$12 Billion Over 10 Years: Pharma, Medical Devices Industries Shell Out Direct Payments to US Physicians
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 11, 2024
The pharmaceutical and medical devices industries paid physicians more than $12 billion over 10 years, according to a study published last month in JAMA.
The analysis found the industries made 85,087,744 payments totaling $12.13 billion to 826,313 physicians — 57.1% of practicing physicians across 39 specialties.
Orthopedic surgeons, neurologists and psychiatrists, and cardiologists received the most money. Trauma surgeons and pediatric surgeons received the least.
The drugs with the highest payouts were blood thinners Xarelto and Eliquis, along with Humira, an immunosuppressant.
The three medical devices with the highest payouts were robotic surgery systems, da Vinci Surgical System and Mako SmartRobotics, and CoreValve Evolut, a heart valve.
“Money given to doctors has a purpose: it is for marketing,” cardiologist Dr. John Mandrola and co-author of the study wrote on his Substack. “If these direct payments to doctors did not work, industry would not spend billions.”
Dr. Andrew Foy, lead author of the paper, told The Defender in an email he thought some people might find the numbers “shocking” and he hoped it would renew interest in having conversations about physician-industry payments and facilitate more research.
The researchers tracked and compared payments made to physicians across and within specialties. They also identified the top 25 drugs and medical devices associated with the largest total payments.
The analysis included only money received for consulting, travel, food, entertainment, education, gifts, grants and honoraria. The researchers excluded other major external funding sources for physicians such as research funding and royalties.
They analyzed data from 2013-2022 in the Open Payments database, established in 2013 by the Physician Payments Sunshine Act as part of the Affordable Care Act.
Legislators designed the Sunshine Act to address growing public concerns about Big Pharma’s influence over doctors. At the time, several studies had shown that increased interaction with pharmaceutical representatives influenced physician prescribing behavior.
The act requires medical product manufacturers to disclose to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services any payments or other transfers of value made to physicians or teaching hospitals. Open Payments publishes the payments on its website.
The analysis found that payments varied significantly across specialties. The highest-paid specialties like orthopedic surgery received $1.36 billion, and neurology and psychology specialties received $1.32 billion. The lowest-paid specialties received substantially less.
Pediatric surgeons and trauma surgeons received only $2.89 million and $6.96 million respectively.
Payments also varied significantly among physicians within the same specialty, with a small number of physicians in each specialty receiving the largest amounts of money — often exceeding $1 million — while the median physician received significantly less, typically less than $100, ranging from zero to $2,339.
“Our paper is a modest analysis. It does not explain the problem of financial conflicts of interest. But it is a lot of money. And it’s highly targeted to lucrative procedures,” Mandrola wrote.
“Industry influence is way too strong,” he added, and commonly results in medical devices being approved “despite dodgy evidence.”
He said many doctors believe collaboration between industry and physicians is a good thing that drives innovation. However, he said, these payments weren’t simply supporting collaboration.
“Most of it, I would argue, is for marketing and goodwill. Goodwill goes a long way to help establish practice patterns.”
Top drugs and devices on list net billions for pharma
The blood thinner Xarelto, used to prevent blood clots from forming due to an irregular heartbeat or after hip or knee replacement surgery, topped the payment list, accounting for $176.3 million.
The drug, made by Bayer and marketed by Janssen Pharmaceuticals, was Bayer’s top drug in 2023, generating about 4.1 billion euros in revenue.
Payments for Eliquis, another blood thinner used to treat the same conditions, amounted to $102.62 million. Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb manufacture Eliquis.
Pfizer in 2023 brought in over $6.7 billion from the drug, its second-most profitable product behind the Comirnaty COVID-19 vaccine. Bristol-Myers Squibb’s sales topped $12 billion.
Eliquis costs U.S. customers 3 to 7 times more than customers in other high-income countries.
Humira, an immunosuppressant used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and other autoimmune conditions paid out $100.17 million to physicians. Over the last two decades, the drug netted over $200 billion for drugmaker AbbieVie, which listed the medication at $50,000 per year.
Bayer, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb and AbbieVie did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Other top drugs included diabetes treatments Invokana, Jardiance, and Farxiga, Dupixent, a drug for allergic diseases, and Botox.
The two medical devices topping the list — da Vinci Surgical System, which paid $307.5 million, and Mako SmartRobotics, which paid $50 million — are machines for robotic-assisted surgeries.
Mako focuses on hip and knee replacements. Da Vinci netted approximately $7.12 billion in 2023 and investors were “blown away” by the “robot-fueled growth” of Mako SmartRobotics device installation for hip and knee replacements. Mako’s parent company Stryker made over $20 billion last year.
Several cardiology devices also made the list, including the third-highest payer CoreValve Evolut, another heart valve, Sapien 3 and LifeVest, a wearable defibrillator. They are all part of their parent companies’ multi-billion dollar product portfolios.
Conflicts of interest
The problem of physicians’ financial ties to pharmaceutical companies has plagued the industry for decades and garnered significant media attention.
Perhaps most famously, Purdue Pharma used misleading marketing to make massive profits from sales of opioids, sparking an epidemic. Nearly 645,000 Americans died from opioid overdose between 1999 and 2021.
