The Torturers’ Poor Memories
By Andrew P. Napolitano | Ron Paul Institute | February 29, 2024
As the pre-trial hearings in the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and others who are charged with masterminding the 9/11 attacks proceed at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, the government continues to stumble with its own witnesses. In hearings last week, government lawyers tried to demonstrate that statements the defendants made to CIA and FBI agents were voluntary.
When the government’s principal torturer, a now retired psychologist, had difficulty recalling that during a torture session he threatened one of his victims by offering to slit the throat of the victim’s young son and that he had recounted that threat under oath in previous testimony, it became apparent to all in the courtroom and to those of us who monitor these awful proceedings that the government was encountering a strange and unexpected difficulty in defending the behavior of its torturers.
Here is the backstory.
Mohammed and others were violently tortured at various so-called CIA black sites outside the U.S. for about three years. They were raped, hanged by their wrists for weeks inside large refrigerators, beaten with fists and wooden boards, and waterboarded whereby water was forced into their nasal cavities so as to create the perception of suffocation and drowning. Many of the records of all this were destroyed by CIA officials, a crime for which no one has been prosecuted.
During these horrific events, the torturer in chief, who was conducting his grisly business in Thailand, called a CIA lawyer in Langley, Virginia, and obtained permission to threaten his victim with slitting the throat of the victim’s young son. The torturer admitted this in testimony he gave in court at Gitmo in 2020.
Why was the torture conducted in Thailand? Because CIA lawyers had erroneously told their bosses that the U.S. Constitution and federal law do not apply in foreign lands.
This has never been American law. The common law of England and in America has always been that when government personnel leave the country for the purpose of doing something that is clearly unlawful in the country they have left, they can be held accountable for their criminal behavior when they return. The U.S. Supreme Court made this clear in one of its five major rulings against the George W. Bush administration over its behavior at Gitmo.
Bush’s own White House counsel advised the president that because Gitmo is physically located in Cuba, the Constitution doesn’t apply, federal laws don’t apply and federal courts lack jurisdiction. All of this erroneous advice was tailored to tell Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney who, according to former CIA personnel, had a particular fondness for torture, just what they wanted to hear.
This terrible legal advice became the stated legal basis for the torture regime and the proposed but never implemented kangaroo courts at Gitmo, until the FBI entered the scene and put a stop to the torture and the Supreme Court entered the picture and required real trials.
However, in protecting the rights of these defendants — the Constitution protects all persons who have contact with the government, not just citizens — the courts have overlooked the right to a speedy trial. It is this salient failure that was manifested last week when the chief torturer “forgot” that he had already admitted under oath to threatening to slit the throat of his victim’s young son.
The lack of a speedy trial and the government’s cavalier attitude about it also were made known last week when the lead FBI investigator involved in the post-torture interrogations at Gitmo asserted 199 times in one day under oath that she could not recall what she saw and heard 20 years ago during interrogations in which she participated.
Here is the government’s problem: When the government plans to use the defendant’s own words as evidence against him and the defense counters that the words were extracted under or due to torture, the government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty — the highest standard of proof in American law, the same standard for proof of guilt in criminal cases — that the words were uttered voluntarily.
The court is addressing two categories of words — those articulated during torture, and those articulated afterward. Defense and government psychiatrists agree that victims of prolonged torture will say what they think the questioner wants to hear long after the torture has ended, just as victims during torture will say what they think the torturer wants to hear.
Yet, when the torturers have forgotten what they heard or said, when they have intentionally or negligently destroyed records of the torture, they have made it nearly impossible for the government to prove voluntariness beyond a reasonable doubt.
Evidence extracted during or from torture is inadmissible in all American courts, civilian and military. Torture is criminal under federal law and all 50 states’ laws, no matter its purpose or its location. Government lawyers are not permitted to whitewash torture without confronting serious ethical consequences.
The Bush/Cheney torture regime and its Devil’s Island at Gitmo are among the darkest events perpetrated by a modern American presidency. Far from preserving, protecting and defending the Constitution — as Bush and Cheney both swore to do — by destroying the free will and personhood of their victims, they have undermined the values upon which the Constitution is based.
Those values are articulated in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution’s Ninth Amendment. Taken together they reflect the unanimous public understanding of the revolutionary generation — those who fought the war for independence and those who crafted the founding documents — that our rights are natural to our humanity, they are indefeasible, and they are permanent. And the sole purpose of the rule of law is to protect our rights.
Why do we repose the safekeeping of our rights into the hands of those who destroy them?
To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
COPYRIGHT 2024 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
A Third of U.K. Met Office Temperature Stations May Be Wrong by Up to 5°C, FOI Reveals
BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | MARCH 1, 2024
Nearly one in three (29.2%) U.K. Met Office temperature measuring stations have an internationally-defined margin of error of up to 5°C. Another 48.7% of the total 380 stations could produce errors up to 2°C, meaning nearly eight out of ten stations (77.9%) are producing ‘junk’ or ‘near junk’ readings of surface air temperatures. Arguably, on no scientific basis should these figures be used for the Met Office’s constant promotion of the collectivist Net Zero project. Nevertheless, the state-funded operation frequently uses them to report and often catastrophise rises in temperature of as little as 0.01°C.
Under a freedom of information request, the Daily Sceptic has obtained a full list of the Met Office’s U.K. weather stations, along with an individual class rating defined by the World Meteorological Office. These CIMO ratings range from pristine class 1 and near pristine class 2, to an ‘anything goes’ or ‘junk’ class 5. The CIMO ratings penalise sites that are near any artificial heat sources such as buildings and concrete surfaces. According to the WMO, a class 5 site is one where nearby obstacles “create an inappropriate environment for a meteorological measurement that is intended to be representative of a wide area”. Even the Met Office refers to sites next to buildings and vegetation as “undesirable”. It seems class 5 sites can be placed anywhere, and they come with a WMO warning of “additional estimated uncertainties added by siting up to 5°C”; class 4 notes “uncertainties” up to 2°C, while class 3 states 1°C. Only 13.7%, or 52 of the Met Office’s temperature and humidity stations come with no such ‘uncertainty’ warnings attached.
The above graph shows the percentage totals of each class. Class 1 and 2, identified in green, account for just 6.3% and 7.4% of the total respectively. Class 3 identified as orange comes in at 8.4%. The graph shows the huge majorities enjoyed by the darkening shades of red showing classes 4 and 5. It is possible that the margins of error identified for classes 3, 4 and 5 could be a minus amount – if for instance the measuring device was sited in a frost hollow – but the vast majority are certain to be pushed upwards by heat corruptions.
Last year, the investigative journalist Paul Homewood sought FOI information from the Met Office about the Welsh weather station Porthmadog, which often appears in ‘hottest of the day’ listings. He was informed that the site was listed as class 4 and “this is an acceptable rating for a temperature sensor”. Hence, continued the Met Office, “we will continue to quote from this site”. In short, observes Homewood, the Met Office is happy to use a class 4 site for climatological purposes, “even though that class is next to junk status”. It is bad enough that the Met Office is using this site, but it is even worse that they know about the issues but still plan to carry on doing so, Homewood continued. “How many other weather stations are of such poor quality?” he asked.
Now we know.
Using these figures with a precision to one hundredth of a degree centigrade, the Met Office declared that 2023 was the second hottest in the U.K., coming in just 0.06°C lower than the all-time record. Cue, of course, all the Thermogeddon headlines in mainstream media. In 2022, the Met Office said that five sites in the U.K. on July 19th went past 40°C, with a record of 40.3°C at RAF Coningsby. Kew Gardens is termed a class 2 site, although it is very close to one of the largest tropical glasshouses in the world. St James’s Park and Northolt airport are class 5 sites, Heathrow is class 4, while RAF Coningsby is class 3. At the time, the Met Office declared that the records set a “milestone in U.K. climate history”. A national record was also set on July 18th at Hawarden Airport in Wales (class 4) and on July 19th at Charterhall in Scotland (class 4).
Always alive to a popular headline catastrophising the weather, the Met Office declared a warmest St. Valentine’s night English record this year of 11.5°C at class 4-rated St. Mary’s airport on the Isles of Scilly. Earlier in the year, the Met Office declared the highest January temperature in Scotland at 19.6°C at Kinlochewe, a class 4 site. Interestingly the previous, much promoted, U.K. record was set on July 31th 2019 at the Cambridge Botanic Gardens, a class 5 site. Even more interesting is that in the Homewood FOI disclosures, the Met Office stated that class 5 data “will be flagged and not quoted in national records”.
The Met Office is between a rock and a hard place with these surface temperature measurements. Many of its long-standing stations have been encroached by urbanisation and corruptions seem to have become endemic across the entire system. In the past, this didn’t matter as much since margin of error allowances could be accepted along with less accurate local and national weather forecasting. Measuring surface temperatures across countries and then the planet is always going to be difficult, but a more accurate reading would be obtained by only using data from WMO classes 1 and 2. However, national and global temperatures have become politicised by the global warming scare and the proposed Net Zero solution. Alarmists often state that climate ‘tipping’ points will be reached with very small increases in temperature measured in tenths of a degree.
Using data from just classes 1 and 2 would likely crash the claimed rises in national and global temperatures. Something similar would likely occur if the Met Office moved the majority of its stations to more suitable spots. A number of scientists have tried to measure the urban heat bias in temperature records with estimates suggesting a general problem of warming corruption around the 20-30% mark. Last October, two scientists working out of the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), produced a paper noting: “The bottom line is that an estimated 22% of the U.S. warming trend, 1895 to 2023, is due to localised UHI [urban heat island] effects.”
Under our FOI request, it can now be seen that the problems with corrupted U.K. weather stations are similar to those discovered in the United States by meteorologist Anthony Watts. In work compiled over a decade, Watts found that 96% of temperature stations used by the U.S. weather service NOAA were “corrupted” by the localised effects of urbanisation. Sites in close proximity to asphalt, machinery and other heat-producing or heat-accentuating objects, “violates NOAA’s own published standards, and strongly undermines the legitimacy and magnitude of the official consensus on long-term climate warming trends in the United States”, he observed.
