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.
American Tax Dollars: $4.8M for Ukrainian Influencers
Sputnik – 23.12.2024
The US State Department spent nearly $5 million on Ukrainian influencers, a move highlighted by Republican Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky as one of the most absurd expenditures by the US government in 2024.
Despite American taxpayers providing nearly $174 billion in aid and military assistance to Kiev since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, “someone over at State thought it was a brilliant idea to drop an additional $4.8 million for ‘Ukraine public affairs – Influencer Staff’,” Paul noted in his annual Festivus Report on government waste.
The senator urged a return to “serious diplomacy” instead of relying on social media strategies, emphasizing that many American taxpayers struggling to meet their basic needs are funding this spending on Ukraine.
Paul said it is “baffling” to see the US government burning through taxpayer dollars at a time when Americans are “scraping by.”
In total, the 41-page report covers over $1 trillion in what the senator describes as “government waste.”
Earlier, in an interview with NBC News, US President-elect Donald Trump remarked that under his administration, Kiev is unlikely to receive the same levels of aid it enjoyed during Joe Biden’s presidency.
Fact-checking Fortune: Has Polio Vaccine Saved 20 Million Children From Paralysis?
The Defender | December 23, 2024
A Dec. 13 article in Fortune called the polio vaccine used in the U.S. today “not only safe but also effective.”
The article also claimed that because 3 billion children have been vaccinated against polio since 1988, according to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, that means “20 million people who would’ve otherwise been paralyzed by polio are walking today.”
How accurate is the 20 million figure?
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) website, in 1988, there were 350,000 reported polio cases worldwide in a global population of 5.1 billion people. If, as the WHO website states, “One in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis,” that would amount to 1,750 cases of irreversible paralysis linked to polio in 1988.
Using that figure — 1,750 cases in 1988 — and factoring in 1.2% annual population growth, the estimated number of cases of irreversible paralysis between 1988 and 2024 would total approximately 80,910 — not 20 million, as Fortune reported.
Here are four other facts about polio vaccines the Fortune article doesn’t address.
1. Polio vaccines used in U.S. don’t prevent infection or transmission.
According to Fortune, the polio vaccine is “safe and effective.” Here’s why that statement oversimplifies the issue of polio vaccines and leads to misleading conclusions.
There are two kinds of polio vaccines used in the world today, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They are the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) and the oral polio vaccine (OPV).
The OPV is used for mass vaccination campaigns of children outside the U.S., as was recently done in Gaza. However, the U.S. exclusively uses IPV polio vaccines, according to the CDC.
The IPV products, which are injected, contain an inactivated — or dead — poliovirus. According to the CDC, the IPV protects against “severe disease caused by poliovirus” but “does not stop transmission.”
According to the Polio Global Eradication Initiative, the IPV also doesn’t prevent infection.
Two stand-alone IPV products are licensed in the U.S. by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Both are manufactured by Sanofi. The other five are combination vaccines that target polio plus other illnesses, including diptheria, pertussis and tetanus.
One of the two stand-alone IPV products, Poliovax, was discontinued. The FDA page on licensed polio vaccines doesn’t explain why.
That leaves IPOL as the sole stand-alone polio vaccine licensed in the U.S.
2. Global polio vaccine campaigns can lead to ‘vaccine-derived’ polio outbreaks.
As its name suggests, the “oral polio” vaccine, or OPV — used only outside the U.S. — is delivered orally. The OPV contains a weakened vaccine-virus that activates an immune response in the body, according to the WHO.
Unlike the IPV products used in the U.S., the OPV prevents transmission, according to the CDC and the WHO. However, the weakened vaccine-virus used in the OPV can cause polio variant outbreaks.
The CDC states that the U.S. stopped using OPV “to eliminate the risk of polio variants that can occur with OPV.”
According to the WHO, the continued use of the OPV “poses a risk to wiping out the disease” because the weakened vaccine-virus originally contained in the OPV can begin to circulate among people who didn’t get the vaccine.
