U.S. Intelligence Operatives Appear to Have Intentionally Groomed Mass Murderer Charles Manson
Status As a Police Informant Raises Suspicion That He Was an FBI and CIA Asset Out to Discredit the 1960s Counterculture
Source: dagospia.com
By Daniel Borgström – CovertAction Magazine – May 1, 2024
The Sharon Tate murders were as bizarre as they were bloody, and the story behind the story is even stranger.
Journalist Tom O’Neill spent 20 years researching, interviewing and digging in his effort to get to the bottom of it. His book, CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties, co-authored by Dan Piepenbring, is an account of O’Neill’s personal odyssey as well as a presentation of his findings which unfold, page after page, in tragedy, weirdness and irony.
Charles Manson’s hit-team killed ten people, perhaps more. That was in California, back in the summer of 1969, while the U.S. Armed Forces were busily slaughtering millions of Asians in Vietnam. And in opposition to that war, hundreds of thousands of Americans marched in mass protests—the anti-war movement.
Even GIs and military veterans were speaking out against the war. The counterculture movement was in full bloom, having started for at least since “the summer of love” two years earlier. Woodstock, an historic occasion which drew 400,000 people to a music event in Upstate New York, also took place the year of the Manson murders in that same month of August.
War, anti-war, and counterculture—it was all going on when Charles Manson and his “family” suddenly stole the show and took center stage with that series of infamous killings. First there was the Gary Hinman murder, then the Sharon Tate killings, followed by the LaBianca murders. Two more victims about whom we do not often hear were Donald Shea, a caretaker at the Spahn Ranch, and Filippo Tenerelli, who was found dead in a Bishop, California, motel.
Source: cbsnews.com
The FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s CHAOS programs were also in play—part of intelligence’s covert war on dissent. Several shadowy characters, apparently CIA operatives, turn up in this story and appear to have crossed paths with Charles Manson. Among them was Dr. Louis Jolyon West of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA mind-control project. Another was Reeve Whitson who somehow knew of the Tate killings 90 minutes before anyone else did, and reported it in a phone call to Tate’s photographer. O’Neill devotes a chapter to each of them.
Dr. Louis Jolyon West [Source: jamanetwork.com
Thirty years had passed since the killings when O’Neill began work on his project in 1999. Several of the key players had already died, but Charles Manson was still in prison, and memories of the killings remained painfully alive. The topic was initially assigned to O’Neill as a magazine article, and the editor gave him three months to complete it.
However, as he launched into it, interviewing dozens—eventually hundreds—of cops, DA lawyers, clerks, Hollywood personalities, drug dealers and others, he found there was far more to the story than he had ever imagined.
He missed his deadline, then his next deadline, and the one after that. The project became his obsession, and the digging and research continued on through 20 long years of plowing through troves of documents: court records, old newspaper files, FOIA requests, and interviews. Research can be frustrating, and clearly it was. “Behind every solid lead, quotable interview, and bombshell document, I put in weeks of scut work that led to dozens of dead ends,” O’Neill tells us. His book finally came out in 2019.
Tom O’Neill – Source: warwicks.com
Told in the first person, the book is a gripping detective story that I could not put down—actually an audio that I could not turn off. It is well written, and the audio by Kevin Stillwell is well read. My partner wanted to know what I kept listening to all the time. So I took off my headset and played it out into the room. She caught the bug and we listened to it together day after day, smitten by Tom O’Neill’s obsession.
At Charles Manson’s orders, people were murdered. This is a “mystery” where we know the “who-done-it” part of the story, but we are left to wonder and speculate about almost everything else—motives, the roles of intel and law enforcement, facts that were covered up, and who or what else might have been operating behind the scenes.
Crime novels typically end with the pieces all falling into place to form a coherent picture. Not so in most real-life crime mysteries, O’Neill cautions us. Some pieces are missing; others do not seem to belong, but they are there nonetheless, often in some grotesquely misshapen form.
A good many pieces are left over; they may seem important, but we do not know what to make of them. In this book, the author takes us into a world where cops, judges, prosecutors, witnesses and others do not function in ways that seem rational or above board.
Among the strange pieces in this picture puzzle is something O’Neill calls “Charlie Manson’s get-out-of-jail-free card.”
After having spent much of his life in various prisons, in 1967 Charles Manson was finally out on “federal parole for grand theft auto.” Being on probation is almost like living on the doorstep of a jailhouse.
A parolee can get thrown back in prison for the slightest mis-step. However, Charles Manson went around committing one offense after another—stealing cars, credit cards and firearms, sex with underage women, drugs, etc. Whatever a parolee was not allowed to do, Charles Manson did. He even flouted it. He was caught repeatedly, but none of his numerous violations landed him in jail for more than a few days at a time.
“We were told not to bother those people,” former Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff Preston Guillory told O’Neill. It was a policy handed down from on high, Guillory said: “Make no arrests, take no police action toward Manson or his followers.”
Cops who had clues, evidence or solid proof of Manson’s violations were pulled back from their investigations. On the occasions when Manson was arrested, judges would let him go. His probation officer, Roger Smith, wrote glowing letters about Manson’s supposedly wonderful progress.
Normally, a probation officer would supervise 20 to 100 parolees; but Roger Smith was supervising only one person—Charles Manson. It was with the encouragement of Probation Officer Roger Smith that Manson spent a year in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, at the time a Mecca of the hippie counterculture.
There Charlie acquired his “family” of followers, and morphed into the Charles Manson known to history and legend—the charismatic guru and apocalyptic cult leader, acid-dropping mystic, guitarist and songwriter, con artist, car thief and general predator, manipulator and abuser, and evangelist who expatiated on the Book of Revelation.
Members of the Manson family. Source: reprobatepress.com
Manson was well-connected with Hollywood celebrities and music personalities: Doris Day’s son, music producer Terry Melcher, the Beach Boys, and many more, though most did not wish to have it known that they had been associated with him. Even after 30 years had passed, many refused to be interviewed by Tom O’Neill. The refusers’ list reads like a who’s who of Hollywood stardom. Cops and prosecutors were more inclined to talk, and some of them opened the author’s way to troves of documents and records.
Reading the accounts of these interactions, I sense that O’Neill must be something of a Will Rogers-type person who rarely met a person he did not like. And people in turn seemed to like him. Even officials who worked hard to cover things up seemed to warm up to him. Several, of course, including legendary prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, eventually screamed at him and threatened to sue for millions of dollars.
Bugliosi was the attorney who had prosecuted Manson and afterwards wrote the best-selling Helter Skelter. In the courtroom and later in his book, Bugliosi presented Manson’s murder rampage as a scheme to blame the Black Panthers and thus spark a race war between blacks and whites. That became the official narrative, though it was doubted by people who had researched the case. Tom O’Neill devoted a chapter to reviewing “Holes in Helter Skelter”; he exposes Bugliosi’s handling of the case and does the coup de grâce on that theory.
Vince Bugliosi surrounded by reporters when he was prosecuting the Manson case in 1971. Source: nytimes.com
However, by the time O’Neill’s book came out, Bugliosi had passed on, and thus far his ghost has not risen up to carry out the threatened lawsuit. Another person who had threatened to sue O’Neill was music producer Terry Melcher, also dead by the time the book came out. There can be upsides to being a slow writer, taking a long time to do research.
Terry Melcher Source: alchetron.com
“I’d spoken to duplicitous celebrities, seedy drug dealers, bumbling cops, and spurious prosecutors. I’d been threatened and cajoled and warned off my investigation. But I didn’t have a smoking gun. There were only mountains of circumstantial evidence,” O’Neill tells us.
So he kept going, finding more pieces of the picture. And it reads like the script of a film noir.