However, Purdue Pharma’s policy of paying physicians has long been common practice. Research studies during the last two decades have found the vast majority of physicians accept payments and gifts from pharmaceutical companies. Influential studies include those by the Institute of Medicine and the Medicare Payments Advisory Commission that led to the passage of the Sunshine Act.
This latest study and other recent studies show that despite new mechanisms for transparency in payments, the payments continue.
And those payments are particularly high among physicians with prominent roles directing public policy.
For example, last year The New York Times revealed that while advisers at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine were shaping public policy on opioids, they were also accepting payments from the Sackler family who owned Purdue Pharma.
Last month, The Defender reported that most of the nine new members appointed to the vaccine advisory committee for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have received substantial direct payments or research funding from Big Pharma — largely from the companies whose products they will be reviewing.
Foy said he thought a major part of the problem is that physicians and researchers believe that if they make their conflicts of interest transparent, the problem is resolved.
“As if someone cannot be transparent about their conflicts and highly biased at the same time,” he said.
He said that payments don’t necessarily lead directly to prescribing one specific drug for which a payment is received.
Instead, he said, he worries that the payments lead to, “overly enthusiastic recommendations or guidelines from medical organizations to use new products when they have not been sufficiently tested, or where the evidence is not strong enough, to recommend them over old standards or nothing at all (in some cases).”
Industry payments to physicians, Foy said, have a way of “tilting physicians’ sympathy toward industry and the ‘medical advancements’ that come from industry so that they (the physicians) more willingly adopt new products just for the sake of ‘industry advancement’ even if they don’t have a direct COI [conflict of interest] with that particular product.”
Physicians, he said, “become cheerleaders for industry and more open to adopting new products simply due to this attachment.”
For example, he said it is not uncommon at medical conferences for attendees to stand up and cheer results from “late-breaking” research studies whose “benefits are very rarely ever more than marginal, tiny, or ‘teensy-weensy’ at best.”
“I never understood it,” Foy wrote.
Direct payments aren’t the only way industry collaborates with physicians, Foy said.
Industry ads are featured on the homepage of medical journals and ads bombard physicians at major medical conferences.
He said this gives the impression that “the event is built around industry and its involvement.”
He said he doesn’t think that anyone tries to hide the relationships. “The main reason being, at least in my opinion, is that many physicians, perhaps even the majority, believe that physician-industry collaboration is a net benefit to patients and society,” he said.
“I don’t necessarily share that view; however, I don’t believe there is strong, objective evidence to support one side or the other.”
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
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.
Game Over? Persian Gulf Powers Reportedly Refuse to Give US Access to Bases for Anti-Iran Strikes
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 13.04.2024
Going back to the Gulf War in 1991, the US has depended on regional allies for large-scale military operations across the Middle East. Now, as tensions between Israel and Iran rise and the US-led unipolar world order comes under strain, America’s traditional partners are apparently refusing to walk in lock step with Washington.
Persian Gulf countries have reportedly told the United States not to launch any attacks against Iran from their territory or airspace amid seething regional tensions.
Sources, including a senior US official told the Middle East Eye that Gulf monarchies have been “working overtime” on the diplomatic track “to shut down avenues that could link them to a US reprisal against Tehran or its proxies from bases inside their kingdoms.”
The countries include regional heavyweights Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Kuwait, with their leaderships reportedly “raising questions” on the details of US basing agreements, and taking steps to prevent the use of their Iran-adjacent bases against the Islamic Republic.
NATO member Turkiye has also reportedly barred the US from using its airspace for strikes against Iran, but Sputnik has not been able to independently verify this information.
“It’s a mess,” a senior US official said, referring to the headache the Biden administration faces as it prepares for a potential Iranian retaliatory strike against its top regional ally Israel following Tel Aviv’s April 1 attack on the Iranian Embassy compound in Damascus, Syria.
The Middle East Eye report follows a report by Axios on Friday citing US officials who said that Iran has privately warned the US that it will target American forces in the Middle East if Washington gets involved in a military confrontation between Iran and Israel.
The US has an estimated 40,000+ military personnel at bases dotting the Middle East, including the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, which hosts at least 10,000 troops, and serves as the forward headquarters of United States Central Command – the combatant command responsible for military operations across the Middle East. Nearby Bahrain hosts up to 7,000 troops and the US Fifth Fleet – which operates in the Persian Gulf, the Red and Arabian Seas, and part of the Indian Ocean. The US also has a 15,000-troop garrison in Kuwait, at least 5,000 troops in the UAE, and about 2,700 troops and fighter jets at the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. Oman hosts a few hundred US troops, and allows the US Air Force to conduct overflights and landings, and warships to make 80 port calls annually.
The Gulf powers’ increasingly independent foreign policy is potentially a major setback for Washington, which for many decades after World War II (and especially after the Cold War) was able to rely on the Persian Gulf monarchies for its military operations in the oil-rich region.
Regional countries led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE have taken a series of steps recently to wean themselves off of dependence on the US economically, politically and militarily, with Riyadh moving to break the petrodollar monopoly in the oil trade with China, pausing its military campaign against Yemen’s Houthi militia, restoring diplomatic ties with Iran and, together with Abu Dhabi, joining the BRICS Plus bloc.
