McCarthyism, European style: The elite crackdown on Ukraine dissent
Experts lambasted as Kremlin mouthpieces turned out to be right
By Eldar Mamedov | Responsible Statecraft | December 12, 2024
As the war between Russia and Ukraine is framed by the ruling politicians and commentators in Europe and America as part of a purported global struggle between democracies and autocracies, the quality of democracy in the West itself has taken a hit.
The dominant voices advocating for Ukraine’s victory and Russia’s defeat, both defined in maximalist and increasingly unattainable terms, are intent on snuffing out more thoughtful and nuanced perspectives, thus depriving the public of a democratic debate on the existential questions of war and peace.
In a familiar pattern throughout the West, respected academics who correctly predicted the quagmire Ukraine and the West now find themselves in have been smeared and delegitimized as Kremlin mouthpieces, subjected to harassment, marginalization and ostracism.
The situation is particularly alarming in Europe. While the Ukraine debate in the U.S. is, to a worrying extent, shaped by pro-militarist think tanks, such as the Atlantic Council, hawkish politicians and neoconservative pundits, a countervailing movement consisting of pro-restraint voices has been growing. They include Defense Priorities, the CATO Institute, publications like The Nation on the left, and The American Conservative on the right, and academics like Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer, and Jeffrey Sachs, among others. There is more space for alternative voices in American discourse.
In Europe, by contrast, foreign policy debates tend to simply echo the most hawkish voices inside Washington’s Beltway.
Sweden is a particularly telling illustration of that trend. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Swedish government and political class swiftly moved to join NATO. Yet, as one of the leading Swedish international relations scholars Frida Stranne told me in an interview, “No proper debate was held on the key questions, like whether Russia’s aggression against Ukraine indeed was such an immediate security threat for Sweden that it had to ditch the neutral status it enjoyed even during the Cold War?” (I can testify myself, from my work as a senior foreign policy adviser in the European Parliament in early 2022, that even some members of the then-ruling Swedish social-democratic party were aghast at the government running roughshod over alternative views on NATO).
Further, in a conversation with me, Stranne, while acknowledging that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “an egregious breach of international law,” pointed to U.S. policies since 2001, such as the invasion of Iraq, noting that they “have helped to undermine international legal principles and set the precedent for other countries acting ‘preemptively’ against perceived threats.”
In the same interview, she also warned that “a refusal to countenance a negotiated settlement to the war in Ukraine is leading the world perilously close to the brink of a major military conflict between NATO and Russia.”
While such points are routinely made by fairly mainstream scholars in the U.S., in Sweden they triggered a vicious campaign against Stranne and made her nearly untouchable by the media and in foreign policy circles. Leading media outlets vilified her as a U.S. hater and a “Putinist.”
Germany is another example of how enforced groupthink led to a marginalization of dissenting perspectives in political debates. What is particularly noteworthy is the speed and radicalism with which the hawks in think tanks, media, and political parties managed to redefine the debate in a country previously known for its now-defunct Ostpolitik, a policy of pragmatic engagement with the Soviet Union and later Russia.
One of Germany’s most prominent foreign policy experts, Johannes Varwick of the University Halle-Wittenberg, has long defied the trend and advocated for diplomacy. In December 2021, together with a number of high-ranking former military officers, diplomats and academics, he warned that a massive deterioration in relations with Russia could lead to war — due, in part, to the West’s refusal to take seriously Russia’s security concerns, chiefly related to the prospects of NATO’s eastward expansion.
Yet such views earned Varwick accusations of “serving Russian interests.” As a result, as he told me in an interview, his “ties with the political parties and ministries responsible for conducting Germany’s foreign and security policy were severed.”
Experts in neutral countries were not spared marginalization as well. Austrian Prof. Gerhard Mangott, one of the most eminent experts on Russia in the German-speaking world, pointed to a “shared responsibility” of Russia, Ukraine, and Western countries for the failure to resolve the post-2014 Ukrainian conflict peacefully. Such analysis, as Mangott told me, led to his “prompt excommunication by the German-speaking scientific community which turned quickly to political activism and became party to the war.”
The tragic irony, of course, is that these ostracized voices have proved to be correct in most respects about this war.
When, despite his warnings, the Russian invasion of Ukraine did occur, Varwick, who condemned it as illegal and unacceptable, called for further efforts to find a realistic negotiated solution to the conflict. As he told me, this should “firstly include a neutral status for Ukraine with strong security guarantees for the country. Secondly, there would be territorial changes in Ukraine that would not be recognized under international law but must be accepted as a temporary modus vivendi, and thirdly, the prospect of suspension of some sanctions in the event of a change in Russia’s behavior must be on offer.”
In March 2022, both Ukraine and Russia were close to a deal broadly along these same parameters. It did not work, because, among other reasons, the West encouraged Ukraine to believe that a military “victory” was possible. The role of then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in undermining the talks is now generally acknowledged. What is, however, particularly striking is that Johnson recently himself admitted that he saw the war in Ukraine as a proxy war against Russia — a claim made by Stranne and the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi in their 2023 book, in Swedish, “The Illusion of American Peace,” for which they were lambasted for purportedly pushing Russian narratives.
Fast forward to late 2024, and, faced with growing difficulties on the battlefield, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky is now signaling that he could go along with some of the elements outlined by Varwick; namely, accepting some de facto territorial losses to prevent even bigger ones should the war continue.