Both the U.K. and U.S. temperature datasets are important constituents of global totals compiled by a number of weather operations including the Met Office and NASA. The Met Office runs HadCRUT, where over the last 10 years two retrospective revisions have added about 30% extra warming to recent global temperatures. This had the effect of removing all traces of a pause around 2000-2014. Meanwhile, Professor Ole Humlum has noted that the GISS database run by NASA increased its surface air temperature between 1910 to 2000 from 0.47°C to 0.67°C, a boost of 49% over this period. “Frequent and large corrections in a database unavoidably signal a fundamental uncertainty about the correct values,” commented Humlum.
Pristine temperature data is available. In 2005, NOAA set up a 114 nationwide network of stations called the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN). It was designed to remove all urban heat distortions, aiming for “superior accuracy and continuity in places that land use will not likely impact during the next five decades”.
The graph above shows nothing more than very minor, gentle warming since 2005, slight warming that might be expected in the small and continuing natural rebound from the depths of the pre-industrial Little Ice Age. A reliable source of global data is to be found in the UAH satellite record, which shows less overall warming since 1979 than the surface datasets. Both these datasets are rarely mentioned. In fact one of the compilers of the satellite data, along with the UAH paper on urban heat, is Dr. Roy Spencer. In 2022 he was kicked off Google AdSense for publishing “unreliable and harmful claims”. The move demonetised Dr. Spencer’s widely consulted monthly satellite temperature update page by removing all Google-supplied advertising. Google is on record as stating that it will ban all sites that are sceptical of “well established scientific consensus”.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
US, UK accused of hindering investigation into UN chief’s plane crash in 1961
UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld, who died in a plane crash in Africa in 1961 en route to talks with Katangan rebels. (Photo by REX)
Press TV – March 2, 2024
Scholars have accused the United States and the United Kingdom of impeding a United Nations investigation into the 1961 airplane accident that resulted in the death of UN chief Dag Hammarskjöld.
Hammarskjöld, a Swedish national, was killed in a plane crash, which was allegedly taken down intentionally on September 18, 1961, while en route to mediate a ceasefire between UN peacekeepers in the Congo and separatists from the breakaway Congolese region of Katanga.
During a conference in London, attendees were briefed by Stephen Mathias, the UN assistant secretary general for legal affairs, on the latest developments in the investigation, which aims to obtain archived documentation from member states.
The attendees expressed concerns that both the US and UK were delaying the transfer of potentially crucial information.
“While Belgium, Sweden and Zimbabwe demonstrated serious efforts, the US and UK responses were wholly inadequate and showed contempt for the UN inquiry,” said the organizers of Thursday’s conference, the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London and the Westminster United Nations Association.
“The most recent general assembly resolution to renew the investigation was co-sponsored by 142 UN member states out of 193 – but not by the US and the UK,” said Susan Williams, a researcher whose 2011 book “Who Killed Hammarskjöld” contributed to the reopening of the UN inquiry.
Paul Boateng, the former UK high commissioner to South Africa, said: “The work must continue because it is part of a wider struggle to support democracy, the international rule of law, and the UN, all under increasing threat.”
“There must be no stone unturned to get at the truth. The suspected murder of a UN secretary general is a crime too grave to be obliterated by time.”
The crash resulted in the death of 15 other passengers, and its first inquiry, which was carried out by Rhodesian authorities, concluded that the crash was the result of a pilot error, but the finding was controversial.
People who witnessed the crash on the ground had claimed that they saw another aircraft apart from the chief’s.
At that time, French and British intelligence officers were reported to be near Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), where the crash took place, while US intelligence officers were monitoring communications from Cyprus and reported hearing communications consistent with the UN plane coming under fire.
Hammarskjöld was killed amidst a contest for resources in Africa during the post-colonial era, during his last journey, he was en route to a clandestine gathering aimed at mediating an end to the civil conflict in the newly liberated Congo, a nation abundant in minerals and teetering on the edge of collapse.
In the year before, the eastern province of Katanga had declared independence in 1960. While being a major contributor to the country’s economy, this region is renowned for its vast ore deposits, including uranium ore used in the atomic bomb, which was dropped on Hiroshima.
What the Nurses Saw — It was Murder
An investigation into systemic medical murders that took place in hospitals during the COVID panic and the nurses who fought back to save their patients
By Ken McCarthy | December 6, 2023
No human activity can ever be free from error, but to be clear, this book is not about the kind of error all human beings are prone to.
As you will learn from the eye-witness accounts and technical information presented in this book, calling the failed COVID protocols “errors” is not accurate.
These protocols were explicitly ordered by those who took dictatorial control of the medical system early in the Panic (spring of 2020). Further, when they were shown to be demonstrably failing and harming many thousands of people, experienced healthcare professionals who raised informed concerns were silenced through demotion, firing, and organized campaigns of harassment promoted by the news media and enabled by companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, in some cases in collaboration with the White House and the Department of Justice’s FBI.
If this sounds very bad, it’s because it is.
What the Nurses Saw is documentation of what happens in the real world when bureaucrats, in this case bureaucrats in Washington DC, take literal dictatorial control over the practice of medicine.
On a pure dollar and cents level, one of every five dollars spent in the U.S. is spent on the products of the medical services industry, as is one of every three tax dollars. The U.S., more than any country in the world, and by a large measure, has been colonized by this industry. As part of this process, the industry and its operatives have corrupted and perverted science, academia, and the news media. Now it’s hard at work to weaken and degrade the last pillar that keeps the system even remotely functioning — the integrity of the nursing profession.
If we fail to support our good nurses, help them hold the line, and start aggressively turning things around, there is no practical limit to how far this totalitarian medical dictatorship which we in fact live under will go in its future abuse and exploitation of human beings.
Featuring in-depth interviews with:
Erin Marie Olszewski,
Kevin Corbett Ph.D.,
Kimberly Overton,
Ashley Grogg,
Kristen Nagle,
Sarah Choujounian,
AJ DePriest,
Mark Bishofsky,
and Katie Spence
Please share the link: WhatTheNursesSaw.com
Lies about China’s Uyghur Oppression
Tales of the American Empire | February 29, 2024
Americans see news reports about the plight of Uyghurs. They are told these Muslims living in the western China province of Xinjiang are abused by the ruling Han Chinese and over a million are imprisoned in camps where they are forced to perform slave labor. As a result, China must be constantly denounced for this abuse and sanctions imposed on any Chinese business exploiting this slave labor. This is false and based on lies promoted by the American CIA.
Note: We are told to pronounce Uyghur as “WEE-gur” even though it has no W. In the province of Xinjiang and in their language it is pronounced “OO-gur” and should be in English since it starts with a U! So I adopted Dr. de Zayas’ correct pronunciation to reject whoever decided we should call them something weird in English.
___________________________________________________
“I Saw ZERO Evidence of Uyghur Repression In China”; Jimmy Dore Show; YouTube; September 30, 2023; 
• “I Saw ZERO Evidence Of Uyghur Repres…
“What’s it REALLY like to travel in Xinjiang, China?”; Cyrus Janssen; YouTube; May 1, 2021; • What’s it REALLY like to travel in Xi…
“No, the UN did not report China has ‘massive internment camps’ for Uighur Muslims”; Ben Norton; The Grayzone; August 23, 2018; https://thegrayzone.com/2018/08/23/un…
“Was There Really a Massacre in Tiananmen Square–or Was It an Illusion Fabricated by U.S. Politicians and Corporate Media to Make Americans Hate China?”; Jeremy Kuzmarov; Covert Action Magazine; August 7, 2023; https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023…
“US efforts to strangle China & reassert hegemony”; The Duran; YouTube; September 16, 2023; https://theduran.com/us-efforts-to-st…
Related Tales: “The American War on China”: • The American War on China
Hysterectomy – On Stealing Womanhood
Lies are Unbekoming | February 25, 2024
This all started from one line in the interview I did with Carol Peterson.
Hormones – Lies are Unbekoming (substack.com)
“Most reasons for hysterectomies can be tied to progesterone deficiencies and most could be avoided with rational supplementation.”
I realised I didn’t know anything about hysterectomies, but I knew it was a major surgery, and here was Carol saying that most could be avoided.
I followed my curiosity and here we are with this article.
I cannot believe what I have discovered. It’s actually hard to put into words.
I think I will do more than just this article on the subject.
How is it possible that cutting out a woman’s uterus is the second most common surgery in the US?
About 600,000 women a year undergo hysterectomies in the U.S., the second most common surgery, surpassed only by cesareans. – Wittelsey 2011
Surely, they are all necessary:
Over 5,000 women whose doctors have recommended hysterectomy have received the names of second opinion physicians from the HERS Foundation, says Coffey. Only 2% of the 5,000 have gone on to have the surgery. – HERS
Surely, they wouldn’t do it for the money, would they?
“Some of us aren’t making a living, so out comes a uterus or two each month to pay for the rent,” admitted a Baltimore specialist in a 1975 New York Times interview.
How did Big Medicine reach the conclusion that a woman doesn’t need her uterus?
“Your uterus is nothing but a big, unresponsive blob.” — The Woman Doctor’s Medical Guide for Women by Barbara Edelstein, MD (1982)
The structural problem seems to be one of lying to women about the risks and aftermath:
According to Nora Coffey, founder and President of the non-profit HERS Foundation in Philadelphia, PA, too many doctors perform unnecessary hysterectomies, too many fail to tell women that there can be devastating after-effects from removal of the uterus or ovaries, and too many don’t offer alternative treatment for the problems that are, seemingly, so quickly solved with the knife.
One of the most significant points that jumped at me from the page was “loss of maternal feeling”:
Coffey says that HERS has also counseled over 9,000 hysterectomized women who are experiencing symptoms such as loss of maternal feeling, bone and joint pain, chronic fatigue, hot flashes, insomnia, loss of short-term memory, diminished emotional responses, loss of sexual desire and a host of other hysterectomy-related symptoms.
Of the millions of women that have had this done to them, how many have lost their maternal feeling towards their children. Women carry that maternal feeling into the world too. What happens to the world when maternal feeling is vanquished?
I now wonder how many women in power have had a hysterectomy. Is it more than the wider population? What are the consequences of this? Does it help with climbing the ladder? Does it impact empathy?
I think these are all fair questions because of the sheer scale of the issue.
At the end of each day of counseling, I knew there were a few more women out there who would avoid unnecessary surgeries because they received information from HERS. It was too little too late, however, for 621,000 other women in this country each year—more than 22 million hysterectomized women alive in America today? – The H Word (2008)
They remove the ovaries also about half the time by scaring woman with ovarian cancer:
In this country, half of the women who undergo a hysterectomy also have their ovaries removed. The reasoning given is to “save” the woman from the remote possibility of ovarian cancer.