“When this happens,” the WHO said, “if it is allowed to circulate for sufficiently long enough time, it may genetically revert to a ‘strong’ virus, able to cause paralysis, resulting in what is known as circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses.”
Vaccine-derived polioviruses were responsible for the recently reported cases of polio in Gaza and the 2022 case reported in New York.
In March 2023, seven children were paralyzed by vaccine-derived polio linked to the novel oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2) developed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, according to health officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.
In other words, the viral infections in these cases resulted from exposure to the vaccine-virus used in the OPV — not from exposure to a naturally occurring, or “wild,” strain of the poliovirus.
The last wild poliovirus case reported in the U.S. was in 1979, according to the CDC.
3. Risk of paralysis from poliovirus infection is roughly 0.001%.
Approximately 90-95% of poliovirus infections are asymptomatic, according to the FDA package insert for IPOL, the only stand-alone IPV product used in the U.S. The package insert also provides general information on polio, including this:
“Nonspecific illness with low-grade fever and sore throat (minor illness) occurs in 4% to 8% of infections. Aseptic meningitis occurs in 1% to 5% of patients a few days after the minor illness has resolved.
“Rapid onset of asymmetric acute flaccid paralysis occurs in 0.1% to 2% of infections, and residual paralytic disease involving motor neurons (paralytic poliomyelitis) occurs in approximately 1 per 1,000 infections.”
In other words, according to the FDA, the risk of becoming paralyzed as a result of a poliovirus infection is roughly 0.001%.
4. All polio vaccines used today are genetically modified.
Unlike the original polio vaccines developed in the early 1950s by Dr. Jonas Salk and Dr. Albert Sabin, the IPV and OPV being administered today are genetically modified.
In 2020, the WHO authorized a new genetically modified OPV for emergency use in polio outbreaks. According to a 2023 article in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, nOPV2 was developed through a global partnership between public health, governmental, philanthropic and nonprofit organizations, including the Gates Foundation.
IPOL, the only stand-alone polio vaccine used in the U.S., uses technology that involves growing the poliovirus on monkey kidney cells whose chromones were modified to cause them to multiply forever.
In 2022, attorney Aaron Siri, on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, petitioned the FDA to “withdraw or suspend the approval for IPOL for infants, toddlers, and children until a properly controlled and properly powered double-blind trial of sufficient duration is conducted to assess the safety of this product.”
The petition stated that modified monkey kidney cells “are susceptible to infection by dozens of viruses, including HPV, measles, rubella, reovirus, SV40 virus, and SV-5.”
According to the petition, Sanofi’s IPOL vaccine hasn’t been adequately proven safe because the clinical trials relied on for licensing the product did not include a control group and declared the vaccine safe after following the trial participants for up to only three days after injection.
The FDA has not withdrawn or suspended its approval of IPOL as requested by Siri, and the agency continues to rely on the existing clinical trials and the agency’s own safety assessment lasting only up to three days.
The CDC recommends children receive four doses of IPOL, starting at age 2 months. The second dose is given at 4 months. The third is given at 6-18 months, and the fourth is given anytime between 4 and 6 years.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
This article is part of a series of articles by The Defender responding to the latest media coverage of vaccines, triggered by the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Business as Usual: US Pursues Research Linked to Weapons of Mass Destruction
Sputnik – 23.12.2024
The US government plans to spend nearly $35.9 million over the next four years on research related to weapons of mass destruction, quietly slipping this information into an otherwise bland online statement.
The FY25-29 Strategic Trends Research Initiative Broad Agency Announcement invites “strategic research on challenges related to weapons of mass destruction (WMD) 5-10 years in the future,” aligning with the mission of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA).
The announcement paints a noble picture of DTRA’s focus on countering WMD threats and preparing for conflict involving chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) adversaries.