Today, Ukraine is farther away from achieving anything remotely resembling a military victory than at any point since February 2022. Contrary to the expectations in the U.S. and EU, sanctions neither tanked Russia’s economy nor changed its policies in the ways the West sought.
In the West itself, political forces that urge negotiations to end the war are ascendant, as evidenced by the election of Donald Trump as president in the United States and the rise of anti-war parties in Germany, France and other EU countries. Public opinion surveys consistently show a preference of the majority of Europeans for a negotiated end to the war.
The reality is, irrespective of the outcome of the war in Ukraine, a modus vivendi between the West and Russia will have to be reestablished to ensure, in Varwick’s words, “their coexistence in a Cold War 2.0 without a permanent escalation.” Restoring an open democratic debate about this vital issue is long overdue.
Listening to the experts who have a proven track record of correct analysis would be a necessary first step.
Eldar Mamedov is a Brussels-based foreign policy expert.
How To Fake An Alien Invasion (2015)
Corbett | December 23, 2024
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FROM 2015: We all know about the crude pie-plate-on-string UFO hoaxes that have been perpetrated in the past. But what if I were to tell you the greatest UFO hoax of all time is being prepared right now, and it has Rockefeller backing and UN/Vatican/presidential support? Join us this week as we peek under the bluebeam curtain at the great alien invasion false flag.
Original Post: Episode 301 – How to Fake an Alien Invasion
TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:
JAMES CORBETT: Welcome back to The Corbett Report, ladies and gentlemen. I’m your host, James Corbett of corbettreport.com, podcasting to you as always from the sunny climes of western Japan, here on this 5th day of February 2015.
Welcome to Episode 301 of The Corbett Report: How to Fake an Alien Invasion.
Now, you’d better be careful who’s watching over your shoulder today, because we are about to broach one of the most top-secret, ultra-classified pieces of information in the entire conspiracy pantheon. A subject so sensitive that its mere exposure threatens to topple the power pyramid itself and, as a result, is never talked about in the establishment mouthpiece media. I’m referring of course to the topic of . . . [whisper] aliens.
Just what was in the skies over Jerusalem, and why did it stop over one of the most treasured sites in Christianity?
SOURCE: Female Anchor Scared Of UFO Sighting Over Jerusalem’s Dome Of The Rock
We bring you this special radio television broadcast in order to give you the very latest information on an amazing phenomenon: the arrival of a spaceship in Washington. The army has taken every precaution to meet any emergency which may develop. Just a minute, ladies and gentlemen, I think something is happening . . .
What’s hovering over Salt Lake City? Is it a rocket? A blimp? A UFO?
SOURCE: A Giant UFO Over Salt Lake City
PRESENTER: Former government UFO expert is warning that Britain is wide open to alien visitors and that the consequences of not monitoring extraterrestrials could be huge. Nick Pope, who resigned from the Ministry of Defense UFO Project, says the department looking into UFOs has all but closed down and despite a higher number of credible sightings. Let’s speak to Nick Pope. He joins us in the studio. . . .
SOURCE: BBC Warns of Alien Invasion
PRESENTER: . . . you want to meet this guy. Joining us now are team leader James Fox, one of the nation’s top UFO experts, and Erin Ryder, who is in charge of tech and recon for this series. Good morning to both of you.
JAMES FOX/ERIN RYDER: Good morning.
FEMALE REPORTER: This is a ufologist? Is that what the actual . . .?
JAMES FOX: So they say.
SOURCE: CBS: UFOs Mounting Preponderance of Evidence & Government Cover Up!
“AWA 517, do you want to report a UFO? Over.”
“Negative. We don’t want a report.”
“Aries 31, do you wish to report a UFO? Over.”
“Negative. We don’t want to report one of those, either.”
“Aries 31, do you wish to file a report of any kind? Over.”
“I wouldn’t know what kind of report to file.”
“Aries 31, me neither. I’ll try to track traffic at destination. Over.”
SOURCE: (Close Encounters) Indianapolis Air Traffic Control detects the UFOs
ADRIENNE MOORE: While the family knows their story sounds out of this world, they are convinced they witnessed a close encounter and will be keeping a watchful eye on the sky.
STACEY GIBSON: I think we’re definitely believers now.
SOURCE: UFO near San Diego — El Cajon, California — CBS News
Sorry, my mistake, my mistake. No, this is clearly a subject that is propounded time and again ad nauseam in the establishment mouthpiece media—that same media that we know is lying to us about most major world events, either through direct lying or lying by omission.
So, why are they not omitting this little idea from the cultural context? Why are they constantly returning to the idea of “alien presence,” “alien cover-up,” “alien invasion,” “alien threat”?
Why is this propounded so often, not just in the news media but also in those cultural entertainment productions that I hope we understand are, in the end, a product of the culture-creation industry that has been predictably programming us for decades—generations, perhaps—to accept various memes and ideas, including this idea of “alien invasion,” “alien threat” and the fallout and consequences thereof?
It is a theme that has been returned to time and time and time and time and time again for the better part of the century by this point. It’s almost as if the billionaire power players at the top of this pyramid are actually connected to an idea to implant this idea of alien invasion in the public consciousness for the purpose of manipulating public opinion. And that’s because . . . they are connected to such an agenda, demonstrably so.