Throughout the drama, Charles Manson was being closely monitored by law enforcement agencies and intel. And yet, even while they were watching him, he sent his acolytes out on those brutal killing sprees of August 1969. Incredibly enough, despite the surveillance, it took law enforcement four long months to eventually arrest him and his hit team. During those extra months of free rein, Manson killed Shea and Tenerelli and perhaps more.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department detectives had almost immediately found clues leading to Charles Manson; many Hollywood people also suspected him. So why did it take law enforcement so long to catch him? It appears that the “hands off Manson policy” was still in effect.
Actually, Manson was not the only person in this story who seemed to be immune to prosecution; similar immunity appears to have been granted to two or three Hollywood drug dealers who turn up in the story. That seems to be a fairly common practice in law enforcement.
“A lot of times we arrest people and the DA would say, ‘We can’t keep this person in custody, he’s too valuable, we want him on the streets,’” former Los Angeles Sheriff’s Deputy Guillory told O’Neill. “My suspicion is that Manson was left alone for a while for some reason.”
Former head deputy DA of Van Nuys, Lewis Watnick, gave a similar opinion. “Sometimes this is explained by just pure incompetence,” he said. “But this is not that. It dovetails right in. Manson was an informant.” Of course, that was just his guess, Watnick conceded, but it was an educated one, based on his 30 years of experience. “They’d been watching this guy for something large.”
Looking at the tolerance that authorities had for Manson’s lawbreaking, his relationship with probation officer Roger Smith, and more, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that somebody up there had a major investment in Mr. Charles Manson. They must have wanted him to do something. But what?
Along with his findings, O’Neill shares his uncertainties. “My work had left me, at various points, broke, depressed, and terrified that I was becoming one of ‘those people’: an obsessive, a conspiracy theorist… I don’t consider myself credulous, but I’d discovered things I thought impossible about the Manson murders and California in the sixties.” Further on, he tells us, “I thought most of all about the possibility that Manson, of all people, had some type of protection from law enforcement… It boggled the mind even to speculate that someone like Manson could be plugged into something bigger, and presumably even darker, than he was.”
Something darker than Charles Manson? Our leaders, and the establishment they work for, have a lot of closely guarded secrets—secrets that occasionally make their way out by way of researchers, whistleblowers, hackers, and even congressional hearings.
For background on the political environment of the late 1960s, O’Neill reviews the establishment’s war against the anti-war movement. That includes cases of people who were murdered as a result of FBI and CIA activities and manipulations here in the U.S. He ties this brutality to U.S. actions overseas.
Anthony Herbert – Source: ronsherman.com
O’Neill looks at the CIA’s Phoenix Program in Vietnam, a kill-capture campaign, which resulted in the death of thousands of Vietnamese civilians. He quotes from a Special Forces soldier, Anthony Herbert, about his time in the Phoenix Program: “They wanted me to take charge of execution teams that wiped out entire families and tried to make it appear as though the Viet Cong had done it themselves. The rationale was that the Viet Cong would see that other Viet Cong had killed their own and… make allegiance with us. The good guys.”
A mission shared by the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s CHAOS was to disrupt and discredit the anti-war movement, and that, O’Neill points out, was one effect of the Manson murders. Of course, Charles Manson was not an anti-war activist; it is doubtful that he ever attended an anti-war rally. He was a product of the prison system who somehow found his way into the fringes of the counterculture movement, and there was a lot of overlap between the anti-war and counterculture movements. Many hippies were anti-war, and many activists smoked grass and grew their hair long.
Scene from the 1967 Summer of Love that Manson and the CIA/FBI were out to destroy. Source: allthatsinteresting.com
The corporate media, then as now, was the voice of the establishment elite, and dutifully presented the murderous Manson and his “family” to the world as poster children of the “hippie movement.” A lot of people bought that framing. Even people who self-identified as countercultural were saying, “Manson ended the Summer of Love!”—a message the corporate media pushed.
Although the killings were billed as the “crime of the century” and have received massive newspaper coverage ever since, few articles went beyond the sensational aspects and asked truly penetrating questions. When (in 1971) whistleblower LA Sheriff’s Detective Guillory went public with what he knew about Manson’s get-out-of-jail-free card, the media showed little interest. Nor did many journalists work out a related source and connection between these killings and a society waging a brutal and unjust war.
We assume that our leaders in Washington care about the lives of ordinary people. Our experience with them shows otherwise.
We remember Vietnam. There have been several murderous wars since then, and now Gaza. As I write this, our president and our Congress are in the sixth month of funding, arming and giving diplomatic support to apartheid Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.
Our leaders are not averse to promoting mass murder. We have the immortal words of former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright: When asked in 1996 about U.S. sanctions causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, she replied, “We think the price is worth it.”
The powers that be are a bloodthirsty lot when it serves their interests, every bit as murderous as Charles Manson himself. But who might have been the local- or regional-level functionaries authorizing immunity for such criminals?
O’Neill tells us about several high-placed California officials. One was Evelle Younger, then Los Angeles DA. Younger was a former FBI agent who, during World War II, was with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, and also oversaw the prosecution of Sirhan Sirhan; he went on to be California Attorney General from 1971 to 1979.
Evelle J. Younger Source: wikiwand.com
Another was California Governor Ronald Reagan’s chairman of the “Task Force on Riots and Disorders,” William W. Herrmann. Herrmann was a veteran of the CIA’s Phoenix Program; he had also been a lieutenant with the LAPD. However, O’Neill was not able to establish a definite connection between them and the on-the-ground operatives. We do get an idea of who they seem to have been.
In this book of strange dark characters, one of the stranger ones was Dr. Louis Jolyon West, known to his friends as “Jolly” West. He was a pioneering scientist of the CIA’s mind-control project—MK-ULTRA. In 1966 he came to San Francisco, shortly before Manson arrived, and his project was to study and manipulate hippies.
So there they were, the two of them, in the Haight-Ashbury. Tom O’Neill, with meticulous documentation, suggests that Manson became a product of Jolly West’s experiments.
Another dark character who seems to have worked for the CIA was Reeve Whitson, a friend of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski. He somehow knew of the killings before anyone else did, and telephoned the awful news to Tate’s personal photographer, Shahrokh Hatami. That was 90 minutes before the bodies were discovered by Polanski’s maid.
Both Dr. Louis Jolyon West and Reeve Whitson are dead and gone, West in 1999 and Whitson in 1994, and are, thus, not available for interviews or comment.
In this book Tom O’Neill shows us convincing evidence that Charles Manson was some sort of operative, maybe unwittingly. It looks like the purpose of his handlers—presumably from the CIA’s CHAOS or the FBI’s COINTELPRO—was to set him up to create a bloody scene such as the one on August 9, 1969.
It needs to be recognized that Charles Manson and his followers served the establishment well. Nevertheless, they went to prison where they remained for the rest of their lives. Only one, Leslie Van Houten, was finally released last year on parole.
IS BIRD FLU THE NEXT COVID?
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | May 2, 2024
As America faces an unlikely bird flu ‘outbreak’ in chickens and cows, many are speculating on when this rare illness will jump to humans. Jefferey Jaxen looked into the previous gain-of-function lab work on H5N1 funded by Tony Fauci and NIAID, and found something very interesting.
Head of Nonprofit With Ties to Wuhan Lab Should Face Criminal Investigation, House Committee Says
By John-Michael Dumais | The Defender | May 2, 2024
A House committee investigating the COVID-19 pandemic on Wednesday called for a criminal investigation into Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, and further investigation into failures in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant-funding procedures.
In a statement released after the hearing — accompanied by a 59-page report — the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic called for permanently terminating funding for EcoHealth Alliance, which has ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Both Republican and Democrat representatives explicitly called for defunding EcoHealth Alliance, which Daszak said receives about $16 million in government grants annually.
However, journalist Paul D. Thacker cautioned against allowing Daszak to become “the fall guy” — because the NIH and Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), aided Daszak “in this multi-year cover-up,” he said.