However, Dr. Lauersen issues this warning to women concerning prophylactic excision of the ovaries: “Usually it is not necessary to remove the ovaries of a menstruating woman during hysterectomy. A doctor may say that he wants to remove the ovaries to prevent ovarian cancer, an insidious disease that does not have obvious symptoms. However, studies have indicated that it would take 7,500 oophorectomies (excision of the ovaries) in order to prevent one death from ovarian cancer. Ovarian cancer, which only accounts for 4% of all cancers in women, is more frequently discovered after menopause in women between 55 and 64 years old.”
Because fibroid growths are often called “tumors”, the lay patient may immediately fear that she has cancer. However, according to Dr. Lauersen, fewer than one half of one percent ever proceed to that stage.
The removal of ovaries is castration.
Castrated men were called Eunuchs.
We don’t have a word for castrated women. I think they, the butchers, prefer it that way.
I really don’t have words to describe this butchery.
We live in three dimensions. The physical, the mental and the spiritual.
We have been trained to diminish the spiritual, to our own detriment.
Somewhere deep in the bowels of Big Medicine, there is a spirit, and that spirit hates humanity, and very specifically it hates women.
There is no other conclusion I can reach anymore.
After reading this long stack, if you reach a different conclusion, let me know in the comments.
Carol Peterson pointed me to HERS to further my education, and it was there that I discovered Nora Coffey and her great book The H Word, that I’m reading now, co-authored with Rick Schweikert. I can definitely recommend it.
It turns out that Rick wrote a play…you will never guess what he called it…
What are the odds!!
The following statistics and Q&As are drawn from these three sources:
HYSTERECTOMY: THE SHOCKING TRUTH by Lee Rothberg (whale.to)
The Hysterectomy Epidemic: Where’s the Outrage? – Ms. Magazine (msmagazine.com)
Female Anatomy: The Functions of the Female Organs – HERS Foundation
Let these numbers wash over you as you start coming to terms with the scale of what has been done to women.
- About 600,000 women a year undergo hysterectomies in the U.S. This makes it the second most common surgery among women in the country, surpassed only by cesarean sections.
- 90 percent of hysterectomies are avoidable, according to Dr. Mitchell Levine, suggesting that the majority of these procedures could be managed with alternative treatments.
- 70 to 76 percent of hysterectomies do not meet the recommended criteria for necessity according to an expert panel and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), indicating a high rate of potentially unnecessary surgeries.
- 210,000 women could avoid losing their ovaries annually if alternative treatments were pursued instead of hysterectomies, based on the 70 percent estimate of avoidable procedures.
- 15 to 30 percent of women who conserve their ovaries during hysterectomy lose ovarian function anyway, highlighting the risk of menopausal symptoms and hormonal imbalance even when ovaries are not removed.
- Women who have their ovaries removed face a higher risk of early death from any cause, primarily from heart disease and lung cancer, as found in a study of almost 30,000 women followed for 24 years.
- For every 24 women having bilateral oophorectomy, at least one will die prematurely as a result of the procedure, emphasizing the significant risk associated with the removal of both ovaries.
- Women who undergo hysterectomy report a range of adverse effects in significant percentages, including 79.6% experiencing loss of sexual desire and profound fatigue, and 79.1% noting personality changes.
- The HERS Foundation’s ongoing study reveals that 72.8% of respondents report loss of stamina post-hysterectomy, indicating the extensive impact on women’s overall well-being and quality of life.
- 35-40% of women whose ovaries are not removed during hysterectomy experience a loss of ovarian function, which equates to a form of castration and results in the cessation of hormone production critical to various aspects of health.
- Only about 10 percent of hysterectomies are performed for cancer, indicating that the vast majority are for benign conditions that might be managed with less invasive options.
- An expert panel found that up to 70% of hysterectomies recommended were inappropriate based on developed criteria, highlighting a substantial issue with surgical decision-making.
- 512,000 women undergoing hysterectomy last year had their ovaries removed during the surgery, whether the ovaries were healthy or not, potentially subjecting these women to unnecessary risks.
- Women who had their ovaries removed had a seven-times greater incidence of heart disease, showing the critical role of ovarian hormones in cardiovascular health.
- The HERS Foundation has counseled over 5,000 women whose doctors recommended hysterectomy, with only 2% going on to have the surgery after receiving second opinions or learning about alternatives.
- Women report a total loss of sexual feeling after hysterectomy in a significant number of cases, affecting their quality of life and personal relationships.
- Hysterectomized women have protruding bellies and little or no waist due to the unnatural shifting of bones and organs inside the pelvis after the surgery.
- Over 9,000 hysterectomized women report experiencing symptoms such as loss of maternal feeling and personality change, as documented by the HERS Foundation.
- Women who undergo hysterectomy are at risk for urinary incontinence and chronic constipation due to weakening of the pelvic floor and loss of feeling from the severing of pelvic nerves.
- A landmark Nurses Health Study concluded that women who had their ovaries removed faced a higher risk of early death, primarily from heart disease and lung cancer, compared to those who did not.
Next, I have created 30 Q&As that again take us from beginner to advanced on the subject, but I have also taken chapter 4 of The H Word and spliced it throughout the Q&A. It’s a very important chapter and you will see why shortly.
- What is a hysterectomy? A hysterectomy is a surgical procedure that involves the removal of the uterus. This operation can be performed for various medical reasons, including but not limited to uterine fibroids, endometriosis, uterine prolapse, chronic pelvic pain, abnormal bleeding, or cancer. The procedure effectively ends menstruation and the ability to become pregnant.
- What is an oophorectomy? An oophorectomy is the surgical removal of one or both ovaries. When both ovaries are removed, it’s called bilateral oophorectomy. This procedure can lead to immediate menopause if both ovaries are removed before a woman naturally enters menopause, significantly impacting her hormonal balance and potentially increasing her risk for certain health issues, such as osteoporosis and cardiovascular disease.
- Why are hysterectomies performed? Hysterectomies are performed for various reasons, often as a last resort for conditions that have not responded to other treatments. Common reasons include uterine fibroids that cause pain or bleeding, uterine prolapse, cancer of the uterus, cervix, or ovaries, endometriosis, abnormal vaginal bleeding, chronic pelvic pain, and adenomyosis. Each condition affects the quality of life and may necessitate the removal of the uterus for relief or cure.
- What are the potential risks associated with hysterectomy? The risks associated with hysterectomy include those common to major surgeries, such as infection, blood clots, hemorrhage, and adverse reactions to anesthesia. Specific to hysterectomy, risks can include damage to surrounding organs, chronic pain, hormonal imbalances when the ovaries are removed, and long-term effects such as increased risk of cardiovascular diseases and osteoporosis. Emotional and psychological effects, including depression and a sense of loss, may also occur.
- How does the removal of ovaries (oophorectomy) affect a woman’s body? The removal of ovaries leads to a sudden drop in the production of hormones such as estrogen and progesterone, leading to what is known as surgical menopause. This abrupt change can cause severe menopausal symptoms, including hot flashes, mood swings, vaginal dryness, decreased libido, and increased risk for osteoporosis and heart disease due to the loss of estrogen’s protective effects.
- What emotional or psychological effects can result from a hysterectomy? Beyond the physical impact, a hysterectomy can have significant emotional and psychological effects. Many women report feelings of loss or sadness after the procedure, particularly if they had not completed their families or if the surgery was done as part of cancer treatment. There may also be changes in self-image and sexual identity, as well as anxiety and depression due to hormonal changes, especially if the ovaries are removed.
- How can a hysterectomy impact a woman’s sexual function and libido? A hysterectomy can impact sexual function and libido in several ways. The removal of the uterus may change the nature of orgasm due to the absence of uterine contractions. If the ovaries are removed, the resulting drop in hormones can lead to decreased libido, vaginal dryness, and discomfort during sex. However, for some women, relief from chronic pain or heavy bleeding after hysterectomy improves their sexual health and quality of life.
- What is estrogen replacement therapy (ERT), and why might it be used after a hysterectomy? Estrogen Replacement Therapy (ERT) is a treatment used to alleviate menopausal symptoms by replacing estrogen, which is no longer produced by the ovaries after oophorectomy or natural menopause. After a hysterectomy, particularly when the ovaries are removed, ERT can help manage symptoms such as hot flashes, vaginal dryness, mood swings, and prevent osteoporosis by compensating for the loss of natural estrogen.
- Can you explain the role of testosterone in women’s health post-hysterectomy? Testosterone plays a crucial role in women’s health, contributing to muscle strength, bone density, and sexual desire. After a hysterectomy, especially with oophorectomy, women may experience a drop in testosterone levels, leading to decreased libido, fatigue, and loss of muscle mass. Testosterone therapy, albeit less common than estrogen therapy, may be considered for some women to address these issues.
- What are some alternative treatments to hysterectomy for conditions like fibroids and endometriosis? Alternative treatments to hysterectomy for managing conditions like fibroids and endometriosis include medication to manage symptoms, hormone therapy to shrink fibroids or control endometriosis, minimally invasive procedures like uterine artery embolization for fibroids, and laparoscopic surgery to remove endometriosis lesions or fibroids while preserving the uterus.
Nurses and doctors’ wives. Seattle, Washington—Rick Schweikert
When Nora told me that women sometimes send HERS photos of themselves before and after hysterectomy, I didn’t think too much about it. Until, at the premiere of un becoming in New York, a woman with tears in her eyes thanked me, saying, “You’re probably going to think I’m crazy, but can I show you a picture of me before the surgery?” And then after the next show it happened again. A woman who was married to a doctor said, “This is me before the surgery.” We spoke with women all over the country who carry around photos to remind themselves of who they were before a doctor removed their female organs.
The biggest difference I notice in the photos is their eyes.
As one woman explained, she showed me her photo to prove that before the surgery she was strong, vibrant, healthy, and happy,
“When I still had that glint in my eyes.”
The main protagonist in un becoming is an artist named Emma Douglas. She’s a painter who refers to her work as her life’s breath. She’s married to an anesthesiologist named Sam Morgan.