RADIO NEWSCASTER (archival): Ladies and gentlemen, here is the latest bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News, Toronto, Canada: Professor Morris of Macmillan University reports observing a total of three explosions on the planet Mars between the hours of 7:45 PM and 9:20 PM Eastern Standard Time. This confirms earlier reports received from American observatories. Now, nearer home, comes a special bulletin from Trenton, New Jersey. It is reported that at 8:50 PM a huge flaming object, believed to be a meteorite, fell on a farm in the neighborhood of Grovers Mill, New Jersey, twenty-two miles from Trenton. The flash in the sky was visible within a radius of several hundred miles, and the noise of the impact was heard as far north as Elizabeth.
NARRATOR: Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds. Never before had a radio broadcast provoked such outrage—or such chaos. Upwards of a million people convinced, if only briefly, that the United States was being laid waste by alien invaders, and a nation left to wonder how they possibly could’ve been so gullible.
By a quarter past eight Eastern time, telephones were ringing madly all across the country, as concerned Americans tried to determine the whereabouts of relatives, warn friends and acquaintances, and most of all, corroborate what they were hearing.
MAN ON THE PHONE (archival): City Desk. A what?? Wait a minute.
NARRATOR: For the next several hours, newspapers, radio stations and police precincts from coast to coast would be swamped with calls.
MAN ON THE PHONE (archival): Well, I can’t help that, ma’am, we just don’t know anything about it. Did I say something about a quiet Sunday evening?
SECOND MAN (archival): What’s going on, anyway?
NARRATOR: Soon, strange bulletins began coming in over the press service wires. In Bergenfield, New Jersey, just north of Grovers Mill, some twenty families turned up at a police station, with all of their household possessions piled into their cars. In Indianapolis, a woman rushed to the pulpit in a Methodist church, shouting that the end of the world had come. And in Washington state, a spectacularly ill-timed power failure plunged the small town of Concrete into darkness and sent terrified residents fleeing into the mountains.
RADIO NEWSCASTER (archival): The battle which took place tonight at Grover Mills has ended in one of the most startling defeats ever suffered by an army in modern times: 7,000 men armed with rifles and machine guns pitted against a single fighting machine of the invaders from Mars. One hundred and twenty known survivors . . .
SEYMOUR CHARLES HAYDEN (archival): Well, my wife, she came in, my wife did, just wringing her hands and wailing away, her eyeballs about to pop out onto her lap, going, “What is it? What is it? What could it be? Is it the Germans?” Well, she hadn’t heard the word “Martians,” but I had.
RADIO NEWSCASTER (archival): . . . There’s a brief statement informing us that the charred body of Carl Phillips has been identified in a Trenton hospital.
DAVID ROEPIK (archival): We think that we’re really smart, but if there’s a cue out there that could possibly be dangerous, we’re going to react to it protectively, autonomically, instinctively—fear first, and reason and fact second.
SOURCE: War of the Worlds: The Panic Broadcast | PBS America
Now, I’m sure that the majority of the listening and viewing audience will be familiar with the story of Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 radio dramatization of the famous H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds and the resulting hysteria and panic that ensued, driving people insane, believing there to be a real alien invasion taking place, and farmers running out into the fields shooting at grain silos and the like. That story is a fascinating one for a number of reasons—namely, because it is a confluence of different events in world history at that time that had a very interesting and profound effect on shaping an entire field of study.
This relates to the advent of mass communication technologies like the radio, which was still, to some extent, in its infancy as a broadcast medium at that time, capable of reaching across a nation as wide and diverse as America and reaching many millions of people at the same time and inducing this kind of mass panic and psychosis.
It is interesting to study in that regard. So, it is not surprising that it was immediately made the subject of such a study, funded by—who else? The Rockefellers. We can take more on this from a very, very important article that was published on GlobalResearch.ca back in 2012: Early ‘Psychological Warfare’ Research and the Rockefeller Foundation by Prof. James Tracy.
Reading from that article:
The “founding fathers” of mass communication research could not have established their field without Rockefeller largesse. Alongside World War One propagandist and University of Chicago political scientist Harold Lasswell, psychologist Hadley Cantril was a principal contributor to the knowledge and information that helped propel Rockefeller-controlled enterprises and American empire in the postwar era. Throughout this period Cantril provided the Rockefeller combine with important information and new techniques in public opinion measurement and management in Europe, Latin American, and the United States.
A roommate of Nelson Rockefeller’s at Dartmouth College in the late 1920s, Cantril took a doctorate in psychology at Harvard, coauthoring The Psychology of Radio with his doctoral mentor Gordon Allport in 1935. “Radio is an altogether novel medium of communication,” Cantril and Allport observed, “preeminent as a means of social control and epochal in its influence upon the mental horizons of men.”
The work garnered the attention of Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Division officer John Marshall, commissioned by the Foundation with convincing commercial broadcasters to include more educational programming into their advertiser-driven schedules. To this end Rockefeller was funding fellowships at the CBS and NBC broadcasting networks.
Aware of the Dartmouth connection, Marshall encouraged the enterprising Cantril to apply to the Foundation for support. Cantril’s request resulted in a $67,000 grant for a two-year charter of the “Princeton Radio Project” (PRP) at Princeton University. There Cantril proceeded to develop studies assessing radio’s effects on audiences. In 1938 Cantril also became a founding editor of the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Public Opinion Quarterly, an organ closely associated with US government’s psychological warfare endeavors following World War Two.
