Polio Global Eradication Initiative, the IPV also doesn’t prevent infection.

Two stand-alone IPV products are licensed in the U.S. by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Both are manufactured by Sanofi. The other five are combination vaccines that target polio plus other illnesses, including diptheria, pertussis and tetanus.

One of the two stand-alone IPV products, Poliovax, was discontinued. The FDA page on licensed polio vaccines doesn’t explain why.

That leaves IPOL as the sole stand-alone polio vaccine licensed in the U.S.

2. Global polio vaccine campaigns can lead to ‘vaccine-derived’ polio outbreaks. 

As its name suggests, the “oral polio” vaccine, or OPV — used only outside the U.S. — is delivered orally. The OPV contains a weakened vaccine-virus that activates an immune response in the body, according to the WHO.

Unlike the IPV products used in the U.S., the OPV prevents transmission, according to the CDC and the WHO. However, the weakened vaccine-virus used in the OPV can cause polio variant outbreaks.

The CDC states that the U.S. stopped using OPV “to eliminate the risk of polio variants that can occur with OPV.”

According to the WHO, the continued use of the OPV “poses a risk to wiping out the disease” because the weakened vaccine-virus originally contained in the OPV can begin to circulate among people who didn’t get the vaccine.

“When this happens,” the WHO said, “if it is allowed to circulate for sufficiently long enough time, it may genetically revert to a ‘strong’ virus, able to cause paralysis, resulting in what is known as circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses.”

Vaccine-derived polioviruses were responsible for the recently reported cases of polio in Gaza and the 2022 case reported in New York.

In March 2023, seven children were paralyzed by vaccine-derived polio linked to the novel oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2) developed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, according to health officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.

In other words, the viral infections in these cases resulted from exposure to the vaccine-virus used in the OPV — not from exposure to a naturally occurring, or “wild,” strain of the poliovirus.

The last wild poliovirus case reported in the U.S. was in 1979, according to the CDC.

3. Risk of paralysis from poliovirus infection is roughly 0.001%.

Approximately 90-95% of poliovirus infections are asymptomatic, according to the FDA package insert for IPOL, the only stand-alone IPV product used in the U.S. The package insert also provides general information on polio, including this:

“Nonspecific illness with low-grade fever and sore throat (minor illness) occurs in 4% to 8% of infections. Aseptic meningitis occurs in 1% to 5% of patients a few days after the minor illness has resolved.

“Rapid onset of asymmetric acute flaccid paralysis occurs in 0.1% to 2% of infections, and residual paralytic disease involving motor neurons (paralytic poliomyelitis) occurs in approximately 1 per 1,000 infections.”

In other words, according to the FDA, the risk of becoming paralyzed as a result of a poliovirus infection is roughly 0.001%.

4. All polio vaccines used today are genetically modified.

Unlike the original polio vaccines developed in the early 1950s by Dr. Jonas Salk and Dr. Albert Sabin, the IPV and OPV being administered today are genetically modified.

In 2020, the WHO authorized a new genetically modified OPV for emergency use in polio outbreaks. According to a 2023 article in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, nOPV2 was developed through a global partnership between public health, governmental, philanthropic and nonprofit organizations, including the Gates Foundation.

IPOL, the only stand-alone polio vaccine used in the U.S., uses technology that involves growing the poliovirus on monkey kidney cells whose chromones were modified to cause them to multiply forever.

In 2022, attorney Aaron Siri, on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, petitioned the FDA to “withdraw or suspend the approval for IPOL for infants, toddlers, and children until a properly controlled and properly powered double-blind trial of sufficient duration is conducted to assess the safety of this product.”

The petition stated that modified monkey kidney cells “are susceptible to infection by dozens of viruses, including HPV, measles, rubella, reovirus, SV40 virus, and SV-5.”

According to the petition, Sanofi’s IPOL vaccine hasn’t been adequately proven safe because the clinical trials relied on for licensing the product did not include a control group and declared the vaccine safe after following the trial participants for up to only  three days after injection.

The FDA has not withdrawn or suspended its approval of IPOL as requested by Siri, and the agency continues to rely on the existing clinical trials and the agency’s own safety assessment lasting only up to three days.

The CDC recommends children receive four doses of IPOL, starting at age 2 months. The second dose is given at 4 months. The third is given at 6-18 months, and the fourth is given anytime between 4 and 6 years.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

This article is part of a series of articles by The Defender responding to the latest media coverage of vaccines, triggered by the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

December 23, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

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