Sam’s best friend happens to be Dr. James Ridge, the gynecologist who recommends “exploratory” surgery to Emma. Halley Ridge, Dr. Ridge’s wife, was hysterectomized by her husband’s colleague, but the audience doesn’t discover that until the end of the play. In the end, Halley helps Emma avoid the surgery.
un becoming places accountability for hysterectomy on the shoulders of those who are most responsible. The villain of the play is a gynecologist, and the hero is a hysterectomized woman his wife. This scenario had never been portrayed in any stage pr duction before. When actors first picked up the script, they some times found the story hard to believe, as was the case with one u the members of the Seattle cast. But it’s unfortunately a common story.
What follows is an excerpt from one of the thousands of emails we’ve received from women whose lives mirror the story of un becoming:
Hi there,
My name is… I am from… My doctor who I loved and never questioned, suggested a hysterectomy. He didn’t think me being only 30 years old was an issue since I was married and had…children. He explained that I would take an estrogen pill each day, and basically I would be good as gold. ( Not his words) that is how he made it seem. NO SIDE AFFECTS WERE EVER MENTIONED! I was told it would be no different than my c section surgeries as far as the pain was concerned. My mother had a hysterectomy…..and told me that it would take a year before I felt better, however she had no idea what she would live the rest of her life like either. I…am having joint pain in my hands, knees, elbows and back. Before the hysterectomy I was fine, due to the pain I can no longer roller skate with my children, dance around the house and I fear that I am going to have to close my business. The list of side effects since the hysterectomy is too long…to put in this e-mail.
This morning out of desperation…I found your site. I am beside myself thinking I am only going to get worse. I am an artist and yesterday I couldn’t hold the paint brush to paint at my easel, typing this e-mail is painful. What can I do? Do you have any info that might help me?
Is there anyone else going through this?
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely;
(name and other identities omitted for confidentiality)
There have been a few books, such as Mary Daly’s GYN/ ECOLOGY, that accurately portray the life-altering effects of hysterectomy. But most books on the subject ultimately twist the truth around to benefit the self-serving interests of its author, the publisher, or the university or pharmaceutical company that sponsored the author’s research. un becoming is the story of hysterectomy told through the eyes of women—not the medical industrial establishment that targets them. The story is fictional, but two of the women who joined the protest in Seattle reminded us that the imaginary plot and characters are based on common experiences.
- How does the HERS Foundation assist women considering or affected by hysterectomy? The HERS Foundation provides education, advocacy, and support to women facing hysterectomy. They offer comprehensive information on the effects of hysterectomy, alternative treatments, and the importance of informed consent. By empowering women with knowledge, HERS aims to help them make informed decisions about their health care and advocate for less invasive treatments when appropriate.
- What long-term health risks are associated with hysterectomy and oophorectomy? Long-term health risks associated with hysterectomy and oophorectomy include an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, hormonal imbalance, and early menopause symptoms if the ovaries are removed. There’s also a potential risk for urinary incontinence, bowel dysfunction, and changes in sexual function.
- How does a hysterectomy affect a woman’s cardiovascular health? A hysterectomy, especially when accompanied by oophorectomy, can affect a woman’s cardiovascular health by increasing the risk of heart disease. Estrogen has a protective effect on heart health, and its sudden decrease can lead to higher cholesterol levels, increased blood pressure, and a greater risk of developing cardiovascular diseases.
- What are the uterine functions beyond childbearing? Beyond childbearing, the uterus plays a role in sexual health and pleasure, with uterine contractions contributing to orgasmic experiences for some women. It also supports pelvic anatomy, maintaining the proper position of surrounding organs and structures. Additionally, the uterus is involved in hormonal regulation and may have protective effects against certain diseases.
- What common misconceptions exist about the effects of hysterectomy on women’s health? Common misconceptions include the belief that the uterus is only necessary for childbearing and that its removal doesn’t impact hormonal balance or sexual function. Many are unaware of the potential for long-term health consequences, such as increased risk of cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis, as well as the emotional and psychological impact.
- How do societal views on female reproductive organs influence decisions about hysterectomy? Societal views often reduce female reproductive organs to their roles in childbearing, overlooking their importance to overall health, hormonal balance, and sexual function. This can contribute to a cavalier attitude towards hysterectomy and oophorectomy, underestimating the procedures’ impacts on women’s lives and health.
- What legal and ethical concerns arise from the high rate of unnecessary hysterectomies? The high rate of unnecessary hysterectomies raises legal and ethical concerns about informed consent, the adequacy of patient education regarding alternatives, and potential financial incentives driving surgical recommendations. It also highlights the need for greater advocacy and protection for patients’ rights to understand and choose less invasive options.
- How might the rate of hysterectomy surgeries be affected by the availability of alternative therapies? The availability of alternative therapies could significantly reduce the rate of hysterectomy surgeries by offering less invasive options for conditions traditionally treated with hysterectomy. Increased awareness and accessibility to treatments like hormone therapy, myomectomy, and endometrial ablation could empower women to choose alternatives that preserve their reproductive organs and minimize long-term risks.
- What advancements have been made in treatments for conditions like endometriosis without resorting to hysterectomy? Advances in the treatment of endometriosis include laparoscopic surgery to remove endometrial tissue while preserving the uterus, improved hormonal treatments to manage symptoms, and new medications targeting endometriosis’ pathophysiology. Research into non-hormonal treatments and immunotherapy offers hope for less invasive, more effective management strategies.
- How could patient education and advocacy change the future of gynecological health care? Patient education and advocacy can significantly impact gynecological health care by demanding a higher standard for informed consent, promoting awareness of less invasive treatments, and challenging the normalization of radical surgeries like hysterectomy. Empowered patients are more likely to seek second opinions, choose alternatives, and advocate for research into new treatments, leading to a shift towards more patient-centered care.
During the protests and talkbacks after the play, we met hundreds of hysterectomized women who were either nurses or the wives of doctors. And if that woman herself was an attorney or a nurse, audiences were shocked to hear that even that wasn’t enough to protect them. Nora often says, “The greatest number of hysterectomy scars are worn by the wives of doctors. Second is nurses.”
One of the women who joined us in Seattle was a writer who wrote a book about the before-and-after of hysterectomy. Her friend Fran (name changed for confidentiality) told her the story of how she ended up on an operating table. Fran was a registered nurse whose husband was a doctor: The surgeon who performed the “exploratory surgery” on her was the father of her daughter, close friend. All were in agreement that no organs were to be removed. She previously had one of her ovaries removed for an ordinary cyst, and she and her husband specifically made it clear that under no circumstances were the uterus or the remaining ovary to be removed. After the operation the surgeon emerged from the operating room, announcing that he had “excised the problem.” Fran’s husband, waiting for news about the surgery, was relieved…until the surgeon informed him that although he didn’t remove her uterus he did remove her remaining ovary, against their expressed wishes.
As medical professionals, Fran and her husband knew that ovarian function is critical to health and wellbeing. Uterine function and viability depends on ovarian function. By removing Fran’s remaining ovary, they knew that her hormone-responsive uterus would atrophy.
In order to keep her uterus viable, Fran was prescribed high levels of exogenous hormones—that is, hormones produced outside of her body. But while the endogenous hormones (produced naturally within her body) were beneficial to her, the exogenous hormones came with a host of dangers. The increased risk of cancer (breast, ovarian, uterine, and others), stroke, heart disease, dementia, and so on have been well-documented in studies and in literature. Because of the adverse effects of high doses of hormones, coupled with the devastating physical loss of ovarian function (the predictable aftereffects of castration), Fran was now unable to control her emotions. So she was prescribed potent anti- depressants and other anxiety-controlling drugs with unknown potential interactions.
The betrayal of trust by her profession filled her with rage and despair. Nora says the angriest women who contact HERS are nurses and the wives of doctors. She was both. Her rage consumed her.
When she and her husband attended a HERS conference in Dallas a few years later, she said her medical records showed there was nothing of significance wrong with the first ovary the doctor had removed, and the remaining ovary was also healthy when he removed it.
In the end, the couple sued the doctor. It was a fairly blatant case of a high-handed doctor mutilating a woman against her expressed wishes. But she lost the lawsuit. The jury favored the doctor’s word over hers and determined that the mutilating surgery had met the current “accepted standard of care.” As the surgeon’s defense attorney put it, her husband was a doctor and she was a nurse, so they should’ve known better.
Once the doctor became focused on Fran’s benign ovarian cyst—a natural variation that required no treatment—a cascade of devastating decisions and actions ensued. Menstruating women produce an ovarian cyst every month. It’s normal for the ovaries to develop physiologic (or functional) cysts when they ovulate mid-cycle, which wax and wane larger before menstruation and smaller after menstruation-usually a functional cyst develops on the right ovary one month, and on the left ovary the next month.
Other common, benign, ovarian cysts include dermoid, endometrioma (also called “chocolate” cysts), borderline, and teratoma. Dermoid cysts are rarely a cause for concern. They’re primordial cysts that usually contain hair, teeth, and often fat. Like endometrioma, dermoid cysts tend to grow bilaterally (on bot) ovaries), but they can also develop on only one ovary. They can occur on the outside of the ovary on a stalk that extends from the ovary (its blood supply), or they can occur inside the ovary, encapsulated. Women are often told that the ovary with the cyst must be removed, but this begins with the faulty premise that the development of these cysts requires action. In fact, except for borderline cysts, which have a small incidence of becoming cancerous, these cysts are benign-they don’t become malignant. Although they can become quite large, they may never cause a symptom. If they don’t bother you, there’s no reason to do anything about them.
The worst-case scenario is they can rupture, but cysts don’t rupture spontaneously—usually only through some kind of trauma to the abdomen, such as a forceful blow to the pelvis. If they do rupture, surgery is performed to irrigate the pelvis, which removes the contents of the cyst.
If the cyst is causing problems you can’t live with, a cystectomy (surgical removal of the cyst) can usually be performed without removing the ovary-if the surgeon has the skill to do so.
Ovaries are very resilient. They can be cut into pieces (called a wedge resection), the cyst removed, the pieces of the ovary sutured back together, and the ovary usually functions normally again.
If a cyst grows very large, some women feel pelvic pressure internally or they might experience urinary frequency. But usually they present no symptoms and are detected incidentally during a pelvic exam. Some women are especially prone to developing dermoid or endometrioma cysts, and after they’re removed they may develop them over and over again. This is a time when they’re especially vulnerable to hysterectomy, which is one reason to not go down the surgical path to begin with.
A Pap smear performed during a so-called well-woman visit is all too often an invitation to unnecessary treatment. The incidence of cancer in the female and the male sex organs is nearly identical, but men don’t have their sex organs routinely inspected.