When the Princeton venture commenced, another trained psychologist close to Rockefeller, CBS Director of Research Frank Stanton, was named PRP lead researcher but took a secondary role of Associate Director due to his position at his broadcast network. At this time Austrian émigré social scientist Paul Lazarsfeld was recruited to join Cantril. Thus Cantril, Stanton, and Lazarsfeld were closely affiliated and ideally positioned to embark on a major study involving public opinion and persuasion.
The opportunity for such an analysis presented itself when CBS broadcast Orson Welles’ rendering of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds on October 30, 1938. Lazarsfeld saw the event as especially noteworthy and immediately asked Stanton for CBS funds to investigate reaction to what at the time was the largest immediate act of mass persuasion in human history. Over the next several months interviews with War of the Worlds listeners were collected, provided to Stanton at CBS, and subsequently analyzed in Cantril’s 1940 study, The Invasion From Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic.
SOURCE: Early ‘Psychological Warfare’ Research and the Rockefeller Foundation
A fascinating little tidbit from history, I trust that you’ll agree. And if you do, I hope you’ll go and follow the link in the show notes to that original article so you can continue reading about Hadley Cantril’s adventures providing studies and information about psychological persuasion to the Rockefeller Foundation and how that developed and contributed to world psychological warfare techniques for the US Army and things of that nature.
I think it is interesting to see this confluence of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds becoming a radio dramatization, which incites this mass panic, the largest immediate act of mass persuasion in human history, which is then studied by the Princeton Radio Project backed up by the Rockefeller Foundation.
But you could argue that that’s a tangential connection or just a coincidental connection—that this doesn’t mean that the Rockefellers are interested in mass persuasion in terms of alien invasion per se, it’s just that that was the immediate proximate cause of this particular study.
So, you might fruitfully ask, “Are there any other connections between the Rockefellers and this idea of faking an alien invasion or an alien presence of some sort?” And the answer is: yes! Yes, there is such evidence . . .
RESEARCHER ANTONIO HUNEEUS: Mr. Rockefeller backed many UFO-related projects in the period between the late ’80s and 2000. But, for the purposes of this hearing, we will concentrate on his political initiatives in these areas.
Laurance Rockefeller’s first forays into ufology started sometime in the late ’80s through Dr. Cecil B. Scott Jones, a parapsychologist and former US Navy Commander who had worked as naval attaché́ in Asia and at the Naval Scientific and Technical Intelligence Center. Between 1985 and 1991, Jones was Special Assistant to Sen. Claiborne Pell (1918–2009), the powerful Rhode Island Democrat Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1987–1994) who was deeply interested in parapsychology and who probably many of you met personally. Sen. Pell was also friends with Laurance Rockefeller, and both served on the board of the Human Potential Foundation, a small think tank launched in 1989 in Vienna, Virginia, by Jones to conduct “research into all conditions of humankind: physiological, psychological and spiritual.”
Many of the papers released by the White House OSTP [Office of Science and Technology Policy] come from Scott Jones, who knew Dr. John Gibbons, a physicist who worked for many years as Director of the Office of Technology Assessment for the US Congress and was appointed in 1993 by the Clinton administration to direct the OSTP.
What was the exact turning point of Laurance Rockefeller’s evolution from a general interest in consciousness studies into the specific area of UFOs and Extraterrestrial Intelligence is still unclear. But the end of the Cold War and the arrival in Washington of a younger generation represented by Bill and Hillary Clinton are key factors. He felt the time was ripe for a new and fresh approach into an area that had been previously dominated by a Cold War mentality.
Rockefeller recruited for these efforts a long-time associate, Henry L. Diamond, an environmental attorney from Washington, D.C., whose links to the family went all the way back to the 1960s, when he worked with Laurance in his conservation activities. Diamond also knew John Gibbons, and so he was the right person to make the first contact with the OSTP chief when he sent a Memorandum on March 29, 1993, requesting a meeting. I’m quoting now the first paragraph:
“Laurance S. Rockefeller, who is a leading US conservationist, businessman, and philanthropist, is anxious to have a brief meeting with Dr. Gibbons to discuss the potential availability of government information about unidentified flying objects and extraterrestrial life. As one who has had a long-time interest in environmental and spiritual issues, Mr. Rockefeller, with other leading citizens, is planning to make an approach to President Clinton on this subject . . . .”
STEPHEN BASSETT: I invite all of the political media, all media in general but certainly the political media, to look at the Rockefeller Initiative. It is one of the stories in American history—it’s one of the great political stories, certainly in this or any other time. It is filled with amazing people who are still around and still very powerful.
At the time that Rockefeller approached, through his attorney, President Clinton, Clinton’s key adviser—or one of his very key advisors—was John Podesta. The Chief of Staff at the time was Leon Panetta. The wife of the President at the time was Hillary Clinton. A good friend of the family at the time, soon to be Clinton’s Secretary of Energy, was Bill Richardson. This Initiative went on for six years. The press completely ignored it, as if “What’s the news there? It’s just a billionaire Rockefeller trying to get the President to release all the files on these phenomena. Possibly put a letter into every newspaper in the country, and release . . . and basically end the Truth Embargo. There’s no news there.”