However, this is the same DTRA responsible for the so-called Biological Threat Reduction Program in Ukraine, which conveniently translated into operating a network of questionable biolabs accused of covert biowarfare research and conducting ethically dubious experiments on local populations.
With that track record, one can only speculate what kind of “research” this new WMD initiative will fund.
The West Bank’s CIA men: Why is the PA killing Palestinians in Jenin?
By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | December 23, 2024
Following a ten-day siege, the Palestinian Authority began a violent raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank on 14 December. The PA security forces used tactics similar to those used by the Israeli occupation forces in their routine attacks on the area.
The camp, which is a mere half a square kilometre in size, hosts an ever-growing population of 24,000 refugees, mostly the descendants of Palestinians ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias during the great catastrophe, the 1948 Nakba.
The raid began with a tight siege, followed by an attack from multiple directions that resulted in the killing of an unarmed youth, Rebhi Al-Shalabi, 19, then a 13-year-old boy, Muhammad Al-Amer. The PA forces also killed Yazid Ja’ayseh, the commander of the Jenin Brigades, who had evaded Israeli assassination attempts for his leadership role in unifying all Palestinian Resistance fighters under the umbrella of a single group.
Unsurprisingly, Israel is largely pleased with the PA’s action against the Palestinian Resistance, although it expects more. “The Palestinian Authority has been acting resolutely against the Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters over the past several weeks, army and Shin Bet sources said, but the Israeli officials expressed the hope that their effectiveness could be enhanced,” reported Haaretz.
Indeed, Israel has attempted to subdue Jenin 80 times in the past year alone, killing more than 220 people, Al Jazeera has reported, citing Palestinian Ministry of Health sources.
By attacking Jenin, the PA is helping the Israeli army in more than one way.
It is killing and detaining anti-Israeli occupation Resistance fighters, for example; consuming the energy and resources of the Resistance; and allowing Israel to spare thousands of soldiers so that they may carry on with the genocide in Gaza.
For many, especially supporters of Palestine around the world, the PA’s action is confusing, to say the least. Those surprised by the anti-Resistance policies of Mahmoud Abbas and his Ramallah-based authority, however, are driven by the erroneous assumption that the PA is a legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and that it behaves in ways consistent with the collective aspirations of all Palestinians.
Nothing could be further from the truth. For many years, the PA has ceased to play any role that deviates from the interests of a small clique of a pro-US and pro-Israel wealthy elite who have enriched themselves, while millions of Palestinians continue to suffer an Israeli genocide in Gaza, and a violent system of apartheid and military occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The most telling and recent example is that, less than 70 kilometres from Jenin, illegal and violent Israeli Jewish settlers have burned the Bir Al-Walidin Mosque in the town of Murda, near Salfit. The PA security services did nothing whatsoever to confront the armed Jewish militias, nor any of the hundreds of settlers’ pogroms carried out against Palestinians in the West Bank in the past year and before; nor, of course, did the occupation army.
How did the PA turn from a supposed national project — at least in theory — into another branch of the Israeli occupation?
It could be argued that the PA was structured from the day of its establishment in 1994 as a body whose existence catered solely for the benefit of the Israeli occupation. There is much evidence to substantiate this claim, including the arrests, torture and killing of dissenting Palestinians soon after the creation of the PA.
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) became directly involved in supporting the PA from the very beginning, expanding its role as early as 1996 following a series of retaliatory Palestinian attacks on Israeli targets in major cities. It was then that CIA director George Tenet became an important player in shaping the policies of the PA security forces, preparing them for massive crackdowns on Palestinian Resistance groups. This involvement was a condition of US financial support under the Bill Clinton administration, the kind of support that sowed the seeds of the Fatah-Hamas conflict, which reached its zenith in the summer of 2007.