The Palestinian-Israeli crisis has driven Gulf state leaders and their populations further from the idea of the establishing relations with Israel, and chilled ties with the US thanks to the Biden administration’s full-fledged support for Tel Aviv in the course of the Gaza War.
‘Russia turned off the gas’ – German leader
RT | April 12, 2024
Germans should blame Moscow and not Berlin for high energy prices, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in an interview published on Friday. He claimed the embargo against Russia was necessary for defending Europe from “imperialism.”
Speaking with Die Tageszeitung, Scholz defended his government’s policy of unequivocal support for Ukraine.
“It’s about defending Europe’s peace order. Russia is waging an imperialist war and must not win,” he told the outlet. “Second: Russia stopped its gas deliveries, not us.”
Russia’s Gazprom delivered natural gas to Germany both via Ukraine – upholding the existing transit contracts – and via the Nord Stream pipeline, built under the Baltic Sea. Under pressure from the US, Germany blocked the certification of Nord Stream 2 in November 2021 – months before the Ukraine conflict escalated.
Berlin refused to certify Nord Stream 2 even after Nord Stream 1 was destroyed by explosive charges in September 2022. Western investigators have yet to name the culprit for the bombing.
According to Scholz, however, his government “developed new sources of supply for gas and oil and built terminals to import liquefied gas.” The LNG has come mainly from the US, at a much higher price.
“All of this has led to energy prices falling again,” the German chancellor said, arguing that his government prevented a ten-year economic crisis through “decisive action.”
Scholz seconded the message of his economy minister, Green leader Robert Habeck, who has argued that the German model of prosperity built around cheap Russian energy was over for good.
“The peacemaking effect of economic contacts was certainly overrated,” he told the Tageszeitung, claiming that Russia sacrificed its economic well-being by choosing violence. To defend its “democracy and freedom,” Germany needs a strong military, an efficient arms industry, and to support Ukraine, he insisted.
Scholz also brushed off the Germans’ concerns about the economy and inflation by saying that green energy and the pharmaceutical industry will soon turn things around.
On the same day his interview was published, Germany’s largest steelmaker Thyssenkrupp announced “a substantial reduction in production” at its Duisburg facility, laying off 13,000 employees. The company blamed “high energy costs and tight emission reduction regulations” as well as increased pressure from Asian imports.
All for One and One for All
By William Schryver – imetatronink – April 13, 2024
Russia, China, and Iran have now formed a de facto military and economic alliance — what they prefer to call a “partnership”.
In the case of Russia and China, a comprehensive full-spectrum partnership has emerged: military, economic, and monetary.
Trade between Russia and China has exploded both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Importantly, trade settlement is overwhelmingly denominated in rubles and renminbi. Use of the dollar and its international mechanisms is being aggressively deprecated.
Russia and China now conduct regular joint naval and air patrols of the western Pacific, from Alaska to the South China Sea.
Russia, China, and Iran conduct regular joint exercises in the Arabian Sea. Those exercises have increased in both scope and frequency in recent years.
Both Russia and China are investing vast sums of capital in Iran, much of it in the energy sector and in ambitious transportation projects aiming to construct fast and efficient trade corridors linking China, Iran, and Russia as primary nodes of Eurasian commerce.
Arms and technology transfers between the three countries have reached unprecedented levels.
Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov just concluded several days of talks with Chinese leaders, including both Wang Yi and Xi Jinping. In its report of the talks, the Chinese government’s flagship media organ, Global Times, summarized (in the words of prominent CPC commentator Li Haidong) the current state of the Russia/China relationship:
“China and Russia will not target any third party, but if hegemonic forces threaten China and Russia, or threaten world peace, China and Russia will stand together and fight to protect their own interests and safeguard world peace together.”
It is increasingly evident that Russia, China, and Iran recognize that an attack against any one of them would constitute an existential threat to them all. The strategic interests of all three countries are now inextricably intertwined.
Most importantly, they are united in a single overriding strategic objective: to dismantle the dominion of the long-reigning Anglo-American empire.
Naturally, the rapidly waning global hegemon is not inclined to relinquish its throne without a fight. What form that fight takes remains to be seen. But if the empire attempts to preserve its so-called “rules-based international order” via force of arms, it is essential to understand this incontrovertible reality:
In order for the United States to make war against any ONE of Russia, China, or Iran, it would be necessary to effectively vacate every major US base on the planet in order to concentrate enough military power to undertake the mission.
In a putative war between the United States and Iran, both Russia and China would actively support Iran. I’m not suggesting Russian or Chinese forces would fight alongside Iranians — although that could happen. But it would likely not be necessary. Iran would simply be supplemented with arms and other logistical necessities from both its partners — and quite possibly taken under their nuclear umbrella in an explicit act of deterrence.
Additionally, in consequence of the US weakening its force posture in Europe and the western Pacific in a bid to militarily subdue Iran, Russia and China would be enabled to apply immense pressure to western logistics, trade, and political influence in those regions. This is not to suggest that China would invade Taiwan or Russia would invade the Baltics or Poland. They would need only to exert their dominant influence in what were previously considered to be unassailable American imperial domains in east Asia and Europe.