Thacker, who has extensively covered Daszak and other COVID-19 origins-related news, told The Defender the Democrats seemed more concerned during the hearing about EcoHealth’s paperwork and conflicts of interest than the core allegations of dangerous gain-of-function research.
“The American people deserve accountability, and Daszak should be prosecuted for helping to misdirect USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development] funds to create the Global Virome Project,” Thacker said.
He pointed to a 2022 U.S. Right to Know investigation showing Daszak co-founded the Global Virome Project with then-director of USAID’s Emerging Pandemic Threats Program Dennis Carroll, who “siphoned taxpayer funds” to launch the project.
The Global Virome Project aims to collect more than 1 million viruses from wildlife for research to forecast future pandemics.
Thacker also noted the change in the Democrats’ messaging throughout the hearing, which was more critical of Daszak. “No great evidence came to light,” he said. “But something is going on behind the scenes that we don’t know about yet.”
The House report confirms many of the same allegations laid out in “The Wuhan Cover-Up,” by Children’s Health Defense founder and chairman on leave Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The book was published in 2021.
Dems admit SARS-CoV-2 may have come from a lab
Daszak appeared before the committee to answer questions about his organization’s ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and allegations of conducting risky coronavirus research.
Committee members pressed him on claims that EcoHealth was conducting gain-of-function research, failed to report on experiments showing excessive viral growth and repeatedly missed deadlines for progress reports.
Led by Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) and Ranking Member Paul Ruiz (D-Calif.), the subcommittee also examined the circumstances surrounding EcoHealth’s NIH grant termination in 2020, and the ongoing dispute over access to virus samples collected at the Wuhan lab.
In his opening statement, Wenstrup said Daszak “comes across as disingenuous” when using “highly technical definitions in order to assert that a certain project really isn’t gain-of-function.”
Acknowledging EcoHealth’s failure to comply with grant-reporting requirements, Ruiz said Daszak’s actions “draw into question whether [he] sought to deliberately mislead regulators at NIH and NIAID.”
Daszak faced tough questioning from members on both sides of the aisle about his organization’s transparency and handling of taxpayer funds, biosafety standards at the Wuhan lab, efforts to downplay the role of Chinese scientists in his proposals, and communications with government officials through private emails.
Maintaining a composed and technical demeanor throughout, Daszak frequently cited government regulations, grant terms and scientific evidence to defend EcoHealth’s actions.
However, at times Daszak appeared evasive or uncertain when challenged on specific details. Many subcommittee members expressed skepticism about his forthrightness.
In a noteworthy departure from previous hearings, Democrats admitted that the SARS-CoV-2 virus could have come from a lab, although several underscored the lack of definitive evidence for the lab-leak theory.
“I’m hoping someday that we are going to get to the bottom of the truth of this,” Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) said at the hearing. “I don’t know that we ever are because I’m hearing totally opposite information from reliable sources.”
Substack author Maryam Henein, noting the extensive documentation and testimony already gathered by the subcommittee and its failure to get to the bottom of COVID-19 origins, asked, “So, are all these hearings and reports for optics?”
Dispute over gain-of-function research definition
A central focus of the hearing was whether EcoHealth was conducting gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.
According to the subcommittee’s May 1 interim staff report, this research violated the terms of NIH grant R01AI110964 awarded to EcoHealth in 2014 for its five-year study, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”
Majority Counsel Mitch Benzine pointed out that NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak, Ph.D., and coronavirus expert Ralph Baric, Ph.D., testified that the experiments described in EcoHealth’s year 5 progress qualified as gain-of-function research.
This contradicts claims Daszak made in November 2023 during a transcribed interview before the subcommittee.
Daszak disputed the allegation, citing a letter from NIH stating that the work was not subject to gain-of-function regulations. “I tend to go with the regulatory authority on this, which is NIH,” he said.
The subcommittee’s interim report states that the definition of gain-of-function research on the NIH website was “unceremoniously removed … the same day the EcoHealth experiment was reported to Congress.”
The report alleges this change occurred before Fauci testified before the U.S. Senate claiming NIAID did not fund gain-of-function research and that Fauci therefore “misled the public” about funding such research at the Wuhan lab.
Public concerns about the research resulted in NIH reviewing EcoHealth’s grant, which it eventually suspended on April 24, 2020, the report states.
Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) questioned “NIAID’s approval and oversight of risky experiments involving potential pandemic pathogens,” calling the oversight “lax,” “a farce” and “grossly negligent.”
Congress will “have to put some adults in place to independently review proposed gain-of-function research” that federal agencies want to fund, Griffith said.
Daszak conceded that the Wuhan lab could have been conducting gain-of-function research on human coronaviruses without his knowledge.
He also emphasized that EcoHealth’s 15 years of work in China “provided direct public health benefits to the American people.”
“The viruses that we identified in bats in China were used by U.S. labs throughout the COVID pandemic and continue to be used to test drugs, vaccines and therapies that saved countless lives,” Daszak said.
Daszak: ‘Zero evidence’ virus emerged from a lab
The debate over the origins of COVID-19 was a central point of contention throughout the hearing.
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) asked Daszak whether U.S. intelligence agencies “suspected something fishy was going on at the Wuhan lab” — including bioweapons manufacturing — before the pandemic.
“Well, that’s really for the intelligence community to answer,” Daszak said, claiming that only two agencies had “low to moderate confidence” of a lab-leak origin.
Daszak repeatedly stated that the available evidence strongly points to a natural zoonotic spillover. “There is zero evidence that it emerged from a lab.”
When Lesko cited a 2021 U.S. Department of State fact sheet alleging the Wuhan lab collaborated with the Chinese military on secret projects, Daszak denied knowing anything about a military connection to the lab.
Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) questioned Daszak’s past statements dismissing the lab-leak origins as a “conspiracy theory,” noting this contradicted Daszak’s current testimony acknowledging the possibility.
Democratic Chief Counsel Giancarlo Pellegrini also interrogated Daszak on the issue, citing the following statement he and other scientists made in The Lancet in 2020: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
Daszak defended the comments, arguing the claims at the time were that the virus had HIV inserts and snake DNA and that it was bioengineered.
“Those are pure conspiracy theories,” he said. “There is no evidence at all for them. And they’re based on myth and legend.”
Under repeated questioning about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, Daszak doubled down on his claim, telling Comer, “The evidence that this came from a natural spillover is huge and growing every week.”
Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) probed Daszak over EcoHealth’s DEFUSE proposal — developed with Shi Zhengli, Ph.D., of the Wuhan lab, and presented to DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in 2018 — and its planned “experiments to introduce furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses.”
She said the altered furin cleavage site is an attribute of SARS-CoV-2 and suggested some of Daszak’s actions were “intended to mislead DARPA about the extent of Wuhan’s involvement.”
Daszak countered that the proposal was never accepted or funded and that he was transparent about his relationship with the Wuhan lab in his prior discussions with DARPA.
EcoHealth failed to report on coronavirus-infected mice
The subcommittee report stated that EcoHealth failed to report an experiment at the Wuhan lab that showed the chimeric virus had enhanced growth compared to the control, violating NIH grant terms.
Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) questioned Daszak about EcoHealth’s year 5 progress report, which describes an experiment where mice infected with a chimeric coronavirus WIV1-SHC014 had a much lower survival rate (25%) compared to mice infected with just the WIV1 virus (71.4%).
Daszak argued the NIH rules did not apply to bat coronaviruses. “It was not considered of any risk to human health because they’ve never been shown to infect people,” he said.
Pellegrini pressed Daszak on the lack of the control virus data in EcoHealth’s year 4 grant report, which made it impossible to verify compliance with NIH’s rule for reporting a significantly increased level of virulence.
“We did the experiment, reported it back,” Daszak said. “Nobody came back to us and said, ‘This is highly concerning,’ because it wasn’t. The results were unremarkable.”