The involvement of the US — and other armed forces of US client regimes in the region — became even more apparent under the leadership of Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, who helped train, prepare and equip the Palestinian Authority Security Forces (NSF), producing several battalions of young recruits (between 20 and 22 years old) to fight fellow Palestinians in the name of restoring law and order.
That supposed restoration of “law and order” began in earnest as early as 2005 and continues to this day. Interestingly, this is the same language that the PA is currently using to justify its war on the Jenin refugee camp. A spokesman for the PA security forces, Anwar Rajab, told Al Jazeera recently that the objective of the raid on Jenin is to “pursue criminals” and lawbreakers, and to “prevent the camp from becoming a battleground like Gaza.”
Equating Resistance fighters with criminals and linking that supposed criminality to the Gaza Resistance is the typical PA discourse on legitimate resistance against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. It is a discourse that took the US and Israel years to craft and perfect, making the PA arguably the greatest achievement of the occupation state and Washington in recent decades.
This behaviour and language can be traced to a famous statement by Dayton himself who, in a 2009 speech, celebrated the US’s greatest creation in Palestine: “And what we have created — and I say this in humility — what we have created are new men… upon the return of these new men of Palestine, they have shown motivation, discipline and professionalism, and they have made such a difference.”
Indeed, the “new men of Palestine” are making all the difference required by the US and Israel; they are fighting the very Palestinian Resistance that is defending Jenin against the Israeli onslaught, Nablus against the pogroms of armed settlers and Gaza against genocide.
None of these “new men” — whose numbers are counted in the tens of thousands — have lifted a finger to help their fellow Palestinians as they continue to starve to death in the Gaza Strip, are tortured and raped en masse, and are burned alive in Jabaliya and Khan Yunis while fighting and dying in their thousands without any assistance from the Ramallah Authority.
To say that the PA has betrayed Palestinians, however, is inaccurate.
The PA was never set up, financed and armed by the US and Israel as a liberation force; it was always intended to be an obstacle to Palestinian freedom. We are witnessing the final proof of this claim. It is taking place in Jenin now; in fact, all over the occupied West Bank.
Of course, the PA will not be able to crush the Palestinian Resistance, which the supposedly mighty Israeli army has failed to subdue over the course of many years. But the question remains: how long will the PA be allowed to serve the role as the enforcer of the Israeli occupation and the protector of illegal Jewish settlers, while simultaneously promoting itself as the guardian of Palestinian rights, freedom and statehood?
“Greater Israel” Metastasizes
By Kevin Barrett | American Free Press | December 22, 2024
“Israel is a cancer on the Middle East.” Resistance leaders across the region have used that metaphor for generations. The Zionists who dominate American politics, finance and media have attacked it as inappropriate.
But is the metaphor inaccurate? Cancer occurs when a diseased cell or cells begin uncontrollably expanding at the expense of neighboring cells and organ systems. Israel, a malignant body of extremist fanatics implanted into the heart of the Middle East, keeps mindlessly and voraciously expanding, not unlike a virulent tumor. Such pathological Zionist growth has caused untold pain, suffering, and hardship for the people of Palestine, the region, and the world.
Let’s chart Israel’s malignant growth. The original version of modern Israel, as set forth in the Balfour Declaration (1917) consisted of a mere “Jewish homeland” (not a state) guaranteed not to impinge on the rights of non-Jews—who constituted the vast majority of the population and owned virtually all of the land of historic Palestine. After the invading Jewish terrorists began running amok, as recounted in Thomas Suarez’s magisterial State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel, Britain rewarded them with the 1937 Peel Commission partition plan, which would have created Israel on 33% of Palestine, leaving the other 67% for Palestinians.
The Peel Commission plan was outright theft. Palestinians owned well over 90% of the land of Palestine, yet the Commission wanted to steal almost one-third of their land and hand it to Eastern European Jewish terrorist invaders. But even such grand larceny wasn’t enough for the Zionists. They held out for more, and got it in 1948 by bribing US President Truman with a suitcase containing two million dollars in cash (as recounted by John F. Kennedy to Gore Vidal). That bribe, and others like it, produced the UN’s partition plan, which almost doubled the size of the Peel Commission’s Israel.