And if doctors are hysterectomizing and castrating more than half a million healthy women each year, clearly the safe thing to do is to stay away from doctors and hospitals…even if you’re a nurse and your husband is a doctor.
- What role do the ovaries play in a woman’s body after menopause? After menopause, the ovaries continue to produce hormones, albeit at lower levels, including testosterone and a small amount of estrogen. These hormones play crucial roles in maintaining bone density, sexual desire, and overall well-being. The loss of ovarian function due to oophorectomy can therefore have significant health implications.
- What are the implications of “surgical menopause”? “Surgical menopause” refers to the abrupt onset of menopause symptoms following the removal of the ovaries. This sudden hormonal shift can lead to severe menopausal symptoms, increased risk for cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, and a decline in sexual function. Unlike natural menopause, the transition is immediate, and symptoms can be more intense.
- How does the removal of the uterus and ovaries relate to increased risks of diseases such as osteoporosis and heart disease? The removal of the uterus and especially the ovaries disrupts the body’s hormonal balance, leading to a decrease in estrogen levels. Estrogen plays a protective role in heart health and bone density; its loss accelerates the risk of cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis. The abrupt change due to surgery amplifies these risks compared to the gradual transition of natural menopause.
- What is the significance of informed consent in the context of hysterectomy? Informed consent is crucial in ensuring that women are fully aware of the potential risks, benefits, and long-term implications of a hysterectomy, as well as alternative treatments. It represents an ethical obligation for healthcare providers to ensure patients make truly informed decisions about their care, acknowledging the profound impact on their health and quality of life.
- How can the structural changes post-hysterectomy affect the pelvic anatomy and function? Post-hysterectomy structural changes can include pelvic organ prolapse, where the bladder, bowel, and vagina may shift or descend due to the loss of uterine support. This can lead to urinary incontinence, bowel dysfunction, and changes in sexual function. The severing of nerves and ligaments during surgery can also result in chronic pain and a decrease in sexual sensation.
- What impact does hysterectomy have on the skeletal structure, specifically the spine and rib cage? The removal of the uterus can lead to a shift in the pelvic bones and a change in the structural alignment of the spine and rib cage. As the pelvic support structure is altered, it can result in a compressed spine, decreased height, and a protruding abdomen. This skeletal impact can lead to chronic back pain and alterations in physical appearance.
- What are the common physical sensations lost or altered after hysterectomy? Women may experience a loss of sensation in the pelvic area, diminished sexual response, and changes in orgasmic capability following hysterectomy. The severing of nerves during the procedure can lead to numbness, tingling, or pain in the pelvic region, affecting sexual health and overall quality of life.
- How does hysterectomy affect a woman’s hormonal balance and overall endocrine function? Hysterectomy, especially with the removal of the ovaries, drastically affects a woman’s hormonal balance by eliminating the primary sources of estrogen and progesterone. This can lead to immediate menopause, with symptoms like hot flashes, mood swings, and increased risk for conditions related to hormonal deficiency, such as osteoporosis and heart disease.
- Discuss the relationship between hysterectomy and increased risks of mental health issues. The hormonal changes and physical alterations following hysterectomy can contribute to mental health challenges, including depression, anxiety, and a sense of loss or grief. The impact on sexual function and self-identity can further exacerbate these issues, highlighting the need for comprehensive pre- and post-operative counseling and support.
- What future research directions are suggested by current findings on the effects of hysterectomy and oophorectomy? Future research should focus on long-term outcomes of hysterectomy and oophorectomy, exploring alternative treatments that preserve the uterus and ovaries, and the development of targeted therapies to manage conditions like endometriosis and fibroids without radical surgery. Studies on the psychosocial impacts of these surgeries and the efficacy of hormone replacement therapy in mitigating long-term risks are also needed to guide patient-centered care.
Hospitals are dangerous places. We’re certainly not the first ones to say so. Nor was Robert S. Mendelsohn, an M.D. who was the President of the National Health Federation, the director of a hospital in Chicago, and a medical school professor:
I have always told my patients that they should avoid hospitals as they would avoid a war. Do your utmost to stay out of them and, if you find yourself in one, do everything possible to get out as soon as you can. After working in hospitals for most of my life, I can assure you that they are the dirtiest and most deadly places in town.
It would be ideal if we were all informed of these basic facts. But informing women about the irreversible aftermath of hysterectomy is bad for business, so we can’t wait for doctors to do it. Women don’t know better because doctors neglect to inform them. The vast majority of the women who call HERS cancel their surgeries after they learn about female anatomy and the function, of the female organs.
“My doctor told me I was endangering my children by not having a hysterectomy,” a woman told us during a talkback. “If I didn’t have the surgery, he said, I was going to die and I wouldn’t’ see my children grow up.”
“So what did you do?” I asked.
“Nora knows,” she said, “because she looked at my medical records with me, and there wasn’t anything wrong with me.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Fourteen years ago. My kids are in college, and I’m the picture of health.”
If we heard it once we heard it a thousand times – “I canceled my surgery,” women tell us, “and now I’m the picture of health. So why did my doctor tell me I needed a hysterectomy?”
The most frightening lines in un becoming found their way into the play because they’re the things women tell us over and over again about what their doctors told them. They’re repeated from coast-to-coast, from border-to-border, to women born a hundred years apart. While I was working on the first draft of un becoming, my friend’s mother yelled to him while he was on the phone with me, saying, “Tell Rick to put in his play what my doctor told me! Tell him my doctor said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m just taking out the crib, but I’m leaving the playpen.’
In other words, women aren’t able to bear children after hysterectomy, but their sexual partners will still have a vaginal pocket for intercourse, even though a loss of sexual feeling is an anatomical fact for hysterectomized women. So I did put it into the play…but only after I heard that same line a dozen or more times. We continue to hear it from women all over the country, including right there in the state of Washington. These one-liners from gynecologists trivialize women’s concerns about their sex organs as they sit half-naked on examination tables.
Women are told to eat nothing after midnight the night before the surgery and to get their things in order because they’ll be out of commission for a while as they “recover.” But recovery presumes they’ll be the same person after the surgery as they were before, which isn’t possible. What they’re not told is far more important than what they are told. It’s what isn’t being said that’s really at issue here.
One of the protestors who joined us in Seattle was an attorney. Her expertise was drafting language that could be defended in court. She was diagnosed with uterine cancer and consented to a hysterectomy, but not castration. It might seem foolish for a doctor to castrate a bright attorney, who not only modified the hospital’s consent form to reflect her wishes prior to the hysterectomy but also included specific language expressly stating that under no circumstances were her ovaries to be removed. And yet, like the nurse mentioned above, against her wishes a doctor removed her ovaries anyway.
She wanted to sue, but no attorney would take the case because most states have a “reasonable person” or “a reasonable physician” standard. The lawyers advised her that the courts would assume that once she entered the hospital, any reasonable physician would’ve chosen to castrate her while hysterectomizing her-even if it was contrary to her written wishes. If you enter a hospital in a reasonable-physician statute state, your wishes may mean nothing.
The courts will very likely support whatever the doctor deems reasonable.
The issue boils down to whether a woman has the right decide what will be done to her body. The Constitution of the United States guarantees personal sovereignty, and our government exists to protect it. When informed consent is missing from the decision making process, personal sovereignty is denied to women. Decisions about what women will and won’t allow to be done to their bodies should never be taken away from them, under any circumstances.
On the first day of the Seattle protest we turned our signs toward the Swedish Medical Center instead of the traffic, so the doctors and patients inside the building could see them. Massive cranes loomed overhead, a sign that business was booming.
That evening a reading of un becoming was hosted by the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Washington in a lecture hall on campus. Like the cast, a few people in the talk. back had a difficult time accepting that doctors knowingly harm women. It’s an unattractive side of human nature that most people are unwilling to attribute to doctors.
“So who’s to blame?” I asked them. As with most audiences, someone said, “I think women need to educate themselves.” But what does that have to do with whether or not doctors knowingly harm women? And who could possibly be more educated on these issues than a nurse and a doctor? A medical education didn’t save her. Isn’t that what we pay doctors for, to advise us on issues we don’t have time to go to medical school to learn?
Although it’s rare for a doctor to be prosecuted in a criminal court for harming patients, the Seattle Times reported the case of a King County gynecologist convicted of two counts of rape and two counts of “indecent liberties” against four Seattle women who testified against him. The last lines of the Times article read, “Momah remains charged with three counts of health-care fraud, which will be tried later. In addition, he faces civil suits from dozens of women who say he sexually abused them or botched surgeries.” Such cases are common, and for everyone we do hear about, how many more are there that we don’t hear about? Insurance fraud is a criminal offense that is punishable by imprisonment. The unconsented removal of women’s sex organs, though, is a civil offense that usually goes unpunished even in the most blatant cases. To find out why, follow the money. What’s a uterus worth? Not much. But what’s hysterectomy—the 20-30 minute surgery to remove the uterus—worth to hospitals and doctors?
Tens of billions of dollars each year. And what are the male sex organs worth? It’s worth searching for a man’s penis in the dirt and spending nine hours in the operating room reattaching it, as was the case when Lorena Bobbit severed John Wayne Bobbit’s penis after he raped her in 1993.19 Another woman who attended the protest and the play with her husband said they were both grateful to HERS for helping her remain intact. A doctor tried to badger her into letting him hysterectomize her. She sought other opinions, but one doctor after another supported the first doctor’s recommendation, until she found HERS.
Nora was interviewed by a local television station in Seattle, but the hospital administrators at Swedish were smarter than some hospitals we’d been to. They didn’t call the police, so we didn’t’ have flashing lights to draw attention to our protest.
We spoke with a woman who said she was afraid because she couldn’t keep up with the minimum payments she was required to make to Swedish to pay down the debt incurred when she was hysterectomized there without health insurance. Meanwhile, the Swedish website says not only can you make a donation to Swedish, “If you would prefer to pledge a fixed amount on a regular basis, call us and we can help you set up an automatic contribution plan.”
It’s an ugly game of round robin. Surgeons’ wives are hysterectomized, as well as the nurses who assist them in surgery. Indigent women are put on payment plans to pay for unnecessary hysterectomies, or taxpayers are sent the bill via Medicaid and Medicare. The public is encouraged to set up automatic contribution plans to pad the medical industry’s bottom line and help pay surgeons exorbitant payoffs for doing this grisly work. And then the courts protect the doctors and hospital administrators when suits are brought against them, because unwarranted surgery has become the standard of care. Health and wellbeing has almost nothing to do with it.