The empire is stretched so thin and its potential for power projection is so diluted that undertaking even one Big War would be enough to bring the entire house of cards tumbling down.
This is the harsh reality the Masters of Empire are now facing, and no amount of mythologizing about the “limitless” power at their disposal can change it.
There is a vast difference between imagined power and the actual ability to project and sustain power against the adversaries the United States military must now face and defeat in order to prevent or even meaningfully delay the end of American global hegemony.
And, to the extent Russia, China, and Iran are determined to act all for one and one for all, they represent a combination of global military and economic power that cannot be defeated.
US has ‘no viable plan’ for Ukraine – senator
RT | April 12, 2024
Kiev cannot win against Moscow because it has run out of men and needs more weapons and ammunition than Washington could possibly provide, US Senator J.D. Vance said on Friday.
Earlier this week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer argued that “the biggest reason Ukraine is losing the war is because the hard-right in the Congress has paralyzed the US from acting.” The New York Democrat claimed that a small group of Republicans have been holding up a vital $60 billion aid package for Kiev.
In an op-ed published by the New York Times, Vance addressed Schumer’s claim and accused President Joe Biden of having “failed to articulate even basic facts” about what Ukraine needs and the reality on the ground.
“The Biden administration has no viable plan for the Ukrainians to win this war,” Vance argued.
“Ukraine’s challenge is not the GOP; it’s math,” the Ohio Republican wrote. “Ukraine needs more soldiers than it can field, even with draconian conscription policies. And it needs more matériel than the United States can provide.”
Not only is $60 billion a fraction of what Ukraine would need to turn the tide, Americans “lack the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war,” Vance argued.
He pointed to the fact that the US can make 360,000 shells for 155mm artillery per year, “less than a tenth of what Ukraine says it needs,” and that’s after doubling prewar production capacity.
Vance also took aim at the White House’s messaging that funding Kiev is good for US military industry.
“The notion that we should prolong a bloody and gruesome war because it’s been good for American business is grotesque. We can and should rebuild our industrial base without shipping its products to a foreign conflict,” he wrote.
The US insistence on not negotiating with Russia is “absurd” and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s goal of restoring Ukraine’s 1991 borders is “fantastical,” Vance added. He urged Kiev to dig in and hold until some kind of peace can be brokered by Washington.
Earlier this week, however, Zelensky said Ukraine was planning yet another counteroffensive – after the costly failure of last summer’s operation – but needed even more weapons and ammunition from the West.
Abu Ghraib survivors to get their day in court
RT | April 12, 2024
Twenty years on from reports that the US military was torturing prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, three survivors will finally get a chance to bring their claims before an American jury.
A trial in the civil lawsuit filed by former Abu Ghraib inmates against the US military contractor that they blame for their suffering is scheduled to begin on Monday in a federal court near Washington. The private security contractor, CACI International, has strung the case along for 16 years by making over 20 unsuccessful attempts to have the lawsuit dismissed.
CACI, which supplied the interrogators who worked at Abu Ghraib, has insisted that its employees weren’t accused of abusing detainees. The Virginia-based company also has argued that as a Pentagon contractor, it should be protected by the government’s sovereign immunity against the torture allegations.
However, the plaintiffs claimed that CACI set the conditions for their torture by directing or encouraging abuses by military guards, at least partly to “soften up” prisoners for interrogations. All three of the former detainees are Iraqi civilians who were held at Abu Ghraib until eventually being released without charges.
The trial will be “an exceedingly rare opportunity for accountability for the egregious harms suffered by Iraqis after the US invasion in 2003,” according to a statement earlier this month by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a US group that is representing the plaintiffs. “In fact, this is the first lawsuit where victims of US post-9/11 torture will get their day in court.”
The Abu Ghraib scandal first came to public attention in April 2004, when photos of abused prisoners and their smiling US guards were published. At the time, CBS News aired a report describing the abuse and showing American soldiers taunting naked prisoners. The abuses included stacking nude prisoners in pyramids or dragging them by leashes around their necks. Others were threatened by dogs or hooded and attached to electrical wires.
One of the plaintiffs, former Al-Jazeera reporter Salah Al-Ejaili, claimed he was forced to wear women’s underwear, terrorized by dogs, deprived of sleep, and put in stress positions that caused him to vomit black liquid. Another survivor, Suhail Al-Shimari, has claimed that he suffered beatings, electrical shocks, and sexual assaults.
CACI has argued that its employees weren’t in a position to give orders to military police and that the US government was responsible for setting the conditions at Abu Ghraib. The company has continued to receive lucrative US government contracts for the past two decades, and only low-level soldiers were criminally prosecuted for the abuses.
A Pentagon investigation found that acts of “brutality and purposeless sadism” occurred at the prison at the hands of military police and US intelligence agency personnel. Retired US Army General Antonio Taguba, who led the investigation, concluded that at least one CACI interrogator should be held accountable for directing military police to set the conditions that led to abuses. Taguba will reportedly testify at the Abu Ghraib trial.
Red Sea rising: Exposing the West’s diminishing naval power
By Ali Halawi | Al Mayadeen | April 12, 2024
The Red Sea has witnessed several developments that brought to light the West’s fading power, as its enemies simultaneously and continuously develop precision weapons and naval capabilities.