Daszak argued the experimental results showed “normal variations within a small group of mice.”
“I also want to remind the committee, these are SARS-CoV-related bat viruses,” Daszak said. “They’re not known to be infectious to people. They’re nothing to do with COVID-19.”
Daszak blamed late report on NIH website lockout
The subcommittee report found that EcoHealth submitted the NIH grant year 5 progress report nearly two years late, in August 2021, despite the report being due on September 28, 2019.
Daszak claimed his staff attempted to submit the report on time but the NIH system “locked us out.” However, an NIH investigation found no evidence to corroborate Daszak’s excuse, Rep. Deborah Ross (D-N.C.) said.
Ross grilled Daszak, challenging his claim that EcoHealth staff only made phone calls and noting EcoHealth’s typical pattern of communicating with NIH by email.
Daszak acknowledged there was no email on the issue, only phone calls from his staff that could not be verified, but promised to look again for any evidence of email communications concerning the lockout.
‘You didn’t tell me the truth’
EcoHealth’s failure to submit the report on time may have been due to ulterior motives, Griffith argued.
He pointed out discrepancies between the May 2020 draft of the year 5 report — the one EcoHealth claimed to have attempted to upload in 2019 — and the report submitted to NIH in August 2021.
In the 2020 version, EcoHealth claimed that bat coronavirus spillover in Southeast Asia and South China is a rare event, whereas the later report stated that “spillovers infected potentially a million people each year,” Griffith said.
“Rare or up to a million?” Griffith asked, telling Daszak that in his November 2023 closed-door testimony, he claimed there were no significant differences between the two versions of the report.
“You changed perhaps one of the most important findings — the likelihood of bat coronavirus spillover into humans,” Griffith said. “There’s no new data. There’s no new paper cited. Just a complete 180 reversal on the conclusion.”
Griffith told Daszak he assumed “Dr. Fauci or others at NIAID” pressured him to change the conclusion “to satisfy NIAD or others in the scientific community or to cover potential liability.”
Daszak responded that it was possible that EcoHealth conducted further scientific research after the initial draft, resulting in a revised conclusion.
Griffith pushed back, telling Daszak, “You didn’t tell me the truth” in the November interview.
Citing his experience in the criminal courts, Griffith said, “If you were my client, I would tell you that ‘That dog won’t hunt’ and the judge ain’t gonna believe that.”
Subcommittee posts key takeaways after hearing
In its statement released after the hearing, the subcommittee shared the following takeaways:
- EcoHealth Alliance used U.S. taxpayer dollars to facilitate gain-of-function research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China.
- EcoHealth Alliance violated its NIH grant terms and conditions by failing to report a potentially dangerous gain-of-function experiment conducted at the WIV.
- EcoHealth Alliance also violated its NIH grant terms and conditions by failing to submit a required research update report — which included details about its gain-of-function work at the WIV — until nearly TWO YEARS after the NIH deadline.
- The Trump Administration identified serious concerns with EcoHealth Alliance’s funding of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and instructed NIH to fix the problem. Then, NIH terminated EcoHealth’s grant. Without the intervention of the Trump Administration, EcoHealth may have been allowed to continue its dangerous research.
- NIH is currently violating the terms of the WIV’s formal debarment by funding EcoHealth Alliance’s research.
John-Michael Dumais is a news editor for The Defender. He has been a writer and community organizer on a variety of issues, including the death penalty, war, health freedom and all things related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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.
Israel’s Plan for Postwar Gaza Ignores Will of Palestinians
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 04.05.2024
Israeli government officials have been quietly discussing a scheme to rule Gaza once the war is over, according to the New York Times.
Citing individuals familiar with the talks, the newspaper wrote that Israel appears to be ready to share oversight of the strip with a number of Arab countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as well as with the US.
Under the plan, the coalition of nations would govern the strip for about 7-10 years and then allow Palestinians residing in Gaza to vote on whether to become subordinate to the united Palestinian administration. The Israeli military would maintain its presence in Gaza in the meantime, as per the proposal. The NYT emphasized that Tel Aviv would agree to the scenario in exchange for normalization of relations with Riyadh.
According to the newspaper, Arab officials and analysts have largely denounced the plan since it does not contain provisions opening the door to legalizing the Palestine state.
“I don’t see the possibility for this plan to become a reality,” Dr. Mehmet Rakipoglu, assistant professor at Mardin Artuklu University and researcher at the Dimensions for Strategic Studies London-based think tank, told Sputnik. “Even if it’s implemented, I don’t see any concrete solution for the problem, because the problem is all about the US and Israel.”
Rakipoglu argued that the proposal directly contradicts a two state solution, which was adopted by the United Nations in 1947 and then upheld by the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995. The expert noted that the peace solution formulated by King Abdullah in 2002 and endorsed by the Arab League in 2002, 2007 and 2017 appears unacceptable to Tel Aviv.
The Abdullah plan envisaged a full Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and Golan Heights and the establishment of a Palestinian state with a capital in East Jerusalem in exchange for normalization of relations between Israel and Arab nations.
“Netanyahu has no intention not only to end the [Gaza] war but also they don’t have any intention to withdraw,” Rakipoglu said.
Eyal Pinko, an Israeli military expert, is similarly skeptical about the proposal described by the NYT. According to Pinko, Washington is interested in finding a quick solution ahead of the US presidential elections in November. According to the expert, the challenge lies in the impossibility of reaching a swift resolution due to the conflicting interests of various state and non-state actors regarding the future of the Gaza Strip.
Similarly, Palestinians residing in Gaza are unlikely to accept the plan: almost 85% of the Gaza population supports Hamas and doesn’t want the Palestinian Authority (PA) to govern the strip, according to the military expert.
What’s more, most Israeli politicians would have preferred to stay out of Gaza and not solve this tricky dilemma. Per Pinko, just a small group of conservative hardliners in the Israeli government want to maintain total control of the strip in a bid to overhaul it and eradicate Hamas.
“The majority of Israeli public opinion – from the right, from the center, from the left, – the majority of the Israeli people want to stay out of Gaza like it was in the last 17 years. Not going back over there. Not to put any kind of civilian authority over there. Nobody wants it, really. We understand this is like a hornet nest.”
Even though Arab states want to normalize with Israel to ensure regional stability, they cannot do this without solving the Palestine dilemma first, Rakipoglu highlighted. The only way to start untying the Gordian knot is to bring Iran, Russia, Turkiye and Qatar along with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE to the negotiating table in order to work out a balanced solution, according to the analyst.
“Hamas has announced that four countries must be at the negotiation table: one of them is Turkiye, the second one is Russia, as well as Qatar and Egypt. Without bringing these countries to the negotiation table, Hamas and other resistance movements will not accept any plan. It will only empower the anger for Hamas to be against the Western countries,” the analyst concluded.
Columbia crackdown led by university prof doubling as NYPD spook
BY WYATT REED AND MAX BLUMENTHAL · GRAYZONE · MAY 2, 2024
The violent crackdown carried out on Columbia University students protesting Israel’s genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip was led by a member of the school’s own faculty, New York City Mayor Eric Adams has declared.
During a May 1 press conference, just hours after the New York Police Department arrested nearly 300 people on university grounds, Adams praised adjunct Columbia professor Rebecca Weiner, who moonlights as the head of the NYPD counter-terrorism bureau, for giving police the green light to clear out anti-genocide students by force.
“She was the one that was monitoring the situation,” Adams explained, adding that the crackdown was carried out after “she was able to — her team was able to conduct an investigation.”
On April 30, dozens of police in riot gear descended on Columbia’s Hamilton Hall after students seized the building earlier in the day, citing a request from the administration. Several hours later, officers used a heavily armored NYPD BearCat vehicle to enter the building through the window on the second floor and arrested those inside, while another team swept up members of the encampment outside.