SOURCE: Citizens Hearing April 29th Steven Bassett Rockefeller Initiative and John Podesta or Annotated Proceedings of the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure [PDF])
Now, for those of you not immersed in the topic of the Disclosure Movement, you may not be familiar with some of these names and faces. But some of the main ones to take note of are Dr. Stephen Bassett, who founded and ran something called the Paradigm Research Group at ParadigmResearchGroup.org. He defines himself as a political activist, lobbyist, commentator, the executive director of Paradigm Research Group and the Extra-Terrestrial Phenomena Politicalist Action Committee, and executive producer of the X Conference: The Citizens Hearing on Disclosure and the Congressional Hearing Initiative, and Dr. Steven Greer, who runs something called the Disclosure Project. He describes himself as “The Father of the Disclosure Movement” and the person who presided over the groundbreaking National Press Club Disclosure Event in May of 2001.
So, these are some of the biggest names if not the biggest names in this Disclosure Movement. And, well, they don’t really make a secret of the fact that the Rockefellers are . . . well, specifically Laurance Rockefeller was a big help in getting this movement launched back in the mid-1990s. We can document this. In order to do so, let’s turn to a very important website, which I will commend to your attention. I hope you guys out there have . . . well, I know some of you have already found it and have emailed me about it.
I have found it myself, and it seems that the author of this website and I are in accord on a number of our political views—especially the overall way in which the BRICS—China and Russia—and other aspects of the New World Order system are being used as the good cop in a good cop/bad cop system.
Also on this subject of the UFO Disclosure Movement, [there is] a very important article called “Why are the Rockefellers and the Jesuits guiding the UFO disclosure movement?” at RedefiningGod.com. I will put the link in the show notes so you can go and follow it.
Reading from that article:
The Rockefeller role in getting the Disclosure ball rolling is something of an open secret among the Disclosure people (the Disclosuristas, as I call them). On Stephen Bassett’s own Research Group website, a specific Rockefeller effort referred to as the “Rockefeller Initiative” is openly touted. The same effort is also touted on Steven Greer’s Disclosure Project website as “Project Starlight” . . . .
“This letter from the Project Starlight Coalition was the result of the historic Asilomar, California, meeting that Dr. Greer organized and Laurance Rockefeller paid for in June 1995, just before Clinton’s meeting with Rockefeller in August 1995.”
[. . .]
Who is Laurance Rockefeller? Well, according to Laurance Rockefeller’s biography:
In 1937 he inherited his grandfather’s seat on the New York Stock Exchange. He served as founding trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund for 42 years, from its inception in 1940 to 1982. During this time, he also served as its president (1958 to 1968) and later its chairman (1968 to 1980) for 22 years, longer than any other leader in the Fund’s history. He was also a founding trustee of the Rockefeller Family Fund from 1967 to 1977.
SOURCE: Why are the Rockefellers and the Jesuits guiding the UFO Disclosure Movement?
So, not only was Laurance deeply involved in the financial industry, but he was also among the founders of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Rockefeller Family Fund. These funds are notorious for advancing globalist aims under the pretense of ‘philanthropy.’ Laurance also served on the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s Special Studies Project.” End quote.
Now, I’ll let you continue reading about that Special Studies Project and the interesting fact that even now, four decades after the publication of the final report, The Prospect for America: The Rockefeller Panel Reports, certain sections of that report are still classified, which is interesting in and of itself. But there are also screenshots of some of the pages of this report shown here in this very important article talking about how they are steering America towards shaping a new world order and things that you would expect to find in a typical Rockefeller study.
I suppose the point here is to emphasize that Laurance Rockefeller is very much in the heart of the Rockefeller matrix, pushing this global government agenda, which David Rockefeller so gleefully admitted to in his memoirs, as I’m sure we all know—or we all should know by now.
And I would again suggest you go to see this original article, if for no other reason than to click on such things as The Rockefeller Initiative or the Disclosure Project’s own Project Starlight’s page, where you can browse through and see all of the main characters who are connected through this Initiative that ran from 1993 to 1996. They include, of course, President Clinton and Laurance Rockefeller, along with Hillary [Clinton] and Dr. John Gibbons and John Podesta and Vice President Al Gore and this cast of Congress critters and [other] very unsavoury characters—including Dr. Steven Greer, the aforementioned “Father of the Disclosure Movement.”
All of these letters are archived here online, so you can read through them all and the various correspondence between some of the players, including between Laurance Rockefeller and John Gibbons and between Laurance Rockefeller and the Clintons.
I mean, this is a pretty interesting and openly admitted non-secret—that the Disclosure Movement was really launched with the aid of Laurance Rockefeller and the Clinton administration. So, I think that should at least get our antennas up toward the possibility that this is going to be used towards the furtherance of some sort of staged or faked alien invasion.
Now, that sounds like an outlandish prospect to those poor souls coming in from mainstream media land who are just landing on this site randomly. I hope you will be able to at least appreciate that there might be a reason why the very rich and powerful and well-connected would be interested in doing something as ridiculous and outlandish— I agree with you there—as staging some sort of alien threat, alien presence—whatever it may be.
But there are reasons why this might be done, and these aren’t reasons we have to speculate on. We can find all of the usual suspects talking about these reasons in all of the usual places, with the big ones—global religion, global finance and global government—uniting the world around this perceived alien threat.
FATHER JOHN MORRIS, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: What is exceptional is that the Vatican was taking very seriously what science might tell us about the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligent life forms. That’s what the conference was about. I can’t tell you that the Vatican found any alien life. I don’t think that’s what they were looking for, but they were taking very seriously the issue.
TRISHA THOMAS, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS: We probably won’t be seeing aliens at Mass anytime soon, but the Vatican’s chief astronomer does say that there could exist other forms of life outside Earth, and he says if they do exist they are God’s creatures.
SOURCE: The Vatican’s Take on Aliens?
