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Biden admin justifies Israel’s assault on Gaza hospitals with recycled Israeli ‘intelligence’

BY WYATT REED · THE GRAYZONE · NOVEMBER 15, 2023

As Israel assaults Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, the Biden administration claims that “Hamas does use hospitals” as military bases. Once again, Washington appears to be relying on dubious Israeli propaganda rather than independent analysis.

With Israeli troops storming Gaza’s Al-Shifa and Al-Rantisi hospitals, the United States and Israel are doubling down on discredited claims that Hamas has been maintaining “command centers” out of the basements of hospitals in Gaza, even after so-called evidence produced by Tel Aviv was thoroughly debunked.

“I can confirm for you that we have information that Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, used some hospitals in the Gaza Strip, including Al-Shifa, and tunnels underneath them, to conceal and to support their military operations and to hold hostages,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Tuesday.

Kirby’s claim echoed the assertion by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who maintained that “open-source reporting” shows “Hamas does use hospitals, along with a lot of other civilian facilities, for command-and-control, for storing weapons, for housing its fighters.”

On November 14, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters that US intelligence had no “boots on the ground,” nor any intelligence assets capable of independently gathering intelligence from or about Shifa. When asked if the declassified intel briefing spun out by Kirby and Sullivan arrived through Washington’s “Israeli counterparts,” she refused to answer. But she strongly suggested the intelligence dump was politically motivated.

“This is newly-downgraded information that we felt was important to get out today, because there have been a lot of questions about the hospital and how Hamas operates, and so it was important to get out there,” Singh insisted.

Hamas denies using hospitals for military purposes, and both local healthcare workers and international humanitarian organizations back that up. “I’m sick and tired of these [Israeli] claims that there are Hamas command centers [in hospitals],” Norwegian physician Dr. Mads Gilbert told Al-Jazeera on November 12. Having performed life-saving procedures for several weeks inside Shifa during Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza, Gilbert noted, “As I’ve said 100 times… we’ve never seen high-ranking Hamas people in Al-Shifa,” adding “we’ve been able to roam freely.”

But that did little to prevent Israeli troops from waging an all-out assault on the facilities. As Israeli forces surrounded Shifa hospital on Tuesday with the full-throated support of the Biden administration, arresting journalists outside the facility and violently clearing displaced people from its grounds, doctors inside were forced to move babies in intensive care from one wing of the hospital to another to save their lives. A lack of fuel had already forced many of those infants off vital oxygen supply units.

Meanwhile, Israeli forces have been unable to find any presence of hostages inside or around the hospital. As Israeli Army Radio reported on November 15, “There is no indication of the presence of abductees inside the hospital.”

Systematic Israeli misinformation campaign dismissed by US as “fog of war”

Israeli and American officials have yet to produced any proof that Hamas operates a “command center” under Al-Shifa. Video published by the Israeli military purporting to prove Hamas kept hostages in the basement of Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital, Gaza’s last remaining medical center with a pediatric cancer ward, was less than convincing.

In that video performance, top Israeli army spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari claims that what appears to be a bomb shelter for young children is actually a Hamas torture chamber, citing objects as unlikely as a baby bottle and a woman’s clothes. In one particularly memorable and widely panned moment, Hagari insisted the days of the week written in Arabic on a calendar were actually the names of the “terrorists” meant to guard captive Israelis ostensibly being held there.

The Israeli military has since attempted to downplay the deception as a “mistake in translation.”

It was hardly the first round in Tel Aviv’s fake news campaign. In the weeks since Palestinian resistance groups launched their shock assault on October 7, native Arabic speakers have taken to social media to mock the audio recordings Israel regularly publishes which purport to show Hamas members gleefully discussing carrying out war crimes.

In November alone, official Israeli social media accounts have been forced to walk about at least a half-dozen false assertions. A video showing a crying woman describing how she retrieved her son’s decomposing body from the streets of Gaza was transformed by Israel’s embassy to the US, which used fake captions to falsely claim she was blaming Hamas for the siege. When questioned, the embassy subsequently deleted the post.

The same week, Israel’s main government account on Twitter had to delete its false claim that “AP, CNN, NY Times, and Reuters had journalists embedded with Hamas terrorists on October 7th massacre” – a lie which the New York Times condemned as “reckless” and said put its journalists on the ground in Israel and Gaza “at risk.”

Days later, Israel’s official Arabic-language Twitter account deleted footage of a woman dressed in nursing scrubs who claimed to work as a nurse in Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital denounced Hamas for supposedly stealing fuel and medicine. Other doctors and nurses at the medical center reportedly told journalist Younis Tirawi: “We don’t know this woman; she has never worked here before & we’ve never seen her at the hospital.”

Social media users claimed the woman was Israeli actress Hannah Abutbul, who moonlights as a social media manager of an Israeli company named Aish International that works alongside the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Abutbul denies appearing in the video.