But even that outrageous robbery did not satisfy the Zionist terrorists, who immediately began massacring Palestinians and invading territory outside their UN borders. When the Nakba (Palestinian Holocaust) was over, untold thousands of Palestinians were dead, and more than 750,000 survivors had been robbed of their land and property and forced into exile as permanent refugees. After perpetrating the 1948 holocaust the Zionists refused to return to their UN-approved borders, which would have given them more than 55% of Palestine, and instead continued occupying almost 80%.
But even that didn’t satisfy them. The Zionist leadership spent the next two decades plotting what would become the 1967 war of aggression, in which they stole another 77,000 square kilometers consisting of the West Bank including Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. Together, those stolen territories are almost four times the size of pre-1967 Israel.
After 1967, Zionist leaders split between those willing to return stolen territory in return for peace, and those dedicated to endless wars of expansion. With the assassination of the land-for-peace Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, the issue was definitively settled in favor of the “forever wars” party.
Rabin was an anomaly—a mere speed bump on the road to Greater Israel. The Zionist leadership has always tacitly agreed that Israel will keep expanding to its Biblical mandate and beyond. David Ben-Gurion defined Zionism’s goal as follows: “to create a Jewish state in the whole of the Land of Israel.” That “whole” includes Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and part of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, northern Arabia, and arguably Turkey. Such conquests will require genocidal war against those countries and peoples.
2024 will go down in history as the year the Zionist cancer metastasized, sending its toxic tendrils even further into northern Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon, and Syria. Netanyahu’s minister Smotrich is calling for the full annexation of the West Bank and Gaza and the murder or expulsion of all Palestinians from historic Palestine. That process is already underway as northern Gaza is being emptied and Israel has grabbed a full 6000 acres of the West Bank. Meanwhile Israel is violating its ceasefire agreement with Lebanon in an attempt to steal all of south Lebanon up to the Litani River. And in the wake of the US-Turkish-Israeli overthrow of the Syrian government, Israel has massively attacked Syria and grabbed vast swathes of Syrian land.
The ever-expanding cancer of Zionism poses a clear and present danger to the region and the world. The driving force behind Zionism is a virulent version of Jewish messianic millenarianism whose endgame is a Jewish military leader conquering not just the region, but the whole world, and then establishing a Jewish global dictatorship based in Occupied Jerusalem.
First they came for the Palestinians. Israel’s neighbors are next. But this isn’t just a regional problem. Metastasizing Israel threatens all of us.
Trump should leverage Arctic for Ukraine peace – analyst
RT | December 23, 2024
US President-elect Donald Trump would succeed in talks with Russia to end the Ukraine conflict by offering to lift sanctions on the Northern Sea Route and invite Western carriers to utilize Moscow’s project in the Arctic, an opinion piece in Responsible Statecraft magazine has suggested.
Trump’s campaign promise to swiftly stop the fighting between Moscow and Kiev “seemed increasingly out of reach,” Lyle J. Goldstein, a research professor at the China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI) at the US Naval War College wrote in his article on Friday.
As the Russian military “continues its slow but steady advance,” Putin could have decided “to push for a more complete Russian military victory and defy any near-term Western peace overtures,” he said.
“It is hard to imagine that dispatching more arms to Ukraine and slapping more sanctions on Russia will be successful at achieving peace,” Goldstein stressed.
However, Trump still has a chance “to break from the status quo and entice Russia to end the war” by making the situation in the Arctic – where a struggle for dominance between world powers has been intensifying in recent years – part of the negotiations, he wrote.