INTERVIEWER: So, how does this actually work? When Discovery [Channel] decided they were going to do a show on alien invasions, your phone rings because you’re sort of on the speed dial for theoretical physicists who can help them do the war game for how this might play out?
DR. MICHIO KAKU: Well, believe it or not, we physicists have actually studied the question of what happens if we do encounter a hostile advanced civilization in space, and Hollywood gets it all wrong. Hollywood assumes that the aliens are maybe a hundred years more advanced than us and that if only we had a secret weapon, we could defeat the aliens. Wrong. Either the aliens don’t bother with us because we’re simply too primitive or, if they do invade, it’ll be more like Bambi versus Godzilla.”
REPORTER: Now the United Nations is getting ready for contact with aliens from outer space. This is Mazlan Othman. She’s out of Malaysia. She will be planet Earth’s first interstellar diplomat.”
MAZLAN OTHMAN: First, I have to categorically deny that I was appointed or will be appointed the ambassador for aliens, the ambassador for the United Nations for aliens. No, the committee is not discussing this very . . . this subject matter. But yes, I was in the UK to attend a meeting—which I can quote to you—called “Towards a Scientific and Societal Agenda on Extraterrestrial Life,” which is why this whole thing came about, because the British press caught hold of the fact that I was going to be at this meeting, and I was on a panel that was discussing . . . they call it the Great Panel Debate. I like that name. It says: “Extraterrestrial Life and Arising Political Issues for the UN Agenda.”
SOURCE: Dr. Mazlan Othman z ONZ na temat debaty w sprawie UFO (UN ET panel debate at UK) – napisy PL
PAUL KRUGMAN: It’s very hard to get inflation in a depressed economy, but if you had a program of government spending plus an expansionary policy by the Fed, you could get that. So, if you think about using all of these things together, you could accomplish a great deal. If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive build-up to counter this space alien threat, and inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. And then, if we discovered, “Whoops, we’ve made a mistake. There actually aren’t any space aliens . . .”
PROFESSOR KENNETH ROGOF: We need Orson Welles, is what you’re saying . . .
PAUL KRUGMAN: No, there was a Twilight Zone episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time . . . we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.”
RONALD REAGAN: Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.
SOURCE: Reagan’s ALIEN speech to UN
BILL PULLMAN (AS “PRESIDENT THOMAS J. WHITMORE”): And should we win, the day the 4th of July will no longer be known as an American holiday but as the day when the world declared in one voice, “We will not go quietly into the night. We will not vanish without a fight We’re going to live on. We’re going to survive. Today we celebrate our Independence Day.”
SOURCE: Independence Day
JIMMY KIMMEL: If you saw that there were aliens there, would you tell us?
BILL CLINTON: Yeah.
KIMMEL: You would?
CLINTON: I would. I think, look, what do we know? We know now we live in an ever-expanding universe. We know that there are billions of stars and planets literally out there. And the universe is getting bigger. We know from our fancy telescopes that just in the last two years more than twenty planets have been identified outside our solar system that seem to be far enough away from their sun and dense enough that they might be able to support some form of life. So, it makes it increasingly less likely we are alone.
KIMMEL: Oh, you’re trying to give me a hint that there are aliens.
CLINTON: No, I’m trying to tell you I don’t know, but if we were visited someday, I wouldn’t be surprised. I just hope that it’s not like Independence Day. That it, you know—a conflict. Maybe that’s the only way to unite this increasingly divided world of ours. If they’re out there, we’d better think of how all the differences among people on earth would seem small if we felt threatened by a space invader. That’s the whole theory of Independence Day: everybody gets together and makes nice and you know . . .
KIMMEL: You and Bill O’Reilly would be hiding in a bunker together . . .
SOURCE: Bill Clinton Talks About The Coming FAKE Alien Invasion — April 1st 2014
What an interesting milieu of characters we have floating around there. We have the Vatican and the UN and Nobel Prize-winning economist/Keynesian wingnut Paul Krugman and multiple presidents of the United States—and all of these people talking about the same thing: “Wouldn’t it be great if we had this idea of an alien threat that would unite us all behind . . . fill in the blank . . . a world government or a world financial system or baptizing the aliens. Wouldn’t that be wonderful!”
And it’s interesting to look at this. I mean, I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday. I understand and can smell the public preparation for some sort of staged event when I see one, and, well, if it looks and smells and quacks like a false flag operation, it probably is one.
Being supported by some of the most prominent and powerful and well-connected political and financial elites, clearly there is something very, very stinky here. In order to really understand this stink . . . again, we know why this would potentially be a valuable thing for these “power elites” to consolidate their power in a world government or what have you.
But the question is: could they do it? If so, how could they do it? These are important questions that we need to address if we want to really approach the subject. And, I guess, if we’re going to address it, we have two different routes we can take. We can go down the unverifiable, unsourceable, unfalsifiable, undocumented route, or we can go down the sourced, verified, falsifiable documented route. Me being me, I’m going to go down the sourced, falsifiable, documented route. But if you want to go down that unsourced, unknowable, unverifiable route, you can go, for example, with something called Project Blue Beam.
Now, Project Blue Beam is something I’m sure most of the listeners out there have heard of at some point—at least in a vague sense—as some sort of plan that was uncovered. There must be documents backing this up—talking about staging an alien invasion with holograms in order to create a world government. Something along those lines.