Although ongoing escort, air defense, and aerial attack operations in the Red Sea are viewed as uncostly, in terms of human capital, and training routines that will raise the preparedness of NATO forces in the region, they have also unveiled a quite unpleasant reality for Western navies. On the flip side, the aerial attacks of Yemeni Armed Forces (YAF) on Israeli-affiliated ships, which were later expanded to include US-UK-affiliated ships in the Red Sea, add to an extended bill that NATO countries pay for securing the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people.
The weapons used in these operations are similar to Iranian-designed drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles and have been described as “cheap” yet effective weapons by US CENTCOM commanders. These precise guided munitions have been disseminated across factions in the Axis of Resistance, via direct armament or technology sharing. When put to the correct use the weapons have proven challenging for some of the world’s most well-trained and equipped forces.
West Asia casts a shadow over NATO military industrial complexes
Some weapons could have been transferred with the blueprints for the production of their main compartments and assembly at their final destination, bringing costs down and production levels up, further deepening the hole for Western counterparts. In the case of Ansar Allah in Yemen, the YAF owns and announces to locally produce a wide array of anti-ship weapons, as well as missiles, and drones that have been appropriated for attacking seaborne targets; currently being put to use to tighten a naval blockade on “Israel” through the Red Sea.
On the other hand, flailing Western military hegemony over the seas pushed the US and its allies to embark on a poorly planned campaign to protect Israeli shipping routes, forcing them to deal with these relatively low-cost weapons in the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, where the YAF has dealt direct hits to multiple non-military vessels and threatened near hits some of the most advanced American military ships. This has been the case in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan, where US military bases have suffered from the horrors of cheap low-flying, and ballistic weapons in more than 100 operations on US assets, which dealt precise hits to their targets on multiple occasions.
When countering these attacks, Western forces have utilized some of the most sophisticated anti-air surface-to-air missiles, which are estimated to cost millions of dollars of taxpayer money. In the Red Sea, the US-led Western alliance has relied on NATO-standard interceptors, each of which was developed to counter specific inbound aerial objects.
According to The Responsible Statecraft and news circulating on Western media outlets regarding the mishaps of air defense units, the Western coalition has depended on the use of a layered anti-air model, consisting of RIM-116 (RAM), RIM-66 (SM-2), RIM-174 (SM-6), RIM-162 (ESSM), and RIM-161 (SM-3) interceptors. Each interceptor has been developed to counter specific weaponry, however, they all share in common extremely pricey tags.
Price list for NATO’s Israeli maritime protection campaign
Below is a list of the cost of a single interceptor, excluding operational and battery costs, as of 2022:
- RIM-116 (RAM): $905,000
- RIM-66 (SM-2): $2,100,000
- RIM-174 (SM-6): $3,901,818
- RIM-162 (ESSM): $2,031,875
- RIM 161 (SM-3) Block IB: $9,698,617
- RIM-161 (SM-3) Block IIA: $27,915,625
The price list is retrieved from the US Department of Defense and military-industrial complexes’ official documents.
Germany’s Navy ridicules itself
Keeping the aforementioned price ranges in mind, an outrageous fluke that came as a result of a failed surface-to-air missile interception attempt by the German Navy’s Hessen frigate exposed the deep-lying issues for the US-led Naval alliance in the Red Sea.
What should have been a strike on a low-cost Yemeni drone turned into a shabby affair in which the German Navy misidentified the drone, launched a dual attack on an allied asset, failed to hit the aircraft, and suffered malfunctions that led to the destruction of two interceptors midflight.
At first glance, the attack underlines several glaring issues including, the under-preparedness of the German air defense crew, inadequate storage or production of interceptors, and poor communication between NATO allied forces at Sea. Some military-concerned outlets have attempted to shift the blame on outdated German comms, however, further investigation of the incident reveals an issue of economic cost that could tip the scale towards NATO’s enemies.
Germany’s embarrassing mishap would cost the country around $4.2 million, as the Hessen launched two SM-2s at a US MQ-9 reaper drone that it failed to identify.
No SM-2 batches produced since 2018
The cost of the failed operation should not be the only consideration here, as the last time Ratheon sold a batch of its SM-2 Block IIIA interceptors was in a deal it signed with Denmark back in 2018. The deal was worth $152 million for 46 SM-2 Block IIIA interceptors and corresponding equipment for a couple of vertical launch systems. Now, the company has stopped producing the system, and the interceptors for lack of international orders and plans to resume production in 2035.
However, conflict in Ukraine, the war on Gaza, and tensions in East Asia may prompt reconsideration, especially as the genocide of Palestinian people drags on while their allies in Yemen, Lebanon, and Iraq tie their operations to the status of the aggression on Gaza itself.
Large-scale confrontation might see selective engagement
The fact that Raethon has not received any major orders since 2018 brings up the possibility of Western shortages in air defense systems and interceptors, in case of larger-scale engagement erupting in the region. The phenomenon cannot be limited to SM-2 interceptors but could affect a range of staple NATO-developed and produced SAMs, including the infamous Patriot systems, THAAD, Israeil Iron Dome, and other anti-ballistic and cruise missile systems.