According to the analyst, the issue is “guaranteed to capture… Putin’s attention” because Moscow is interested in the effective functioning of the Northern Sea Route (NSR), which runs from the Barents Sea near Russia’s border with Norway to the Bering Strait between Chukotka and Alaska, and “holds the key to unlocking major development in the country’s vast, resource-rich interior and more broadly for Siberia.”
In order to see Russia making concessions, “the US would need to lift sanctions that have been applied against NSR projects… [and] facilitate major European shipping companies like Hapag Lloyd and Maersk to green light the route.” Another step to “sweeten the pot” for Moscow could be “the encouragement and even incentives for Western investment along the NSR” by Washington and Brussels, Goldstein stressed.
“By appending peace proposals with a carrot guaranteed to catch Putin’s attention, negotiations having a substantial Arctic component could gain Trump’s favor and find success,” he insisted.
Trump said on Sunday that he wants to resolve the Ukraine conflict through direct talks with Putin. “We must end that war,” he stressed.
During his end-of-year press conference last week, the Russian leader said that he is “ready to talk [to Trump] anytime; I will be ready to meet with him if he wishes.”
At the same event, Putin reiterated that Moscow is open to negotiating with Kiev without any preconditions, except for those previously agreed upon in Istanbul in 2022. These agreements include a neutral, non-aligned status for Ukraine and certain restrictions on the deployment of foreign weaponry. He also emphasized that any negotiations must take into account the current situation on the ground.
Righty Tighty: A Simple Way Donald Trump Can End the Ukraine and Israel Wars
By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | December 22, 2024
Upon his inauguration as president, Donald Trump will become the leader of a United States executive branch mired in two major wars via its continuing pumping of money, weapons, and intelligence into support of the Ukraine and Israel governments. Trump has declared his opposition to the continuation of these wars. But, how can he end them?
The means by which Trump can end the wars is simpler than many Americans think. This means just does not come to mind for many Americans because it is far removed from the course US presidents have tended to pursue over the last few decades.
Righty tighty. That’s it. Taking the US out of these wars is as simple as turning off a standard outdoor water faucet. President Joe Biden has turned the handle all the way lefty loosey. Trump should just turn it back all the way. Shut off the money flow. Shut off the weapons flow. Shut off the intelligence flow.
And there is no good reason for Trump to take his time about it. He should turn off the flow of aid in all forms promptly in his presidency.
Doing so would comport with Trump’s stated objectives regarding the Ukraine War and the Israel War during his campaign and since. Trump has repeated his promise to end the Ukraine War in a day. He has also commented on multiple occasions that he wants the Israel War over before he is even sworn in as president. Without US support, Ukraine and Israel lack the means to continue their wars. Deprived of the means to continue fighting in anywhere near the strength they have, both governments will immediately find themselves in a new situation where their best option is to seek peace.
Without critical US support, the Ukraine government will negotiate what it will give up in its loss to Russia. Meanwhile, Israel, also deprived of critical US support, will have to pare its ambition in its multifront war. Their only other option is suicidal fighting on in a lost cause. Sober military members would probably put a stop to that. No matter, it was never the cause — lost or otherwise — of America anyway.
What about negative political repercussions for Trump from his ending US participation in the wars? Such participation lacks popular support, so ending it would seem a plus for Trump’s popularity. Further, since Trump won the presidential election portraying himself as the “peace candidate,” even people who dislike his extraction of the US from the wars would not be very convincing complaining of Trump acting inconsistently or hypocritically. Indeed, Trump could proclaim that his action is a promise kept.
There is even a political urgency for Trump to turn the faucet handle righty tighty. If he continues supporting the wars for weeks or, worse, months or even years, the wars will become Trump wars as they have been Biden wars. Americans would feel relief when Trump after significant delay terminates US involvement, but any effort then to praise him as a man of peace will be met with justified skepticism. There would be blood on his hands.