Starting on April 17, students at Columbia escalated their ongoing protest against Israel’s genocidal assault on the besieged Gaza Strip. They encamped on school grounds, stating their refusal to leave until the university fully divested from its Israeli-related investments. That protest model has since spread to over 100 other universities in the US, and even been taken up abroad, with similar actions occurring at Leeds University in the UK and the Sorbonne in Paris.
Just a few hundred meters from the Gaza protest encampment, Weiner maintained an office at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). Her SIPA bio describes her as an “Adjunct Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs” who simultaneously serves as the “civilian executive in charge of the New York City Police Department’s Intelligence & Counterterrorism Bureau.”
In that role, according to SIPA, Weiner “develops policy and strategic priorities for the Intelligence & Counterterrorism Bureau and publicly represents the NYPD in matters involving counterterrorism and intelligence.”
The NYPD’s Counterterrorism Bureau currently maintains an office in Tel Aviv, Israel, where it coordinates with Israel’s security apparatus and maintains a department liaison. Weiner appears to serve as a bridge between the Bureau’s offices in Israel and New York.
A 2011 AP investigation revealed that a so-called “Demographics Unit” operated secretly within the NYPD’s Counterterrorism and Intelligence Bureau. This shadowy outfit spied on Muslims around the New York City area, and even on students at campuses outside the state who were involved in Palestine solidarity activism. The unit was developed in tandem with the CIA, which has refused to name the former Middle East station chief it posted in the senior ranks of the NYPD’s intelligence division.
The “Demographics Unit” appears to have been inspired by Israeli intelligence as well. As a former police official told the AP, the unit attempted to “map the city’s human terrain” through a program “modeled in part on how Israeli authorities operate in the West Bank.”
A lawyer by training, Weiner oversaw negotiations between the NYPD and lawyers for local Muslims who had their civil liberties violated by its “Demographics Unit.”
Weiner is the granddaughter of Stanislaw Ulam, the Polish Jewish mathematician who helped conceive the hydrogen bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. “I’m very proud of that legacy,” Weiner said of her grandfather’s work upon being appointed as NYPD intelligence chief.
NYPD/Columbia’s Weiner: militarized raid was response to student “rhetoric associated with terrorism,” Tiktok posts
During the NYPD’s triumphant May 1 post-raid press conference, Weiner blamed “outside agitators” for triggering the military-style police crackdown at Columbia. However, she refused to name the outsiders supposedly on the scene.
According to Weiner, the police response was not necessitated by any criminal behavior, but by the radical language and symbols of the students. “This is not about students expressing ideas,” she claimed. The real problem, Weiner maintained, was the alleged “change in tactics” by protesters, which she said represented “a normalization and mainstreaming of rhetoric associated with terrorism.”
Proof of this dynamic, Weiner suggested, could be seen in what she claimed was the “common” trend of wearing of “headbands associated with foreign terrorist organizations” on college campuses; the “reissuing of Osama Bin Laden’s 2002 letter to America” on TikTok; and a brief visit to Columbia by Nahla Al-Arian, who Weiner incorrectly described as “the wife of somebody who had been convicted for material support to terrorism.”
“That’s not somebody who I would want necessarily influencing my child if I were a parent of somebody at Columbia,” Weiner commented.
Nahla’s husband, Palestinian academic Sami Al-Arian, had been indicted on flimsy terrorism charges in 2003, but a jury refused to convict him. Nevertheless, her brief stop at the Columbia encampment — where she says she did not even interact with any demonstrators — was cited by Adams during three separate media engagements to justify the police repression.
Throughout the press conference, Mayor Adams repeatedly cast the city’s crackdown on student speech as the only possible solution to ongoing campus encampments, citing undefined threats to the minds of impressionable youth.
“There is a movement to radicalize young people, and I’m not gonna wait until it’s done and all of a sudden acknowledge the existence of it,” Adams proclaimed.
“Young people are being influenced by those who are professionals at radicalizing our children,” he insisted, without specifying. “And I’m not gonna allow that to happen as the mayor of the city of New York.”
After angrily proclaiming that his “uncle died defending this country,” Adams declared: “It’s despicable that schools will allow another country’s flag to fly in our country.”
However, as an enthusiastic participant in New York City’s annual Celebrate Israel parade, Adams is no stranger to waving another country’s flag.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams waves Israel’s flag during the Celebrate Israel parade on June 4, 2023
Hostile Takeover: How NATO Annexed Macedonia
By Kit Klarenberg | Al Mayadeen | May 3, 2024
In Macedonia – or North Macedonia, or FYROM (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) – a counter-revolution impends. On April 24th, citizens went to the polls to choose their next President. Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova of Russophilic, pro-Serbian VMRO-DPMNE trounced Western-backed incumbent Stevo Pendarovski, albeit not by an absolute majority. The second round will be held May 8th, although opinion polls point to the challenger’s crushing victory. As we shall see, this development is a devastating blow to NATO, which could have far-reaching consequences regionally.
Pendarovski is a darling of EU and US officials. His upset win in 2019 was widely hailed in the mainstream media as illustrative of Macedonians’ yearning to at last become fully-fledged members of the transatlantic community, and rejection of VMRO-DPMNE’s “anti-Western” politics, which prominently included resisting NATO membership. His success also removed the last remaining barrier to Skopje joining the military alliance – a bitter, fraught, and protracted process, opposed by a significant proportion of the local population.
How Macedonia reached that point is largely unknown outside the country. It is a sordid tale of election meddling, subverted democracy, brazen swindles, high crimes and misdemeanours, and expansive American and British skullduggery, the full dimensions of which may never publicly surface. Now, Siljanovska-Davkova’s seemingly inevitable victory threatens to not only overturn those malign machinations, but reverse the US Empire’s ongoing effort to forcibly enmesh the entire Former Yugoslavia within NATO.
As with the election of Robert Fico in Slovakia, VMRO-DPMNE’s triumph comes at a very bad time for Washington. Across the West, public and state support for the proxy war in Ukraine is rapidly deteriorating, while Kiev faces total frontline collapse, and its forces are retreating everywhere. The prospect of Skopje’s withdrawal from NATO risks kickstarting another destabilising domino effect. The question of how, and whether, the alliance would be able to prevent this is an open one. Although it’ll undoubtedly try.
Dropping ‘Bombs’
NATO’s oft-repeated official mantra is that countries are free to choose their own security arrangements. As residents of the Balkans know only too well, in practice this simply isn’t true. For example, The Grayzone has previously exposed how alliance membership was violently imposed upon Montenegro in 2017, against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the population. Macedonians were slightly more amenable to joining, although there was for many years a seemingly insurmountable hurdle preventing accession – their country’s name.
Following Yugoslavia’s breakup, Macedonia applied to join a welter of international organisations and institutions. Athens, worried Skopje’s nationalist leaders might use their newfound independence to make irredentist claims on its own territory, successfully lobbied the United Nations et al for Macedonia to be forever referred to as FYROM in international fora. Officials charged there was no connection between the modern state, populated by ethnic Slavs, and the Greek land of antiquity.
In 2008 however, Greece blocked Skopje’s bid to begin NATO’s accession process under the FYROM moniker, explicitly due to its official name. Athens proposed the country rebrand itself New or Upper Macedonia, before trying again. Three years later, the International Court of Justice judged this was improper and discriminatory, although did nothing to prevent a subsequent repeat. Both the alliance and EU remained steadfast that the issue needed to be resolved, before membership negotiations for either body could begin.
Contemporary polls showed 82.5% of Macedonians opposed changing the country’s name, a position wholeheartedly shared by the government. VMRO-DPMNE was in office at this time, led by hardline nationalist Nikola Gruevski. Pledging that Macedonia would always be called Macedonia, as if to specifically spite Athens, he thereafter launched an ambitious construction project, “Skopje 2014”. Swaths of the capital’s brutalist architecture were razed to make way for faux neoclassical buildings, and a giant statue of Alexander the Great was constructed in the city centre.