Large-scale engagement will most likely see the Colletive West prioritize assets and selectively down often low-cost but deadly targets.
One Yemeni strike was capable of sinking a bulk carrier in the Red Sea, while an attack on a secret US outpost on the Jordanian-Syrian border injured and killed more than a hundred US servicepeople.
In a war of attrition, the Axis of Resistance’s factions will have the economic advantages of pumping out low-cost munitions that target multi-million dollar systems and vehicles, and the morale advantage of deep-rooted ideological motives related to religion and nativity to the lands they defend.
Another blunder: Denmark’s unreported defensive failure gets chief sacked
More recently, Denmark sacked its defense chief Flemming Lentfer after major faults were discovered in air defense systems on a frigate that it sent to the Red Sea earlier. Lentfer was axed on Wednesday night after failing to report to the Danish Defense Minister, Troels Lund Poulsen, that the Iver Huitfeldt vessel had experienced a 30 minutes-long malfunction in one of its missile and radar systems, during a drone attack in the Red Sea. The malfunction led Danish authorities to recall the frigate from its mission, marking the gravity of the faults.
“I have lost trust in the chief of defense,” said Poulsen. Shockingly, he found out about the incident from a specialist military outlet, rather than any of his subordinates.
“We are facing a historic and necessary strengthening of Denmark’s defense forces. This places great demands on our organization and on the military advice at a political level,” he asserted.
Danish news website Olfi was the one to break the news to the Minister of Defense, explaining that the frigate was commanded by Commander Sune Lund, who complained about a problem with the ship’s active radar and C-Flex combat management system.
Unexplained outages to the systems were severe enough to prevent the frigate from launching its ESSM interceptors. The Danish frigate’s 76 mm guns were also reported to be defective on several occasions during deployment to the Red Sea. Other reports revealed other aspects of the commander’s message, in which he stated that the equipment problems reportedly had been known about for “years”, but that little had been done to address them.
Germany’s “Embarrassment” vs Yemen’s Victory
Back to Germany’s flop in the Red Sea, which was described by German media outlet BILD as an “Embarrassment to our (the German) Navy in the Red Sea”, the YAF had just marked another milestone by downing a US-operated MQ-9 Reaper Drone over Hodeidah a few days prior to the blunder.
Although both forces attempted to target different MQ-9-type drones using their own SAMs, the Yemeni Armed Forces were able to destroy the highly prized American drone with a “locally produced” air defense system while the Germans harrowingly failed. The Germans said that they mistakenly targeted a drone on February 28, 2024. However, their failure to down the then-unidentified object was due to unnamed technical malfunctions that led to the detonation of the two SM-2 missiles midflight, rather than active efforts to avert the disaster.
Interestingly, Sanaa had only unveiled two air defense systems capable of achieving such a hit. One of which is seemingly a copy of the Iranian-developed compact air-defense missile, dubbed Saqer-2. The missile can be easily transported and launched to take down close-range targets, flying at relatively slow speeds. The Saqer-2, a copycat of the Iranian so-called 358 surface-to-air missile reportedly functions like a one-way attack drone, reaching the required via a liquid fuel-propelled engine, to later hover near an aerial target, approaching it and detonating its warhead after being manually locked on to it by a ground operator, or by working in an autonomous mode.
However, footage published by the YAF’s Military Media indicated that the air defense system utilized in the incident was similar to traditional supersonic SAMs due to the speed at which it reached its target and the sound produced during its flight in the video.
Notably, the missile impacted the drone in a near direct trajectory and did not pause to hover nearby or for directions by operators. Examining the publicly revealed arsenal of the YAF, this likely indicates that the missile in use was the Bareq-1 or Bareq-2 SAM.
The missiles resemble the Iranian Taer line of missiles, which are used on a multitude of staple air defense systems. Digging deeper into the origin of the technology, it is clear that the Taer or Bareq lines of missiles are actually reverse-engineered models of the Soviet-era 3M9, incorporating certain elements from NATO Standard Missiles.
Presuming that the Bareq-2 was used by the YAF for the operation reveals an even deeper hole dug by Western military complexes for their own armies. Moreover, NATO’s SMs are much more developed than the YAF’s interceptors, as they incorporate a wide range of technological and hardware additions, putting them in a class of their own.
These additions allow for 360° scope for air defense teams allowing Hessen and other vessels to fire at any surrounding target within its range at any time without having to adjust their position while boosters on the SM-6 allow for longer-range targeting.
Still, the single-stage and aimed single launch conducted by the YAF achieved a direct hit to the 20 m-long US drone obliterating it to pieces that were scavenged by fighters on al-Hodeidah’s shore.
Yemen’s support to Palestine uncovers deep crises in NATO’s Naval power
Putting this series of unfolding events into the context of the Yemeni Armed Forces’ support to Palestine, as the Western-backed Israeli regime continues its genocidal war on Gaza, is key to not only regional security but global security as a whole.
The equations drawn by the YAF have been unprecedented in the history of the nation’s struggle against Western imperialism, as for the first time, an Arab nation has taken the responsibility of launching an expansive naval campaign to support a moral and national cause, whose result will alter the course of human history. By setting this historical precedent, Yemen has not only altered regional security to the favor of natives, but it has also exposed essential faults in NATO’s military and naval structure which can and will be taken advantage of by adversaries.