Well, if you really want to open the Pandora’s Box of Project Blue Beam, it’s much more specific than that and, well, somewhat more outlandish and much less documented than you might expect.
This really all dates back and sources back to one particular French Canadian journalist, Serge Monast, who was talking in the mid-1990s about this Project Blue Beam—this NASA project that he had uncovered and was unveiling to the public. It had a multiple stage process for creating a world religion, world government—world tyranny. This involved the induction of earthquakes in order to expose archaeological finds—manipulated, planted archaeological finds—that would change our view of human history and a staged extraterrestrial invasion and the appearance of a new Messiah to be the head of this world religion and the imposition of UN World Government, etcetera. This is a detailed plan that was talked about, but there is literally no document behind this. There is no NASA secret paper that was ever exposed about this. It really all sources back to this Serge Monast and a couple of interviews that are available online.
There’s a transcript of a speech. There’s a translation of what I guess is some sort of summary of a book he apparently wrote on this subject. He did write a book, apparently in French, on this subject, but it’s never been reprinted, and it’s basically unobtainable. There are a couple of different translations of something that may have sourced from this book, more or less, but that’s basically it. I mean, there are just a few scraps. And from those scraps there’s been a lot of talk, and a lot of people have run with this idea. But I think not a lot of people know where it actually sources from.
I will put some links in the show notes, so you can actually follow them and read about them and come to your own conclusion: “Is this worth following?” and “Why should we believe this particular piece of information?” Call me a doubting Thomas. I’ll believe it when I see something, anything documentable, verifiable in terms of this plan.
If we want to go down the other route and look at actual verifiable, sourced and knowable technologies that we know exist, let alone those technologies that we don’t know exist that are being worked on in the skunkworks of DARPA, down in the bowels of the Pentagon—and for more on DARPA I’ll direct you to a previous Corbett Report radio episode, where we talked about DARPA and its various projects—we can source that in a number of different ways, from a number of different, seemingly disparate threads, but definitely technologies that we now know exist.
One place to start: we can get the clue from the book by previous Corbett Report guest James Perloff, Truth Is A Lonely Warrior, where he talks about an Air Force military publication that was available on the Air Force website. You can still access it on the Wayback Machine. The link will be in the show notes. This is about an airborne holographic projector which, this AF.MIL website notes, is:
” . . . a three-dimensional visual image in the desired location, removed from the display generator. The projector can be used for psychological operations and strategic perception management. It is also useful for optical deception and cloaking, providing a momentary distraction when engaging an unsophisticated adversary.”
SOURCE: Airborne Holographic Projector
You can see the unsophisticated visualization that is accompanying this on the website itself. But, yes, very crudely, it’s a plane projecting an image of another plane elsewhere in the sky. Now that is a very crude implementation of this type of holographic technology that, at the very least, would be required for making the world believe we were under some sort of alien invasion threat or what-have-you, but that is twenty years old now and sources from an Air Force military website.
I’m thinking that the actual technology would be somewhat more advanced. But we don’t have to speculate about that. We can take a look at the very real developments in technology, including such incredible things as beaming sound directly into people’s ears, touchable holograms, and being able to manipulate people’s perceptions and incite fear and panic through brain wave technology.
PRESENTER: “The ultimate weapon in the infowar would be so secret, so invisible, so undetectable, you would never know your mind was under attack. At Laurentian University in Ontario, Canada, a young student is about to undergo one of the strangest experiences of her life. They’re hooking Denise’s brain up to an electroencephalograph, or EEG machine. For thirty to forty minutes, this will monitor her brain waves while these electric coils attached on either side of her head will immerse her brain in an electromagnetic field. Her brain actually completes the circuit between the two coils. The field pulsing through her brain is less powerful than one given off by a digital clock radio. But, acutely controlled and focused on specific parts of the brain, it will open Denise’s mind to outside suggestion by this man. Dr. Michael Persinger is a professor of psychology and neuroscience. He is designing ways to put the power of mind control to good use. Dr. Persinger’s research focuses on brain trauma, and he uses carefully controlled doses of electromagnetic radiation to induce relaxation and alleviate pain.
DR. PERSINGER: So what Sandra did was to initiate an opiate-releasing pattern. That’s a burst-firing field that is stimulated once every four seconds and that produces relaxation and a very pleasant sensation. Similarly, using the appropriate field we can induce fear and apprehension, but clearly that would be unethical in that setting.
PRESENTER: Dr. Persinger’s tests suggest that carefully programmed electromagnetic frequencies can tap into individual brains and influence people’s emotions.
DR. PERSINGER: The cognitive processes of the human brain are really quite simple. And, if you understand how they work, you can make entire populations think and decide in the manner which you wish.
PRESENTER: Many experts are skeptical of such an Orwellian scenario, but Persinger thinks the implications are chillingly real.
DR. PERSINGER: Suppose you generate a field that produces fear—fundamental fear—in large numbers of people, and then over the television or in traditional ways you say, “The reason we’re having this fear is because of this particular group.” Now you start to move the population, believing in a direction that you wish.
PRESENTER: To influence 250 million people, the equivalent of the entire population of the United States, may not be difficult. According to Dr. Persinger, we already have the technology—satellites and television and radio transmitters. Mind control may already be happening. We know the mysterious psyops plane can beam persuasive sounds and pictures into people’s television sets. Will it someday beam disturbing frequencies directly into the mind?”