‘Israel is destroying itself’ as Western media helps in the slaughter of Palestinians
By Ian DeMartino – Sputnik – 01.03.2024
On December 28, 2023, the “paper of record” in the United States, The New York Times, published a piece that described acts of alleged sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas during the October 7 attack. Since publication, independent media outlets have revealed significant issues with the piece.
The New York Times and other Western media outlets paved the way for Israel’s slaughter, Seyed Mohammad Marandi, an Iranian-American academic and political analyst, told Sputnik’s The Critical Hour on Thursday.
“When The New York Times published that dishonest piece about rape on October the 7th, some Israeli [media] were rejecting those claims, [but] the Western media would not accept any of this. They closed their eyes and simply repeated the accusations in order to help the Israelis justify genocide and they continue to do so today,” he said.
The Times article’s co-author was later revealed as a former Israeli Defense Force officer who had no prior reporting experience and had liked posts that called Gazans “human animals” and advocated turning the Gaza Strip “into a slaughterhouse.”
The family of one of the victims featured heavily in the article later said the newspaper misled them, and the victim’s brother-in-law and sisters denied there was evidence that their family member was raped.
The Times has since said it is reviewing the author’s social media accounts, but has not retracted the article.
“In other words, what the New York Times and others did was that they prepared the ground so that Israelis could slaughter Palestinians, and no one in the West would complain,” he continued.
Marandi noted that anyone who is denying that “Israelis are intentionally massacring Palestinians” has been “closing their eyes to reality,” especially in the wake of videos released on Thursday that appear to show IDF forces firing on Palestinians gathering food from aid trucks.
“It’s quite clear that the Israelis use the trucks as bait and when starving people gather to find food for their starving children, the Israelis open fire.” More than 100 people were killed and more than 750 injured in the attack, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
But it is the mainstream media’s portrayal and non-coverage of these events that brainwash the masses, Marandi said.
“That’s exactly why the United States is not a democracy, why it’s never been a democracy. People are not allowed to have information,” he argued. “If people are being managed, if they’re being fed information that’s divorced from reality and then they make decisions based upon that information, that’s not democratic. That’s a brainwashed society that will do as it’s told.”
Despite the propaganda, the images coming out of Gaza are so horrific that even some of Israel’s most adamant supporters are turning against the US policy of unconditional support.
“Two-thirds of Americans [oppose] the current policy, according to one poll, the majority of even white evangelicals and the majority of American Jews are [in favor of a permanent ceasefire],” Marandi explained, referring to a recent Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) poll.
“The irony is that while the Israeli regime and its allies in Washington are the ones who are preventing a ceasefire from taking place, these are the ones who are going to lose the most by continuing the war,” Marandi argued.
“They can kill more Palestinians and they want to kill more Palestinians, but they are destroying their image. They are destroying their legitimacy in the eyes of those who thought they were legitimate previously across the world. So in my opinion, Israel is destroying itself.”
Biden Aides Trying to Shield US President From Protesters at Campaign Events – Reports
Sputnik – 01.03.2024
WASHINGTON – US President Joe Biden’s aides have adopted several tricks to protect their boss from protesters who are increasingly dissatisfied with the White House’s policies in the Middle East and unlimited support for Israel, NBC reported on Friday.
Biden’s aides’ tactics include avoiding protesters at events by making them smaller, keeping precise locations secret from the media and the public until the last moment, avoiding college campuses, and hiring a private company to filter attendees, the report said.
Even though the tactics have already shown their success and over the past five weeks there has not been a single incident of an attempt to interfere with Biden’s speech at an event, it also has drawbacks, including the president’s appearance in front of a smaller number of potential voters, according to the report.
“But the downside is that means he doesn’t reach as many voters,” an aide was quoted as saying. “The point is to reach as many voters as you can, and those small events don’t.”
White House aides are planning to use the tactics at an upcoming fundraiser event this month with Biden and former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. More specifically, event organizers are going to hire a private company that will vet attendees to exclude those who can disrupt it, the report added.
In January, Biden’s campaign rally in Virginia was disrupted eight times by protesters demanding a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.
Protests have taken place many times across the United States, including large marches in Washington with hundreds of thousands of people attending, demanding a ceasefire in Gaza in light of the thousands of civilians killed and wounded amid Israel’s military operations there.
‘State-minus’: Biden’s Palestine solution
Three decades after the Oslo Lie, neither the US nor the EU are in any position to dangle the promise of a Palestinian state.
By Stasa Salacanin | The Cradle | February 29, 2024
Is it sadly ironic that the issue of Palestinian statehood – unresolved for over 75 years – has resurfaced only after Israel’s wholesale carpet-bombing of the Gaza Strip, killing over 30,000 civilians, injuring tens of thousands more, and destroying significant swathes of the territory’s infrastructure.
University of California (UCLA) historian James Gelvin states the case plainly:
“There would have been no serious discussion of a two-state solution without [the events of] 7 October. As a matter of fact, putting the Palestine issue back on the front burner of international and West Asian politics was one of the reasons Hamas launched its operation.”
As Gelvin explains it to The Cradle, Hamas has already scored several victories since its Al-Aqsa Flood operation: “The Palestine issue is back on the international agenda, it is negotiating the release of its captives as an equal partner to Israel,” and has demonstrated that it is “more effective in realizing Palestinian goals than its rival, Fatah.”
New ‘Biden Doctrine’
While the unprecedented, brutal Israeli military response has indeed illustrated the urgency for establishing a Palestinian safe haven, it is impossible to ignore that western state backers of the 1993 Oslo Accords – which laid out the essential framework for the establishment of a Palestinian state – have then so assiduously ignored and neglected that responsibility.
Even greater hypocrisy emerges from the fact that these western powers, led by Washington, have now decided to force the discussion of Palestinian statehood in the midst of Gaza’s carnage, with an Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is infamously opposed to it.
So, why is this debate possible now? Why was it ignored before 7 October – or even prior to Netanyahu’s return to the prime ministership?
After enormous public and international pressure, US President Joe Biden has, at least rhetorically, reopened the issue of Palestinian statehood. According to the New York Times, the Biden White House’s new doctrine would “involve some form of US recognition of a demilitarized Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in return for strong Palestinian guarantees that their institutions could never threaten Israel.”
In addition, the US president’s plan also envisages Saudi–Israeli normalization and a tough military stance against Iran and its regional allies. However, many analysts have already raised questions about the viability of a plan that does not reflect current ground realities.
While Netanyahu rejects the very notion of a Palestinian state, the ‘Biden doctrine’ and its offering of some limited-sovereignty version of a demilitarized Palestinian state is nothing less than humiliating for Palestinians.
Dr Muhannad Ayyash, Professor of Sociology at Mount Royal University, observes that there is no fundamental change of approach by the US on this issue. In short, the Biden administration refuses to clarify what it means by a ‘Palestinian state.’ Its initiative appears mainly to advance a form of a two-state solution that would be palatable to Israel.
Ayyash points out that the key issues related to Palestinian statehood are left unanswered, including the issue of sovereignty, Jewish settlements, the status of East Jerusalem, a necessary West Bank/East Jerusalem connection with the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian right to return, and so forth.
As Israel has firmly insisted on retaining full security control over the entire territory west of Jordan – meaning, over all the territory likely to come under Palestinian (self-)rule – many experts fear that Israel would have the right to militarily enter those territories at will, without Palestinian consent, with the latter banned from assembling its own military force.
This version of ‘statehood’ is not remotely on par with that of other UN member-states, who are entitled, under the UN Charter, to exercise full sovereignty and defend their territorial integrity. Biden’s ‘solution’ of a Palestinian state with limited sovereignty is nothing more than the legalization of Israel’s perpetual occupation of Palestine.
A Palestinian ‘empty shell’
The revived debate on Palestinian statehood is also intricately connected to a big western public relations dilemma. The Atlanticists’ unconditional support for Israel’s illegal, disproportionate military assault against mostly female and child populations has deeply impacted their image and capacity to maneuver in West Asia and beyond.
This is especially true for Washington’s foreign policy objectives in the region, which are facing major, direct resistance on the ground in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.
The revival of a two-state solution is, therefore, a “desperate act to salvage some of the credibility or legitimacy of these regimes (both Arab and Western governments),” argues Dr Mohammed Abu-Nimer, Professor and Abdulaziz Said Chair for Peace and Conflict Resolution at the American University in Washington, DC.
For decades, the US has capitulated to Israeli demands on pretty much everything Tel Aviv has ever asked for. In recent years, as Gelvin describes it, the US has mainly focused “on bribing various Arab governments – the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan – to normalize relations with Israel” through the “Abraham Accords,” which, in effect, took the Palestine issue off the table.”
Meanwhile, Arab states managed regional expectations by continuing to pay lip service to Palestinian issues while scuttling any opportunities behind the scenes. With few Arab state allies left, Palestinians themselves had no cards left to leverage – until 7 October.
Now, Israel is doing all it can to negate that day’s gains. Says Ayyash:
“Netanyahu wants to dispense with all pretension about the establishment of the Palestinian state and use this moment to establish full Israeli Jewish sovereignty from the river to the sea, whereas the Biden administration prefers a quieter approach that pretends to care about the aspirations of the Palestinian people in order to maintain its close ties with Arab regimes across the region.”
The two-state solution, according to Professor Abu-Nimer, is, therefore, nothing other than a “fig leaf” to resuscitate the west’s crashing image and should not be viewed as a serious US initiative. The proposed plan is “a skeleton or an empty shell which lacks of any serious form of sovereignty.”
Nathan Brown, an American scholar of Middle Eastern law and politics at George Washington University, largely concurs:
“This is not a step toward statehood but only reviving some provisions of the Oslo Accords. Even at a maximum, it would produce what would have been called a ‘protectorate’ in the nineteenth century, not a state.”
A Palestinian state is not on the cards
Although the US and the EU could exercise immense leverage over Israel to revive the Oslo agreement and fast-track its provisions, they are doing nothing of the sort.
Today, there is a unique opportunity for Tel Aviv’s western allies to play this hand, given the utter collapse of Israel’s image worldwide and the mass public demand for the protection of Palestinians.
Instead, the Biden administration thinks that it can resurrect the two-state idea by mediating a grand regional deal – one that will deliver everything Israel wants, by dangling the promise of a rump Palestinian state.