These events have not been limited to uncovering the flaws of Danish and German forces, but they have laid bare essential challenges for the far superior American and British navies.
For the US, issues have concentrated around logistics and the high cost of operating multiple strike groups, in order to maintain feeble objectives. The UK on the other hand has witnessed multiple accidents and complications during the period of its operations.
The Yemeni Armed Forces’ strategic engagements in the Red Sea highlight a significant shift in naval dynamics, exposing vulnerabilities in Western military prowess and logistical strategies. Despite maintaining relatively low-scale engagements, the YAF’s precision attacks on military vessels have yielded valuable experience and expanded their target list, aided by direct repercussions from the US’s involvement in the genocidal war on Gaza. This evolving scenario underscores the importance of the Axis of Resistance’s strategic foresight and adaptive responses in navigating the complexities of Western provocations, in the context of modern naval warfare, signaling a paradigmatic challenge for maintaining Western military hegemony in the region.
The Attack on Pearl Harbor Was No Surprise (Part IV)
Tales of the American Empire | April 11, 2024
The previous three parts of this series provide overwhelming evidence that American President Franklin Roosevelt knew a Japanese carrier force was sailing east to attack Hawaii in late 1941. Few Americans know about this shocking fact because their government controls informational sources. In 1989, the BBC produced a great documentary about the Pearl Harbor attack titled: “Sacrifice at Pearl Harbor.” Not only does this documentary expose the truth, the title says that President Franklin Roosevelt sacrificed 2,403 Americans at Pearl Harbor to trick Americans to support his goal of entering World War II. As a result of tighter government controls, this documentary can no longer be found on the BBC’s Timeline documentary website and it is blocked from posting at YouTube.
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“Operation Gladio”; BBC; 1992; 
• Operation Gladio – Full 1992 document…
“USS Liberty: Dead in the Water”; BBC; 2002; • USS Liberty: Dead in the Water – BBC …
“Sacrifice at Pearl Harbor”; BBC; 1989; • Sacrifice at Pearl Harbor (BBC)
Related Tales: “The Attack on Pearl Harbor”; • The Attack on Pearl Harbor
The CIA Wants More Power to Spy on Americans!
By Judge Andrew Napolitano | April 11, 2024
Americans need to be aware of the unbridled propensity of federal intelligence agencies to spy on all of us without search warrants as required by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
These agencies believe that the Fourth Amendment — which protects the individual right to privacy — only regulates law enforcement and does not apply to domestic spying.
There is no basis in the constitutional text, history or judicial interpretations for such a limiting and toothless view of this constitutional guarantee. The courts have held that the Fourth Amendment restrains government — all government. Last week, the CIA asked Congress to expand its current spying in the United States.
Here is the backstory.
When the CIA was created in 1947, members of Congress who feared the establishment here of the type of domestic surveillance apparatus that the Allies had just defeated in Germany insisted that the new CIA have no role in American law enforcement and no legal ability to spy within the U.S. The legislation creating the CIA contains those unambiguous limitations.
Nevertheless, we know that CIA agents are present in all 50 statehouses in the United States. They didn’t arrive there until after Dec. 4, 1981. That’s the date that President Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order 12333, which purports to give the CIA authority to spy in America — supposedly looking for narcotics from foreign countries — but keeps from law enforcement whatever it finds.
Stated differently, while Reagan purported to authorize the CIA to defy the limitations imposed upon it by the Constitution and by federal law, he insisted on a “wall” of separation between domestic spying and law enforcement.
So, if the CIA using unconstitutional spying discovered that a janitor in the Russian Embassy in Washington was really a KGB colonel who abused his wife in their suburban Maryland home, under E.O. 12333, it could continue to spy upon him in defiance of the Fourth Amendment and the CIA charter, but it could not reveal to Maryland prosecutors — who can only use evidence lawfully obtained — any evidence of his domestic violence.
All this changed 20 years later when President George W. Bush demolished Reagan’s “wall” between law enforcement and domestic spying and directed the CIA and other domestic spying agencies to share the fruits of their spying with the FBI.
Thus, thanks to Reagan and Bush, and their successors looking the other way, CIA agents have been engaging in fishing expeditions on a grand scale inside the U.S. for the past 20 years. Congress knows about this because all intelligence agencies are required by statute to report the extent of their spying secretly to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.
This, of course, does not absolve the CIA of its presidentially authorized computer hacking crimes; rather, it gives Congress a false sense of security that it has a handle on what’s going on.
What’s going on is not government lawyers appearing before judges asking for surveillance warrants based upon probable cause of crime, as the Constitution requires. What’s going on is CIA agents going to Big Tech and paying for access to communications used by ordinary Americans. Some Big Tech firms told the CIA to take a hike. Others took the CIA’s cash and opened the spigots of their fiber-optic data to the voracious federal appetite.
If government lawyers went to a judge and demonstrated probable cause of crime — for example, that a janitor in the Russian Embassy was passing defense secrets to Moscow — surely the judge would have signed a surveillance warrant. But to the government, following the Constitution is too limiting.