From NATO’s perspective, however, Macedonia’s alliance “aspirations” were “set in stone” when Skopje inked a “Membership Action Plan” in 1999. VMRO-DPMNE’s popularity, and Gruevski’s leadership, were therefore highly problematic for Washington. In the year following Russia’s March 2014 reunification with Crimea, NATO’s efforts to expand into Moscow’s “near abroad” became turbocharged. As if on cue, opposition party SDSM’s leader Zoran Zaev began regularly dropping what he and domestic media dubbed “bombs”.
These were highly incriminating audio recordings and wiretaps of private conversations between prominent local government officials, businesspeople, journalists, and judges. Purportedly captured illegally by Skopje’s intelligence agencies, and provided to Zaev by whistleblowers, they appeared to implicate Gruevski and his ministers in gross wrongdoing, and abuses of power. For his part, the Macedonian premier claimed SDSM was attempting to blackmail him into holding a snap general election, and had threatened to publicise damaging intelligence “gathered with the help of a foreign spy service.”
‘Only Consultative’
A political crisis duly erupted in Macedonia. The EU and US stepped in, mediating a deal whereby SDSM would appoint ministers to government departments in an interim administration, Gruevski would resign by January 2016, and new elections would be held in June that year. USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), a component of the intelligence cutout concerned with “political transition” – in other words, regime change – subsequently set up shop in Skopje.
OTI went on to funnel tens of millions of dollars to anti-government, pro-NATO groups, political parties, and NGOs. In all, $16.2 million was allocated for ensuring Macedonia’s untroubled entry to NATO alone. George Soros’ Open Society Foundations was also handed vast sums to cause chaos. A final report on these efforts produced by USAID bragged that its “Macedonia Support Initiative” had “reinforced the US Government’s foreign policy goal of strengthening Macedonia’s democratic reform processes leading to greater Euro-Atlantic integration.”
Yet, in the resultant election, SDSM fell short of victory, and was forced to scrape together a fragile coalition government. Incongruously, around 70,000 Albanians in Macedonia – one third of the country’s total population – supported Zaev, when they would normally vote for ethnic Albanian parties. They hadn’t backed SDSM before in significant numbers, and haven’t since. Local sources suspect Skopje’s US and British embassies “worked with village elders, imams, and local mafia elements, to get Albanians to switch their vote this one time.”
Despite its vulnerability, the coalition administration was the breakthrough necessary to end Skopje’s name dispute once and for all. So it was in June 2018, the Greek and Macedonian foreign ministers met by Lake Prespa to sign a historic agreement. North Macedonia was born, and its NATO membership was imminent. Or so the alliance thought. While parliament rubberstamped the move, President Gjorge Ivanov of VMRO–DPMNE refused, pointing out the agreement contravened Skopje’s constitution.
Panicking, the Macedonian government opted to hold a referendum on the name change that September. In the intervening three months, authorities – backed and financed by the EU and US – bombarded citizens with slick advertising and propaganda, intended to sell the public on the benefits of joining NATO. Simultaneously, vast protests raged throughout the country, under the banner of “Never North, Always Macedonia”. Ivanov, and countless posters in major cities, urged voters to boycott the plebiscite. As a constitutional scholar explained:
“The name of a country is a name that comes from and is created by the people who created this country and live in it. The state created by the Macedonian people is called the Republic of Macedonia. The Macedonian people will never refer to their country with [another] name… We can never accept to change something that we’ve used for centuries, a name that has been carried by this state for more than 50 years.”
When the referendum’s results trickled in, Western leaders and Zaev hailed how a staggering 94% voted in favour of renaming Macedonia. They neglected to mention turnout was just 37%, therefore nullifying the result. Under Skopje’s constitution, 50% of the public must vote for the government to honour a referendum’s outcome. No matter – Zaev simply shifted goalposts, claiming the plebiscite was “only consultative”. The name change could and would go ahead regardless.
In January 2019, parliament approved dubious and highly controversial constitutional “reforms”, allowing the country to be renamed without a public vote, or even the President’s blessing. This required corralling two thirds of lawmakers to back the changes. The SDSM-led coalition achieved this feat by bribing, intimidating, and blackmailing MPs, pardoning MPs facing prosecution for serious crimes, and other cynical connivances. Subsequent investigations uncovered “serious breaches” of domestic laws and international standards perpetrated by authorities during the referendum campaign.
The next month, NATO’s 29 members accepted North Macedonia’s accession. The alliance welcomed its newest inductee on March 27th 2020. How extraordinary it would be, if the country was the last one in, and first one out. Although, long before the latest Presidential election, there were unambiguous indications Skopje sensed geopolitical breezes have begun to blow in new directions. In November 2023, Macedonian officials announced their airspace would open to Russia, allowing Sergei Lavrov to visit a local OSCE ministerial summit.
Sweden rules out international Nord Stream probe
RT | May 4, 2024
There is no need for an international investigation into the explosions on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines, Sweden’s Foreign Ministry has told RIA Novosti news agency.
Last week, China’s deputy envoy to the UN, Geng Shuang, called for a probe into the September 2022 blasts that ruptured the pipelines, which were built to deliver Russian gas to Germany and the rest of Europe. Countries should work together on an investigation “to bring the perpetrators to justice in order to prevent the reoccurrence of similar incidents,” Geng said.
When asked about Beijing’s proposal by RIA Novosti on Friday, the Swedish Foreign Ministry insisted that “there is no need for an international investigation. It’s going to achieve nothing.”
“An investigation into the incidents was carried out by the Swedish authorities in accordance with the fundamental principles of independence, impartiality and the rule of law. Other national investigations are still ongoing,” the ministry stated.
Sweden conducted its own probe as the explosions on the Nord Stream pipelines occurred in the country’s exclusive economic zone. Germany and Denmark carried out separate inquiries. However, in February, the Swedish and Danish investigations were aborted. Stockholm said it had come to the conclusion that the case did not fall under Swedish jurisdiction, while Copenhagen concluded that “there was deliberate sabotage” of the pipelines, but found insufficient grounds to pursue criminal proceedings.
Russia is carrying out its own investigation into the Nord Stream blasts despite the refusal of Western nations to cooperate. Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov said earlier that Moscow had sent more than a dozen requests for legal assistance to Germany, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland and Sweden, but only received a single formal reply from Copenhagen.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and other officials suggested previously that the pipelines were targeted by the US or on Washington’s behalf.
Odessa massacre 10 years on… Western media silence covers up NATO incrimination
Strategic Culture Foundation | May 3, 2024
Ten years ago this week, a shocking and brutal massacre was perpetrated by supporters of the NATO-backed Kiev regime in Odessa.
At least 42 men and women were murdered on May 2, 2014, when the Trade Unions House in the historic port city was set ablaze by a fascist mob.
Last year to commemorate the ninth anniversary of the atrocity, our weekly editorial provided a rationale for Western silence. We commented:
“In all, 42 people were murdered in the Trade Unions building massacre. Not one attacker was ever prosecuted. The Kiev regime refused to carry out any adequate investigation.
However, the horror of that day was a turning point for many Ukrainians and Russians. It revealed the hideous nature of the regime that had seized power over the country and its vile fascist hostility toward Russia.
This is the regime that was brought to power by Washington and its NATO partners. Since 2014, it has been armed and built up to be a war machine to aggress Russia and obliterate all cultural connections with Russia.
The massacre in Odessa should be remembered for the sake of the victims that day. But also remembered because it helps explain the background of how the present U.S.-led NATO proxy conflict in Ukraine with Russia has come about.
For that reason, Western news media and their governments chose to studiously ignore the Odessa massacre. Their shameful silence is necessary in order to conceal the criminal complicity of the West in Ukraine’s deadly turmoil.”