The White House believes that the reward of normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia will offset for the Netanyahu government a reversal on the question of Palestinian statehood and withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories.
Gelvin dismisses the plan, saying it simply won’t work on so many levels. For starters, “if Netanyahu commits to a Palestinian state and withdrawal from the occupied territories, his government will collapse and he will go to jail.”
Don’t expect anything spectacular from the European Union either. Although EU High Representative for Foreign Relations Josep Borrell has said that a Palestinian state may need to be imposed from the outside without Israel’s agreement, realistically, the range and reach of European foreign policy is minimal or non-existent. According to Gelvin, “the EU has no more leverage against Israel than Costa Rica.”
Abu-Nimer likely speaks for the majority of regional observers – who have seen this game play out before: these top-down western statehood formulas do not work without genuine engagement with Palestinian political representation – in this case, Hamas and other Palestinian resistance organizations.
Thirty-one years after the Oslo Accords promised a Palestinian state, Israel is ethnically cleansing Gaza and swallowing up the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Almost five months after the start of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, some of the leverage is back in Palestinian resistance hands, and they are unlikely to trade their gains for an unsovereign rump state which diplomats are privately calling a ‘state-minus.’
Washington blocks UNSC statement condemning Israel for ‘Flour Massacre’
The Cradle | March 1, 2024
The US, on 29 February, vetoed a UN Security Council (UNSC) statement that would have condemned Israel for the mass murder of over 100 Palestinian civilians who were awaiting the delivery of humanitarian aid in Gaza City.
“We don’t have all the facts on the ground – that’s the problem,” US deputy ambassador to the UN Robert Wood told reporters on Thursday.
He then claimed there are “contradictory reports” about the Israeli army’s latest massacre and highlighted that Washington was focused on finding “some language that everyone can agree on.”
Thursday’s veto is the fifth time Washington has blocked a UNSC statement or ceasefire resolution that would hold Israel accountable for the atrocities it has committed in Gaza.
According to Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian UN ambassador, 14 of the 15 council members supported the statement advanced by Algeria.
At least 112 Palestinians were killed and more than 750 wounded after Israeli troops opened heavy machine gun and artillery fire on thousands waiting for food on Gaza’s Al-Rashid Street, in what marked the first delivery of food to northern Gaza in several weeks.
“After opening fire, Israeli tanks advanced and ran over many of the dead and injured bodies,” Al Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul reported from the scene.
“We had come here to get our hands on some aid. I have been waiting since noon yesterday. At about 4:30 in the early morning, trucks started to trickle in. The Israelis just opened random fire on us as if it was a trap. Once we approached the aid trucks, the Israeli tanks and warplanes started firing on us,” a witness at the scene told Al Jazeera.
The Israeli aggression triggered a stampede, adding to the chaos.
“We were going to bring flour … then Israeli snipers shot at us,” another person in the area told the Qatari news outlet. “They shot me in the leg. I’m unable to stand up,” he added.
Tel Aviv changed its story multiple times on Thursday, first claiming the majority of victims were killed by the stampede and later saying that soldiers opened fire only after feeling “threatened.” Officials have yet to explain how the crowds of underfed and displaced civilians posed any threat to them.
US Refuses to Discuss ‘Nuclear Arms in Outer Space’ Despite Russia’s Dialogue Efforts
By Andrei Dergalin – Sputnik – 29.02.2024
Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered his annual address to Russia’s parliament on February 29, offering his assessment of issues related to the country’s foreign and domestic policies.
Russian President Vladimir Putin broached the subject of the United States recently alleging without any proof that Russia plans to deploy some kind of nuclear weapons in space during his State of the Nation address on Thursday.
Having dismissed these unfounded allegations, Putin mentioned that Russia is yet to receive any serious proposals from the US to initiate bilateral contacts on strategic stability.
Commenting on the Russian president’s remarks, Dr. Marco Marsili, a researcher at Cà Foscari University of Venice, pointed out that the US and its European allies have consistently refused to negotiate “international legally-binding instruments” with Russia, despite the latter’s initiatives aimed at preventing possible deployment of nuclear armaments in space.
According to Dr. Marsili, who is also an associate fellow at the Center for Strategic Research (Cesran International) and who holds research positions in major civil and military institutions in Portugal, the UK and Italy, the US and its allies torpedoed the initiatives “to maintain their technical advantages from its missile defense program and other space weapons.”
“In his speech delivered today, President Putin opened once again to a frank and genuine negotiation with the US on the placement of nuclear arms in outer space but, so far, has not received any signal from the counterpart,” he said.
“Today, Russia is in a stronger position due to its technological advances in missile defense and has developed hypersonic capabilities, like the Avangard rocket cited by President Putin in his speech, which place the country far away from its Western competitors. Notwithstanding, President Putin is still seeking dialogue with the White House, but does not receive any response.”
Dr. Marsili also weighed in on Putin’s statement about the need for a new global financial architecture that would be free from political interference, with Marsili noting how the “global governance” that emerged in the aftermath of World War II “was shaped by Western nations.”
“This post-colonialist governance, including the Bretton Woods system, is challenged by emerging countries from Africa and Latin America. The Sino-Russian cooperation agreement about the Belt and Road Initiative, and regional agreements with CSI member states can boost the economic growth of the region,” he continued.
Regarding Putin’s remark on Russia’s prospects to become one of the world’s four largest economies soon, Dr. Marsili observed that the figures presented by the Russian president to the audience during the speech “demonstrate the foreseen growth of the Russian economy, despite international sanctions.”
“These figures are reliable because they are based on data provided by the economic outlook of the major international institutions such as the IMF, the OECD, and the World Bank,” he added. “As of today, Russia’s economy is already among the largest in the world by nominal GDP. A significant economic power, Russia is not only the largest country in the world, but also an energy superpower and one of the largest producers of rare-earth materials that are crucial for many technologic applications.”
Meanwhile, Dmitry Suslov, deputy director of the Center for European and International Studies at Russia’s Higher School of Economics, argued that one of the crucial themes of Putin’s address was the matter of Russia’s sovereignty.
“Without question, sovereignty was another crucial theme of Putin’s address and sovereignty could be considered as the ideology of Russian development in the observable future. The president emphasized the political, economic and technological sovereignty of Russia. Sovereignty is indeed a precondition of Russian not just development, but survival, and, of course, development,” he elaborated.
According to Suslov, “Western policies prove that the West uses and used the interdependence and Russian dependence on the Western technologies and markets as a weapon against Russia.”
Thus, in order to avoid such dependence in the future and to not exchange it for “a new dependence on the other countries,” Russia “needs to be sovereign in all crucial aspects of development – in technologies, in defense, in the main aspects of economic development and, of course, in the political sphere,” he postulated.
The CIA in Ukraine — The NY Times Gets a Guided Tour
By Patrick Lawrence | ScheerPost | February 29, 2024
If you have paid attention to what various polls and officials in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West have been doing and saying about Ukraine lately, you know the look and sound of desperation. You would be desperate, too, if you were making a case for a war Ukrainians are on the brink of losing and will never, brink or back-from-the-brink, have any chance of winning. Atop this, you want people who know better, including 70 percent of Americans according to a recent poll, to keep investing extravagant sums in this ruinous folly.
And here is what seems to me the true source of angst among these desperados: Having painted this war as a cosmic confrontation between the world’s democrats and the world’s authoritarians, the people who started it and want to prolong it have painted themselves into a corner. They cannot lose it. They cannot afford to lose a war they cannot win: This is what you see and hear from all those good-money-after-bad people still trying to persuade you that a bad war is a good war and that it is right that more lives and money should be pointlessly lost to it.
Everyone must act for the cause in these dire times. You have Chuck Schumer in Kyiv last week trying to show House Republicans that they should truly, really authorize the Biden regime to spend an additional $61 billion on its proxy war with Russia. “Everyone we saw, from Zelensky on down made this very point clear,” the Democratic senator from New York asserted in an interview with The New York Times. “If Ukraine gets the aid, they will win the war and beat Russia.”
Even at this late hour people still have the nerve to say such things.
You have European leaders gathering in Paris Monday to reassure one another of their unity behind the Kyiv regime—and where Emmanuel Macron refused to rule out sending NATO ground troops to the Ukrainian front. “Russia cannot and must not win this war,” the French president declared to his guests at the Elysée Palace.
Except that it can and, barring an act of God, it will.
Then you have Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s war-mongering sec-gen, telling Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty last week that it will be fine if Kyiv uses F–16s to attack Russian cities once they are operational this summer. The U.S.–made fighter jets, the munitions, the money—all of it is essential “to ensure Russia doesn’t make further gains.” Stephen Bryen, formerly a deputy undersecretary at the Defense Department, offered an excellent response to this over the weekend in his Weapons and Strategy newsletter: “Fire Jens Stoltenberg before it is too late.”
Good thought, but Stoltenberg, Washington’s longtime water-carrier in Brussels, is merely doing his job as assigned: Keep up the illusions as to Kyiv’s potency and along with it the Russophobia, the more primitive the better. You do not get fired for irresponsible rhetoric that risks something that might look a lot like World War III.
What would a propaganda blitz of this breadth and stupidity be without an entry from The New York Times ? Given the extent to which the Times has abandoned all professional principle in the service of the power it is supposed to report upon, you just knew it would have to get in on this one.
The Times has published very numerous pieces in recent weeks on the necessity of keeping the war going and the urgency of a House vote authorizing that $61 billion Biden’s national security people want to send Ukraine. But never mind all those daily stories. Last Sunday it came out with its big banana. “The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin” sprawls—lengthy text, numerous photographs. The latter show the usual wreckage—cars, apartment buildings, farmhouses, a snowy dirt road lined with landmines. But the story that goes with it is other than usual.
Somewhere in Washington, someone appears to have decided it was time to let the Central Intelligence Agency’s presence and programs in Ukraine be known. And someone in Langley, the CIA’s headquarters, seems to have decided this will be O.K., a useful thing to do. When I say the agency’s presence and programs, I mean some : We get a very partial picture of the CIA’s doings in Ukraine, as the lies of omission—not to mention the lies of commission—are numerous in this piece. But what the Times published last weekend, all 5,500 words of it, tells us more than had been previously made public.
Let us consider this unusually long takeout carefully for what it is and how it came to make page one of last Sunday’s editions.