PRESENTER: First, your voice is transformed into high-frequency ultrasound—a sound so high no one can hear it. Ultrasound is highly directional, so, like a torch, it can be pointed at someone standing a long way away. Although they cannot hear the ultrasound, it causes secondary vibrations in the air around them, and it’s that sound the person hears.
DR. JOSEPH POMPEI: So, if you imagine you’re in a room and I shine a flashlight at you, it’s very bright for you but it’s very dark for everybody else. Much the same way, the audio spotlight creates a very narrow beam of sound that can shine at a listener. They hear it very clearly, and it doesn’t create noise that might bother other people in the same space.
SOURCE: Voice to Skull Time
PRESENTER: Researchers at Tokyo University have come up with the technology that is a first and significant step away from the mouse and keyboard: touchable holograms.
HIROYUKI SHINODA (translated): Up until now, holography has been for the eyes only. If you tried to touch it, your hand would go right through. But now we have the technology that also adds the sensation of touch to holograms.”
Now, look, I’m not necessarily saying that there’s going to be a staged alien invasion tomorrow and that we should all be concentrating on this, nor am I saying that there is no such thing as alien life in the universe. I would be shocked, flabbergasted, if there was not. Whether or not it’s visiting Earth well, what do I know? How do I know? I mean, I haven’t seen it myself, but does that mean it doesn’t exist? Well, of course not.
I’ll let you guys . . . you’re grown-up boys and girls out there. I’m sure you can decide for yourself on things like that. But we should know that there is a coordinated plan, or an agenda in place, to capitalize on such things as fake alien invasions that is being funded and promoted by the financial power elite at the top of the pyramid and is being promoted and pushed out into the cultural sphere by the politicians and economists and the Vatican and the UN, and then, underneath them, the culture-creators in the entertainment industry, to prepare the public for such a possibility. And we should be on guard against such manipulations.
These technologies that are now coming together . . . the ones that we know about, let alone the ones that are secretly in development that we don’t have access to . . . are clearly along the path towards making such an event possible.
You can look at something like the Norway spiral and believe the official response—that this was a Russian ICBM test that went awry. If you believe that, I have a bridge on the moon to sell you.
But all of these are just different pieces of the puzzle. I think they add up to something very interesting and something that is potentially coming sometime in the future.
Even if this particular instantiation—this fake alien invasion or what have you—doesn’t come together, still, the concept of psychological manipulation through manipulated events in manipulated reality is an important one—obviously one that we have to continue to keep in mind. Now that the technology for making these events possible is more and more a documentable reality, I think we should have our mental guards up for such eventualities.
So, that’s, I think, where we’re going to leave things today.
This is an open-source investigation. I invite and encourage and applaud the input of all of you out there. So, if you are a Corbett Report member, please do leave your comments on the website with any relevant links or information. Any comments, questions, complaints, criticisms, concerns or otherwise—all invited at corbettreport.com.
Once again, I’m your host James Corbett of corbettreport.com thanking you for joining me for this edition of The Corbett Report podcast and inviting you to join me again next week.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Covid-19 Vaccines White Clots Results – 2024
Medical Embalmers Across The Country
Dr. John Campbell | December 21, 2024
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
Covid Vaccine Injury Global Study: http://www.react19.org/study
Covid vaccine injury medical expense fund: http://www.react19.org/donate
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Shattered Dreams: The HPV Vaccine Exposed (2019)
By Christina England – 30 Q&As – Book Review & Summary
Lies are Unbekoming | September 4, 2026
… Gardasil received FDA fast-track approval in 2006, Cervarix followed in 2009, and Gardasil 9 was approved in December 2014 with more than double the aluminium adjuvant content of the original. The commercial context is specific. Merck was about to lose patent protection on Zocor and faced $18 billion in Vioxx injury claims from a cardiovascular drug the company had marketed while suppressing its own data showing a five-times increase in heart attacks. Analysts projected the global HPV vaccine market at $4 billion by 2011, contingent on government-funded national programs for teenage girls. The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act had already granted manufacturers complete liability immunity. By 2013, Japan had withdrawn its HPV vaccine recommendation after cataloguing severe adverse reactions in hundreds of girls. No Western government followed. The establishment position across the UK, US, Australia, and most of Europe held, and still holds, that the vaccines are safe and effective, that reported injuries are coincidental, and that cervical cancer prevention justifies the program. The book was published into this position, not against a vacuum.
Shattered Dreams sits alongside Mary Holland’s The HPV Vaccine On Trial and Viera Scheibner’s foundational vaccination work as part of the documented record on what has been done to a generation of teenage girls under the banner of cancer prevention. The full summary unpacks three specific findings: that Merck used the aluminium adjuvant itself as the “placebo” control in 92.5% of trial subjects, making it structurally impossible to detect excess reactions from the adjuvant; that Dr. Sin Hang Lee found HPV DNA fragments bound to aluminium in every one of sixteen Gardasil samples tested, and in the blood and spleen of a New Zealand girl six months after her third dose; and that in every country with high vaccination coverage, including Australia, the UK, Norway, and Sweden, cervical cancer rates have stopped declining and started rising specifically in the vaccinated cohort. Martínez-Lavín’s 2017 calculation puts the number needed to seriously harm with Gardasil 9 at 140, and the number needed to vaccinate to prevent one case at 1,757. Thirteen young women are seriously harmed for every one who benefits. The vaccine was approved on the basis of trials that could not detect what the trials were supposed to detect, and it is still being given to twelve-year-olds today. … Read full review
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