Thus, by acquiring bulk data — fiber-optic data on hundreds of millions of Americans acquired without search warrants — the government avoids the time and trouble of demonstrating probable cause to a judge. But that time and trouble were intentionally baked into the Fourth Amendment so as to keep the government off our backs.
Not to be outdone by its principal rival, the FBI soon began doing the same thing — gathering bulk data without search warrants.
When Congress learned of this, it enacted legislation that banned the warrantless acquisition of bulk data. Apparently, Congress is naive enough to believe that the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency, their cousin with 60,000 domestic spies, will actually comply with federal law.
Last week, that naivete was manifested front and center when the CIA sent a letter to both congressional intelligence committees addressing its spying on foreign persons and the Americans with whom they communicate, and asking to expand that reach inside the U.S.
The timing of the CIA’s letter coincides with a decision Congress must make in the next 10 days — whether to reenact Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, allow it to expire on April 19 or expand it as the CIA has requested. Section 702 permits warrantless spying on foreigners and the Americans whom intelligence agencies suspect communicate with them. Section 702 is an unconstitutional free pass for domestic spying.
So, notwithstanding the persistent efforts of members of Congress from both parties to limit and in some cases to prohibit the warrantless acquisition of bulk data by the CIA from Americans, the practice continues, the CIA defends it and presidents look the other way.
In 1947, Congress created the CIA monster, which today is so big and so powerful and so indifferent to the Constitution and the federal laws its agents have sworn to uphold that it can boast about its lawlessness, have no fear of defying Congress and always escape the consequences of all this largely unscathed. Even President Harry Truman, who signed the 1947 legislation into law, later acknowledged as much and condemned what the CIA had become.
I suspect the CIA and its cousins will get away with this because they spy on Congress and possess damning personal data on members who regularly vote to increase their secret budgets.
When will we have a government whose officials are courageous enough to uphold the Constitution?
To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
COPYRIGHT 2024 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
US funds Ukraine outlets that censor and smear pro-peace Americans – report
Brigadier-General Oleksii Hromov, Deputy Chief of the Main Operational Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (Photo by Vladimir Shtanko/Anadolu Agency)
RT | April 11, 2024
A “sprawling constellation” of supposedly independent organizations and fact-checkers bankrolled by Washington has been behind labeling Americans who disagree with Kiev Russian propagandists, according to an investigation published on Thursday.
Journalist Lee Fang and RealClearInvestigations have looked into outfits such as New Voice of Ukraine, VoxUkraine, Detector Media and others, finding that in many cases they “promoted aggressive messages that stray from traditional journalistic practices” to support the Ukrainian government and “delegitimize its critics,” both at home and abroad.
Americans they have gone after range from economist Jeffrey Sachs and University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer to journalists Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald. Some of these outfits have also denounced a factually correct New York Times article about the battle of Avdeevka as a “Russian psyop” and “disinformation.”
The US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) have funded scores of Ukrainian organizations. Some of them act as fact-checking partners for Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp platforms, helping Ukraine censor critics under the guise of fighting “Russian disinformation.”
The London-based Zinc Network has been paid by USAID to “undermine Kremlin information operations” and help Ukraine with its own “strategic communications.”
According to another investigative journalist, Jack Poulson, Zinc’s Open Information Partnership in Ukraine has defined disinformation as “verifiable information which is unbalanced or skewed, amplifies, or exaggerates certain elements for effect, or uses emotive or inflammatory language to achieve effects which fit within existing Kremlin narratives, aims, or activities.”
Asked about the “anti-disinformation” groups in Ukraine targeting Americans, the State Department told Fang and RealClear that it “provides funding to credible independent media organizations to strengthen democracies in the countries we work in around the world.”
“We do not control the editorial content of these organizations,” the State Department insisted. According to documents Fang has reviewed, however, the US government and its contractors have “directly set the agenda” for Ukrainian outlets.
The US is “an active participant” in the information war between Russia and Ukraine, George Beebe, a director with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told Fang. “The US government has been trying to shape perceptions, and it’s very difficult to separate what’s intended for foreign audiences from what seeps into the Anglosphere media,” he added.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has accused Russia of influencing US lawmakers and society at large. While he has offered little evidence for his claims, Fang’s investigation has revealed that much of the content generated by US-funded Ukrainian outlets “explicitly targets American foreign policy discourse.”
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From the Archives
The great ADHD swindle
By Daniel Ken | TCW Defending Freedom | May 20, 2023
Over more than two decades in the classroom I’ve taught thousands of children and teenagers: some were lovely and lots were hard-working. On the other hand, quite a number were disruptive and argumentative, and a number were violently opposed to learning. But I don’t think I’ve taught more than a handful of kids who could be properly described as having the symptoms of ADHD. And that handful could just as easily have had something else wrong with them. Because here’s the thing: despite the fact that the best part of a million children are medicated for the condition, ADHD doesn’t exist.
There’s no definitive medical test for it, experts can’t agree on what it actually means, and most of the symptoms disappear if the child in question has lots of exercise, good diet and, crucially, a set of clear behavioural boundaries, preferably set early in childhood and, for the boys at least, enforced by a stable adult male living at home. … continue
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- Germany’s Die Welt: “Too Much Is Too Much” … Green Energies Are Cannabalizing Each Other!
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