Now 10 years on, the Western media do not even make any mention of the atrocity. In earlier years, the Western media sought to distort the incident by claiming that it was a confused melee and the tragic result of a clash between unknown rival factions. There were even deplorable attempts by Western media to make out that claims of an atrocity were “Russian disinformation”.
The cover-up has given way to total silence as if the horrific event was consigned to an Orwellian “memory hole”.
Russia continues to call for an international independent investigation to bring the perpetrators to justice. The Kiev regime persists in rebuffing any serious investigation for the simple reason that a thorough probe would probably show that the atrocity was carried out by the leadership of the Kiev regime in collusion with Western intelligence agencies.
What happened in Odessa on May 2, 2014, was not some random event of chaotic violence that got out of control. This is what the Western media initially reported.
No, it seems quite clear now that the massacre was a well-planned, deliberate act of mass murder to terrorize the Ukrainian opposition into complying with the NATO regime. It was an act of state terrorism.
The victims were all from Odessa who had been participating in a peaceful protest outside the landmark building in the city center. The building was closed due to the May Day holiday. As in several other southern and eastern regions of Ukraine at the time, there were many protests against the NATO-sponsored coup in Kiev that had taken place only weeks earlier in February of that year.
Many Ukrainians were not happy – indeed were appalled – that the so-called EuroMaidan coup in Kiev had brought to power ultranationalists and fascists who glorified NeoNazi figures and paramilitaries. Cities like Odessa suffered terribly under Nazi occupation during the Great Patriotic War (WWII). Now they were seeing a regime exulting in those Nazi memories and wanting to banish all Russian cultural connections.
In those pivotal months of 2014, the CIA’s plan to turn Ukraine into an anti-Russian bulwark was not a foregone conclusion due to the formidable opposition to the new regime in cities like Odessa, Kherson and Kharkov – as well as of course the Crimea Peninsula and the Donbass.
Former Odessa lawmaker Vasily Polishchuk who witnessed the violence that day testifies that senior figures in the Kiev regime were present in Odessa in the days before May 2. One of those was Andriy Parubiy who had been appointed head of national security. Parubiy is also implicated in the sniper shootings in Kiev on February 20 – a false flag provocation killing dozens of protesters and police officers – that precipitated the coup against the elected pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych.
Two weeks before the Odessa massacre, the then CIA director John Brennan was in Kiev on an unannounced visit. Even some U.S. lawmakers complained at the time that it was not a good look for the United States to be seen collaborating with the Kiev regime. Brennan was not only giving the green light to the “anti-terror operation” (civil war) that the Kiev regime was about to launch against the Donbass. It seems plausible that the United States was also helping to formulate a scorched-earth policy of terror to quell any dissent across Ukraine.
The mass killings in Odessa on May 2 were the selected terror demonstration.
Eyewitnesses tell of how thousands of Kiev regime paramilitaries who had been instrumental in the coup in the capital weeks earlier were bussed into Odessa and put up in camps. Andriy Parubiy was seen inspecting their ranks and overseeing the supply of body armor.
When the anti-Maidan protesters were attacked on May 2, they were herded by baseball-bat-wielding thugs into the Trade Union House. The building was then assailed with incendiary devices.
People who jumped from the blazing building were bludgeoned to death by NeoNazi gangs shouting “Death to all Russians”.
The dereliction of duty by the police that day to protect the peaceful protesters and the subsequent quashing of any crime investigation is proof that the security forces were complicit. That could only have been enabled by senior orders most likely issued by those in Kiev.
This is essential background to understand the current conflict in Ukraine and why Russia decided to intervene on February 24, 2022. Moscow maintains that Ukraine is a proxy war orchestrated by the United States and its NATO allies as a geo-strategic confrontation to subjugate Russia. Western regimes and their propaganda media make out that Ukraine is a democracy under aggression from Russia.
Understanding how the Kiev regime was installed with CIA and NATO engineering and how it rapidly used its fascist violence to turn Ukraine into a terror state corroborates the analysis of the current conflict being a Western imperialist proxy war.
The Western-lionized “democracy” has repressed all opposition parties and media.
The United States and its NATO accomplices do not want the Western public to understand the truth about their criminal machinations in Ukraine. These powers want the bloodshed to continue to the last Ukrainian because the war racket is so damn lucrative.
Thus the Western powers must shove episodes like the Odessa massacre down the memory hole and keep a lid on it. It is imperative to keep the fiction going of a democracy under attack otherwise the West’s collusion with a NeoNazi regime would reveal the Western powers’ inherent fascism.
Several events and developments around the world – brutal police repression of peaceful protests in the U.S. and Europe, the enabling of genocide by a fascist Israeli regime, the unprovoked aggression toward China, and the nefarious involvement in Ukraine – all point to Western states degenerating into full-fledged fascism.
Russia shoots down four US-made long-range missiles – MOD
RT | May 4, 2024
Russian air defenses have shot down four US-manufactured long-range missiles over Crimea, according to the Defense Ministry in Moscow.
On Saturday night, Kiev’s forces attempted “to carry out a terrorist attack” against the Russian peninsula using surface-to-surface Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) supplied by Washington, the ministry said in a post on Telegram. The strike was intercepted, it added.
On Tuesday, the Defense Ministry claimed that six ATACMS projectiles had been downed in a single day, without specifying the location of the strikes. In total, 15 such missiles have been intercepted in the past seven days, Moscow reported on Saturday.
In late April, US officials confirmed earlier media reports that the Pentagon had secretly shipped an unspecified number of long-range missiles to Ukraine as part of an arms package announced by President Joe Biden in mid-March.
The “goal” of supplying Kiev with ATACMS was to put more pressure on Crimea and allow Ukrainian forces to target the peninsula “more effectively,” the New York Times reported at a time, citing an unnamed Pentagon official.
Moscow said the provision of long-range missiles would only spell “more problems” for Kiev. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov insisted that the use of ATACMS would not impact the outcome of the conflict, or prevent Russia from achieving its security goals.
On Friday, Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned that any Western-backed Ukrainian attack against the Russian peninsula, or the Crimean Bridge which connects it to the Krasnodar Region, would spark a forceful response.
“I would like to again warn Washington, London, Brussels, that any aggressive actions against Crimea are not only doomed to failure, but will also be met with a retaliatory blow,” she said during a media briefing.
Pandemic Officials are “Disappointed in Themselves”, per the New York Times
By Igor Chudov | May 3, 2024
An article in the New York Times is titled “Thousands Believe Covid Vaccines Harmed Them. Is Anyone Listening?” (no paywall)
The author, Apoorva Mandavilli, was correctly described by Vinay Prasad as the worst science reporter. She states her surprise about “thousands” who believe that Covid vaccines harmed them. While we know that number to be an understatement, it is interesting how the New York Times recognizes them after years of stonewalling.
But in a recent interview, Dr. Janet Woodcock, a longtime leader of the Food and Drug Administration, who retired in February, said she believed that some recipients had experienced uncommon but “serious” and “life-changing” reactions beyond those described by federal agencies.
“I feel bad for those people,” said Dr. Woodcock, who became the F.D.A.’s acting commissioner in January 2021 as the vaccines were rolling out. “I believe their suffering should be acknowledged, that they have real problems, and they should be taken seriously.”
FDA’s Dr. Woodcock is disappointed in herself:
“I’m disappointed in myself,” she added. “I did a lot of things I feel very good about, but this is one of the few things I feel I just didn’t bring it home.”
The article discusses thousands of people gaslit by vaccine promoters and their doctors, who were intimidated not to report vaccine injuries:
Similar sentiments were echoed in interviews, conducted over more than a year, with 30 people who said they had been harmed by Covid shots. They described a variety of symptoms following vaccination, some neurological, some autoimmune, some cardiovascular.
All said they had been turned away by physicians, told their symptoms were psychosomatic, or labeled anti-vaccine by family and friends — despite the fact that they supported vaccines.