If President Trump quickly turns off the faucet for the Ukraine War, the defeat of Ukraine will be accelerated. Trump can portray such as the much-needed termination of Biden’s deadly folly, reminding Americans as Trump has over the past couple years that the entire conflict would have been avoided had Trump been president. Trump can also claim victory in stopping the killing of people — Ukrainian and Russian — something he has pointed to as his primary objective.
In turning off the war support for the Israel government, Trump is in a different position as he has expressed his particularly strong support for this government. But, Trump, as with the Ukraine war, has also expressed his strong desire for the carnage in the Israel War to end. Trump, when shutting off the faucet, can declare victory for Israel. He can claim the defeat by Israel of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. He can claim also Israel’s elimination of threat posed to it from Syria. The war is over and won can be his message.
Trump will surely face difficult challenges as president, but on the major issues of the Ukraine War and Israel War, the solution is simple: righty tighty.
Panama responds to Trump’s threat to retake vital waterway
RT | December 23, 2024
President Jose Raul Mulino has addressed the nation in response to US President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to retake control of the Panama Canal, a vital waterway that contributes billions of dollars to the Panamanian economy annually and serves as a crucial artery for global trade.
In his video address on Sunday, Mulino emphasized that the sovereignty and independence of the country are “non-negotiable” and underscored the canal’s significance as part of the “history of struggle and an irreversible conquest.”
“Every square meter of the Panama Canal and its adjacent area belongs to Panama, and it will continue to be so,” Mulino declared.
Over the weekend, Trump expressed outrage on Truth Social and during a speech at the AmericaFest conference over what he called “exorbitant” fees charged for the passage of American vessels through the canal, accusing Panama of exploiting the United States with excessive fees.
“We’re being ripped off at the Panama Canal, just like everywhere else,” despite the “extraordinary generosity that has been bestowed on Panama,” he told supporters in Arizona on Sunday.
“If the principles, both moral and legal, of this magnanimous gesture of giving are not followed, then we will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to the United States of America. In full. Quickly and without question,” Trump proclaimed, warning officials in Panama to “please be guided accordingly.”
Trump also declared that he would never allow the canal to fall into “the wrong hands,” namely China’s, emphasizing that a “secure Panama Canal is crucial for US commerce and the rapid deployment of the Navy from the Atlantic all the way to the Pacific.”
Trump further emphasized his statements by sharing an image on Truth Social of an American flag over a narrow waterway with the caption, “Welcome to the United States Canal!”
Mulino strongly rejected these claims, stating that the canal’s rates are set publicly and transparently, considering market conditions, international competition, operating costs and maintenance needs. He highlighted that since the transfer of the canal from the United States to Panama on December 31, 1999, as per the Torrijos-Carter Treaties signed in 1977, there have been no objections or complaints regarding Panama’s control.
“These treaties also established the permanent neutrality of the canal, guaranteeing its open and secure operation for all nations,” he said, calling it the best tribute to the martyrs who fought for Panama’s sovereignty and dignity during the 1964 anti-American riots. Mulino rejected any notion that China, the European Union, or any other power has direct or indirect control over the canal.
The canal has become a source of strong national pride, managed by qualified Panamanian professionals who ensure its safe, continuous, efficient, and profitable operation, the president added. It also contributes billions of dollars to the Panamanian economy annually and serves as a crucial artery for global trade.
“Panama respects other nations and demands respect,” the president concluded, stating that he aspires to preserve good relations with the incoming US government on issues such as drug trafficking, terrorism, organized crime, and illegal migration, but the neutrality of the canal is “non-negotiable.”
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From the Archives
How the CIA Spawned Google
By Svetlana Ekimenko – Sputnik – 05.02.2025
American tech giant Google has faced regulatory scrutiny on numerous occasions amid accusations of antitrust violations. Google’s relationship with the CIA, ranging from early financial support to collaborative efforts have been decried as undermining privacy rights and free speech in the digital landscape.
Google’s creation played a crucial role in the US intelligence community’s scheme to attain global dominance by controlling information. … continue
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