On November 10, Israel’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) claimed Hamas was “INSIDE the Indonesian hospital last night,” citing a video which appeared to show a firearm being displayed. An observer who pointed out that the object was actually a billy club had their reply ‘hidden’ by the official Israeli account.

Throughout the blood-spattered onslaught on the Gaza Strip, US officials have consistently taken Israeli claims at face value, even parroting Tel Aviv’s excuses when prompted. Following Biden’s now-retracted claim to have seen “confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children,” US officials continue to exhibit a remarkable willingness to side with the Israeli government and echo its talking points.

During a November 14 press briefing, a reporter asked State Department spokesman Matthew Miller about the Israeli government’s habitual spreading of “misinformation.” Miller responded by brushing off Israel’s parade of fabrications as an inevitable feature of the “fog of war.”

“In the fog of war, from thousands of miles away at the podium,” the spokesman insisted, “I have no way to independently adjudicate the various claims that are being made.”

November 16, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Russia-US relations risk ‘being severed’ – Moscow

RT | November 16, 2023

There is a real possibility that diplomatic relations between the US and Russia could be entirely severed, the Foreign Ministry in Mocow has warned. While Russia wants to avoid such a scenario, Washington’s insistence on confrontational policies makes the situation ever more likely, it said.

Relations between the two nuclear powers hit rock bottom after Russia’s years-long confrontation with Ukraine led in early 2022 to military action. The Kremlin claims that Washington is using Kiev as a proxy to effectively wage a war against Moscow.

In a statement on Thursday that marked the 90th anniversary of the restoration of diplomatic ties between the USA and the USSR, the Russian foreign ministry said that “there is a risk that these relations can be severed at any moment” again. The ministry blamed this on “irresponsible” US policies that “promote further escalation,” and on Washington’s pursuit of Moscow’s “strategic defeat.”

Having embraced “rampant Russophobia” as its guiding principle, the US has already reduced bilateral relations to “next to nothing,” the ministry in Moscow added.

According to the statement, US elites have deluded themselves into believing that US hegemony is absolute, and that no country is in a position to question it. In its refusal to recognize the “tectonic geopolitical shifts” and the reshuffle of the “global balance of power” that are underway, the US has doubled down on its policy of containment vis-a-vis China and Russia, in a futile attempt to reverse the current trends toward multipolarity, it claimed.

However, there is still hope that the powers-that-be in Washington finally take their cue from their Cold War-era predecessors and reshape their policies toward Russia “based on respect and taking each other’s interests into account,” the statement concluded.

Last month, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov pointed to an article by prominent US economist Jeffrey Sachs, which called for a new US-Russia détente, saying that such a perspective, while far from being the predominant one, was “gradually gaining momentum” in Washington.

In September, President Vladimir Putin said, however, that the Biden administration is unwilling to engage in any meaningful dialogue at this point. Responding to Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s suggestion that Moscow was not prepared to “tango” with Kiev to reach a peace agreement, the Russian head of state retorted that the US itself is notorious for not knowing “how to do this tango.”

November 16, 2023 Posted by | Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Pentagon fails annual audit

RT | November 16, 2023

The US Defense Department has flunked its sixth annual independent audit, having failed to even provide auditors with enough financial data to complete their evaluation, a report released on Wednesday revealed.

The overall results of the audit – the sixth that the Pentagon has failed since it was required to begin auditing itself in 2018 – were a “disclaimer of opinion,” the worst of three possible grades and the same rating the department received last year. The result took into account 29 component audits, of which 18 were also flunked with disclaimers of opinion. Just seven components received “unqualified opinions,” the most desirable rating, while another one received a “qualified opinion.”

Pentagon Chief Financial Officer Michael McCord attempted to frame the audit results positively, stating in a press release accompanying the report that his department was “making progress toward the goal of a clean audit.”

McCord acknowledged in a call with reporters on Wednesday that the Pentagon had not expected to pass the audit, but insisted it was moving toward resolving its balance of funds with the Treasury Department. He also touted the use of automated programs for rote tasks, stating that “bots” had saved 600,000 hours of work between the Navy and Air Force alone, and claimed the Pentagon had done a detailed inventory of its stockpiles in the course of supplying billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine.

However, the Pentagon remains the only cabinet-level department never to have received a clean financial bill of health. With $3.8 trillion in assets, $4 trillion in liabilities, and little meaningful oversight, the potential for waste and fraud is immense, according to the Government Accountability Office, which has included the department’s business systems modernization and financial management initiatives on its “High Risk List” – a list of federal programs most susceptible to fraud, abuse, mismanagement, and waste – for nearly 30 years.

The Pentagon consumes more than half of the US discretionary budget, with most in Washington wary of cutting military spending lest they run afoul of the defense industry, a source of hefty donations to both sides of the political aisle, according to OpenSecrets.org, which tracks political contributions. Defense Department staff have admitted to “misplacing” trillions of dollars in transactions in accounting discrepancies that have never been resolved.