In a recent commentary I reflected on the mess the Times landed in when it published a thoroughly discredited p.o.s.—and I leave readers to understand this newsroom expression—on the sexual violence Hamas militias allegedly committed last Oct. 7. I described a corrupt but routinized relationship between the organs of official power and the journalists charged with reporting on official power, likening it to a foie gras farmer feeding his geese: The Times’s journalists opened wide and swallowed. For appearances’ sake, they then set about dressing up what they ingested as independently reported work. This is the routine.
It is the same, yet more obviously, with this extended piece on the CIA’s activities in Ukraine. Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz tell the story of—this the subhead—“a secret intelligence partnership with Ukraine that is now critical for both countries in countering Russia.” They set the scene in a below-ground monitoring and communications center the CIA showed Ukrainian intel how to build beneath the wreckage of an army outpost destroyed in a Russian missile attack. They report on the archipelago of such places the agency paid for, designed, equipped, and now helps operate. Twelve of these, please note, are along Ukraine’s border with Russia.
Entous and Schwirtz, it is time to mention, are not based in Ukraine. They operate from Washington and New York respectively. This indicates clearly enough the genesis of “The Spy War.” There was no breaking down of doors involved here, no intrepid correspondents digging, no tramping around in Ukraine’s mud and cold, unguided. The CIA handed these two material according to what it wanted and did not want disclosed, and various officials associated with it made themselves available as “sources”—none of the American sources named, per usual.
Are we supposed to think these reporters found the underground bunker and all the other such installations by dint of their “investigation”—a term they have the gall to use as they describe what they did? And then they developed some kind of grand exposé of all the agency wanted to keep hidden? Is this it?
Sheer pretense, nothing more. Entous and Schwirtz opened wide and got fed. There appears to be nothing in what they wrote that was not effectively authorized, and we can probably do without “effectively.”
There is also the question of sources. Entous and Schwirtz say they conducted 200 interviews to get this piece done. If they did, and I will stay with my “if,” they do not seem to have been very good interviews to go by the published piece. And however many interviews they did, this must still be counted a one-source story, given that everyone quoted in it reflects the same perspective and so reinforces, more or less, what everyone else quoted has to say. The sources appear to have been handed to Entous and Schwirtz as was access to the underground bunker.
The narrative thread woven through the piece is interesting. It is all about the two-way, can’t-do-without-it cooperation between the CIA and Ukraine’s main intel services—the SBU (the domestic spy agency) and military intelligence, which goes by HUR. In this the piece reads like a difficult courtship that leads to a happy-at-last consummation. It took a long time for the Americans to trust the Ukrainians, we read, as they, the Americans, assumed the SBU was thick with Russian double agents. But the Ukrainian spooks enticed them with stacks and stacks of intelligence that seems to have astonished the CIA people on the ground and back in Langley.
So, a tale with two moving parts: The Americans helped the Ukrainians get their technology, methods, and all-around spookery up to snuff, and the Ukrainians made themselves indispensable to the Americans by providing wads of raw intel. Entous and Schwirtz describe this symbiosis as “one of Washington’s most important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today.” Here is how a former American official put it, as the Times quotes him or her:
The relationships only got stronger and stronger because both sides saw value in it, and the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv—our station there, the operation out of Ukraine—became the best source of information, signals and everything else, on Russia. We couldn’t get enough of it.
As to omissions and commissions, there are things left out in this piece, events that are blurred, assertions that are simply untrue and proven to be so. What amazes me is how far back Entous and Schwirtz reach to dredge up all this stuff—even to the point they make fools of themselves and remind us of the Times’s dramatic loss of credibility since the current round of Russophobia took hold a decade ago.
Entous and Schwirtz begin their account of the CIA–SBU/HUR alliance in 2014, when the U.S. cultivated the coup in Kyiv that brought the present regime to power and ultimately led to Russia’s military intervention. But no mention of the U.S. role in it. They write, “The CIA’s partnership in Ukraine can be traced back to two phone calls on the night of Feb. 24, 2014, eight years to the day before Russia’s full-scale invasion.” Neat, granular, but absolutely false. The coup began three days earlier, on Feb. 21, and as Vladimir Putin reminded Tucker Carlson during the latter’s Feb. 6 interview with the Russian president, it was the CIA that did the groundwork.
I confess a special affection for this one: “The Ukrainians also helped the Americans go after the Russian operatives who meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” Entous and Schwirtz write. And later in the piece, this:
In one joint operation, a[n] HUR team duped an officer from Russia’s military intelligence service into providing information that allowed the C.I.A. to connect Russia’s government to the so-called Fancy Bear hacking group, which had been linked to election interference efforts in a number of countries.
Wonderful. Extravagantly nostalgic for that twilight interim that began eight years ago, when nothing had to be true so long as it explained why Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, and why Donald Trump is No. 1 among America’s “deplorables.”
I have never seen evidence of Russian government interference in another nation’s elections, including America’s in 2016, and I will say with confidence you haven’t, either. All that came to be associated with the Russiagate fable, starting with the never-happened hack of the Democratic Party’s mail, was long ago revealed to be concocted junk. As to “Fancy Bear,” and its cousin “Cozy Bear”—monikers almost certainly cooked up over a long, fun lunch in Langley—for the umpteenth time these are not groups of hackers or any other sort of human being: They are sets of digital tools available to anyone who wants to use them.
Sloppy, tiresome. But to a purpose. Why, then? What is the Times’s purpose in publishing this piece?
We can start, logically enough, with that desperation evident among those dedicated to prolonging the war. The outcome of the war, in my read and in the view of various military analysts, does not depend on the $61 billion in aid that now hangs in the balance. But the Biden regime seems to think it does, or pretends to think it does. The Times’s most immediate intent, so far as one can make out from the piece, is to add what degree of urgency it can to this question.
Entous and Schwirtz report that the people running Ukrainian intelligence are nervous that without a House vote releasing new funds “the CIA will abandon them.” Good enough that it boosts the case to cite nervous Ukrainians, but we should recognize that this is a misapprehension. The CIA has a very large budget entirely independent of what Congress votes one way or another. William Burns, the CIA director, traveled to Kyiv two weeks ago to reassure his counterparts that “the U.S. commitment will continue,” as Entous and Schwirtz quote him saying. This is perfectly true, assuming Burns referred to the agency’s commitment.
More broadly, the Times piece appears amid flagging enthusiasm for the Ukraine project. And it is in this circumstance that Entous and Schwirtz went long on the benefits accruing to the CIA in consequence of its presence on the ground in Ukraine. But read these two reporters carefully: They, or whoever put their piece in its final shape, make it clear that the agency’s operations on Ukrainian soil count first and most as a contribution to Washington’s long campaign to undermine the Russian Federation. This is not about Ukrainian democracy, that figment of neoliberal propagandists. It is about Cold War II, plain and simple. It is time to reinvigorate the old Russophobia, thus—and hence all the baloney about Russians corrupting elections and so on. It is all there for a reason.
To gather these thoughts and summarize, This piece is not journalism and should not be read as such. Neither do Entous and Schwirtz serve as journalists. They are clerks of the governing class pretending to be journalists while they post notices on a bulletin board that pretends to be a newspaper.
■
Let’s dolly out to put this piece in its historical context and consider the implications of its appearance in the once-but-fallen newspaper of record. Let’s think about the early 1970s, when it first began to emerge that the CIA had compromised the American media and broadcasters.
Jack Anderson, the admirably iconoclastic columnist, lifted the lid on the agency’s infiltration of the media by way of a passing mention of a corrupted correspondent in 1973. A year later a former Los Angeles Times correspondent named Stuart Loory published the first extensive exploration of relations between the CIA and the media in the Columbia Journalism Review. Then, in 1976, the Church Committee opened its famous hearings in the Senate. It took up all sorts of agency malfeasance—assassinations, coups, illegal covert ops. Its intent was also to disrupt the agency’s misuse of American media and restore the latter to their independence and integrity.
The Church Committee is still widely remembered for getting its job done. But it never did. A year after Church produced its six-volume report, Rolling Stone published “The CIA and the Media,” Carl Bernstein’s well-known piece. Bernstein went considerably beyond the Church Committee, demonstrating that it pulled its punches rather than pull the plug on the CIA’s intrusions in the media. Faced with the prospect of forcing the CIA to sever all covert ties with the media, a senator Bernstein did not name remarked, “We just weren’t ready to take that step.”
We should read the Times’s piece on the righteousness of the CIA’s activities in Ukraine—bearing in mind the self-evident cooperation between the agency and the newspaper—with this history in mind.
America was just emerging from the disgraces of the McCarthyist period when Stuart Loory opened the door on this question, the Church Committee convened, and Carl Bernstein filled in the blanks. In and out of the profession there was disgust at the covert relationship between media and the spooks. Now look. What was then viewed as top-to-bottom objectionable is now routinized. It is “as usual.” In my read this is one consequence among many of the Russiagate years: They again plunged Americans and their mainstream media into the same paranoia that produced the corruptions of the 1950s and 1960s.
Alas, the scars of the swoon we call Russiagate are many and run deep.
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From the Archives
Neocons confess: “We did 9/11-anthrax”
By Kevin Barrett | Press TV | September 6, 2014
As the 13th anniversary of the crimes of September, 2001 approaches, the neoconservatives are shrieking from the rooftops – and effectively confessing that they were the real perpetrators of the 9/11-Anthrax false flag operation. (The neocons, you may recall, openly called for a “new Pearl Harbor” in September, 2000 – and got one exactly one year later.)
Every year at this time, the neocons orchestrate and hype a series of public relations stunts designed to magnify fears of “radical Islam” and reinforce their crumbling 9/11-Anthrax cover story. But this year’s propaganda campaign is so extreme that it represents a tacit confession: The neocons know that the truth about the 9/11-Anthrax operation is slowly closing in on them; so they are over-reacting by desperately trying to stoke the dying embers of the so-called War on Terror, in order to maintain the myth that Muslims (rather than neoconservative Zionists) attacked America in the autumn of 2001.
When a hysterical person exhibits guilty demeanor by trying too hard to blame a crime on someone else, that person is almost certainly the real perpetrator. As the neocons try much too hard to blame Islam for 9/11 and “terrorism” in general, their hysteria inadvertently reveals their own culpability. Like Shakespeare’s Lady MacBeth, the neoconservative movement has blood on its hands and “doth protest too much.” … continue
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