Even some key vaccine promoters report vaccine injuries, which they could not report anywhere:
Dr. Gregory Poland, 68, editor in chief of the journal Vaccine, said that a loud whooshing sound in his ears had accompanied every moment since his first shot, but that his entreaties to colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to explore the phenomenon, tinnitus, had led nowhere.
He received polite responses to his many emails, but “I just don’t get any sense of movement,” he said.
The federal officials in charge of setting the policy still refuse to believe these reports:
Federal health officials say they do not believe that the Covid vaccines caused the illnesses described by patients like Mr. Barcavage, Dr. Zimmerman and Ms. France. The vaccines may cause transient reactions, such as swelling, fatigue and fever, according to the C.D.C., but the agency has documented only four serious but rare side effects.
The excuse that these officials give for ignoring vaccine harms is that they were fighting misinformation :
The rise of the anti-vaccine movement has made it difficult for scientists, in and out of government, to candidly address potential side effects, some experts said. Much of the narrative on the purported dangers of Covid vaccines is patently false, or at least exaggerated, cooked up by savvy anti-vaccine campaigns.
Questions about Covid vaccine safety are core to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign. Citing debunked theories about altered DNA, Florida’s surgeon general has called for a halt to Covid vaccination in the state.
“The sheer nature of misinformation, the scale of misinformation, is staggering, and anything will be twisted to make it seem like it’s not just a devastating side effect but proof of a massive cover-up,” said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a vice dean at Johns Hopkins University.
So, get this please, the massive coverup was necessary to debunk ‘“misinformation” about the existence of a massive coverup. I hope it makes sense to you, my dear reader!
They finally note miscarriages caused by COVID vaccines:
Among the hundreds of millions of Americans who were immunized for Covid, some number would have had heart attacks or strokes anyway. Some women would have miscarried. How to distinguish those caused by the vaccine from those that are coincidences? The only way to resolve the question is intense research.
Another way to get the alarm signal of miscarriages is to ask, why does the Moderna vaccine cause 42% more miscarriages, compared to the Pfizer vaccine.
Why Now?
Are we observing a paradoxical awakening of honesty among federal officials and vaccine researchers? Have Apoorva Mandavilli and her employer finally decided to come clean about Covid vaccines?
Did these dishonest people suddenly straighten their ways, after being paid millions in research grants, CDC vaccine promotion fees paid to the media, etc? As much as I hope people can improve, I doubt that explanation.
The most likely explanation is that:
- Most vaccine-injured people are Democrats
- Facing a tough election in 2020, the Democratic party is afraid that the victims of vaccines that their party promoted and that disproportionally affected their core voters, might divert their votes and vote for an anti-vax Democrat, Robert Kennedy.
That might explain a puzzling turnaround in reporting vaccine injury in major newspapers such as the New York Times.
Police State Revealed: US Student Protesters Tracked and Spied Upon
A State trooper stands gurad near pro-Palestinian demomstrators at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas – © AFP / Suzanne Cordeiro
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 03.05.2024
Thousands of American students at pro-Palestinian rallies face increased surveillance and scrutiny from police and university authorities.
Pro-Palestinian college students in the US may encounter surveillance on campuses following their protests, according to Axios.
The media outlet warned that the extent that law enforcement agencies and universities use social media monitoring tools and facial recognition software is greater than the public imagines.
Over the past two weeks, more than 2,000 protesters have been arrested due to close cooperation between law enforcement officers and university authorities. Citing Albert Fox Cahn, the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project’s (S.T.O.P.’s) founder, Axios noted that police and universities have a long history of security cooperation, which includes sharing campus video footage, students’ geolocation, and social media posts.
US educational institutions have also mastered surveillance during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, installing all sorts of surveillance tools and apps for public safety. For instance, some installed automated license plate readers while others reportedly used state law enforcement’s facial recognition databases.
As per the media outlet, at least 37 universities have been clients of Social Sentinel (also known as Navigate 360), a US technology firm that tracks students’ social media behavior with a declared aim of preventing self-harm or violence on campuses. It turned out that the technology has also been used to spy upon student protesters since 2015, according to a 2022 journalist investigation.
In addition to abusing students’ privacy, various artificial intelligence tools could mislead their users. For example, facial recognition applications are prone to errors, especially when it comes to non-white individuals. That could lead to potential misidentification, with little to prevent officials from inadvertently or intentionally abusing the technology.
Columbia University, which has recently emerged as a focal point of student protests, has been a target for police that tracked student groups since at least 2006, according to the Associated Press.
There is fear that participants of student movements could face continued surveillance by law enforcement agencies post-graduation. US college and university students appear to be aware of the potential threat: many wear masks and other face coverings to avoid identification during the protests.
Featured Video
Pediatrician shares 30 yrs of insight on vaccinating vs. not vaccinating children
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Book Excerpt
Biden’s Closed Circle on Russia
An excerpt from ‘The Great Betrayal’
By James W. Carden | The Realist Review | June 14, 2026
Joe Biden’s presidency may ultimately come to be seen as a cautionary tale. Here was a president who showed little interest in entertaining arguments that might have contradicted his most deeply held assumptions.[1] And there were precious few within the upper ranks of the administration who might have attempted to do so, after all, only policy hands and political operatives who had come up through the ranks of the Clinton and Obama administrations or had longstanding ties to the citadels of the foreign policy community were invited into the fold. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Terms of Iran-US MoU revealed: Bloomberg
- A California Pediatrician Shares 30 Years of Insight on Vaccinating vs. Not Vaccinating Children
- What Is Defensive Medicine?
- CDC Awards Pfizer $1.24 Billion for COVID Vaccines for Kids and Adults
- Historic blow to South Korea’s military intelligence agency
- Russian frigate fires warning shots in English Channel
- Radio Free Europe, the Cold War ‘Weapon’ Congress Still Funds
- UN: Israel continues to violate Lebanon airspace in defiance of Iran-US MoU
- Araghchi: Israeli occupation of Lebanese land a violation of MoU
- Hezbollah fighters confront intruding Israeli forces in southern Lebanon
- If Americans Knew
- Pro-Israel Donors Power Last-Minute Surge of Espaillat Spending
- “They Stole Our Home and Our Life”: Israel Permanently Displaces Syrians in Quneitra
- Massie Recognizes USS Liberty Attack. Here’s Why That Matters
- The blatant racism and cruelty that define Israel’s settler movement
- Israeli army ‘murdered child’ in Gaza and then dumped body on a roadside
- The Forward’s Hit Piece on Thomas Massie and USS Liberty Veterans
- Israel’s former defense minister compares settler ideology to Nazism
- The Pro-Israel Lobby’s Quiet Cash Shuffle
- Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) Propagandizes for Israel’s Wars
- A grim milestone: Gaza’s death toll surpasses 73,000 – Daily Update
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Chile’s Relative Sea Level Was 3.2 Meters Higher Than Today During The Mid-Holocene
- Beyond The Pitch: Why FIFA’s World Cup Is One Of Humanity’s Best Investments
- Climate Alarmists Now Using Natural Phenomena To Support Their Claims
- New Study: Significant CO2 Fluxes From Non-Volcanic Sources Are Largely Neglected In Carbon Budgets
- Women Climate Scientists Being Harassed, Insulted By Skeptics, Claims Berkeley Earth Researcher
- Germany’s Longterm Spring Climate Data Show “No Climate Trend”
- New Study: Solar Photovoltaic, Wind Power Fail To Meet Annual Energy Demands 62% Of The Time
- Germany’s Die Welt: “Too Much Is Too Much” … Green Energies Are Cannabalizing Each Other!
- Germany’s Ecological Holocaust… Once Fairy Tale Forests Getting Cleared For Wind Turbines
- A Grand Solar Minimum Has Arrived…Global Cooling Of At Least 1°C Is Expected By The 2030s, 2040s
Aletho News 