Efforts to rein in profligate defense spending in Congress have repeatedly failed. The Audit the Pentagon Act, which would penalize any department of the military that fails its annual audit by forcing it to forfeit 1% of its budget, was introduced again in the Senate last year after the Defense Department was unable to account for more than half of its assets. However, it never made it to the floor for a vote.

November 16, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Militarism | | Leave a comment

Biden Calls Xi ‘Dictator’ Hours After Meeting Meant to Repair Relations with China

By Ian DeMartino – Sputnik – 16.11.2023

US President Joe Biden met with his Chinese Counterpart Xi Jinping on Wednesday at the Asia Pacific Economic Council (APEC) Leaders’ summit in San Francisco on Wednesday and held a press conference later in the day.

Hours after a meeting designed to restore US-Chinese relations between US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping, Biden called the Chinese leader a dictator during a press conference about the meeting.

Biden and Xi met in San Francisco during the APEC Leaders’ Summit on Wednesday. The highly anticipated meeting was hyped as a critical opportunity to restore Chinese-US relations following years of heightened tensions between the two countries.

During a press conference following the meeting, Biden touted the progress made, saying that they reached a deal to combat fentanyl precursor chemicals from China entering the United States, resuming direct communications between the world’s two largest militaries and a plan to have experts from both countries meet on the dangers of AI.

He said they also discussed Ukraine, Gaza, Taiwan and the South China Sea.

After Biden stated he would take no more questions he started walking towards the exit but then stopped and announced that he would take another question, “Who can holler the loudest?” the President asked the crowd of supporters.

The reporter, whose name and outlet were not clearly audible in the video, first asked if Biden could share the evidence he had that Hamas hid a headquarters in Al-Shifa hospital, something Biden said was a “fact” earlier in the press conference.

Biden said he was confident in the evidence he saw, but declined to provide it. “No, I can’t tell you. I won’t tell you.”

The same reporter then asked if Biden still calls Xi a “dictator” as he did earlier in the year. Biden confirmed that he still does.

“Well look, he is. I mean he is a dictator in the sense that he is a guy who runs a country that is a communist country that is based on a form of government that is totally different from ours,” Biden stated before leaving the press room.

The Chinese government has not yet responded to Biden’s latest description of the Chinese President as a “dictator.” In June, one day after Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Beijing in an effort to ease tensions between the countries, Biden harmed those discussions by calling Xi a dictator and implying that he did not know what was going on in his country.

“The reason why Xi Jinping got very upset in terms of when I shot that balloon down with two box cars full of spy equipment is he didn’t know it was there,” Biden said at a fundraiser. “That’s a great embarrassment for dictators.”

Mao Ning, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that Biden’s June comments were “extremely absurd and irresponsible, seriously contradicting the basic facts,” while stressing that China was “strongly dissatisfied.”

At the start of the press conference, Biden called the meeting he had with Xi the most productive discussion he had with the Chinese leader, noting that their relationship goes back to when they were both Vice-Presidents of their respective countries.

Biden was also asked about Gaza, saying that he is “deeply involved” in the hostage negotiations and remains “mildly hopeful.”

When asked if he gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a deadline for the conflict, Biden stressed that he had not. “I believe it’s going to stop when Hamas no longer maintains the capacity to murder and do horrific things to the Israelis.”

Outside the building where APEC is taking place, hundreds of protesters gathered in the streets, demanding a ceasefire in Gaza.

November 16, 2023 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | Leave a comment

US-based NGO confirms running Russian opposition troll farm

RT | November 16, 2023

The Free Russia Foundation (FRF), a Washington-based NGO, has confirmed running a network of paid online commenters focused on influencing Russian current affairs and the Ukrainian crisis.

The pro-opposition troll farm was exposed in an explosive report published on Wednesday by SVTV, an online outlet created by Russian libertarian activist Mikhail Svetov. The report claimed, citing a trove of documents received from ex-employees of the network, that the FRF-payrolled troll farm has collaborated with FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation), founded by jailed Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny, and has also routinely targeted critics of FBK and the government alike.

The FRF confirmed on Thursday that the troll network actually exists. The NGO claimed the investigation by SVTV was “inaccurate on a large number of points” and strongly denied any links to Navalny’s FBK. The foundation also insisted the network has been never used to discredit “any opposition politicians, journalists, projects or groups.”

“We regret that certain so-called independent outlets allow themselves (by mistake or intentionally) to spread lies and put a large number of people at possible security risks,” the foundation said in a statement.

Earlier, FBK Director Ivan Zhdanov denied the anti-corruption foundation was associated with the troll network, vowing to prove this in court, if needed.

According to the SVTV report, the troll network has been outsourced by FRF to Reforum, a Lithuania-based non-profit, which hired contractors to perform “social media management consultations.” In reality, the “consultations” involved posting remarks under select online posts, using pre-approved talking points. The commenters, receiving €10 ($10) per hour on average, have been using fake profiles with photos of persons who had abandoned or lost their accounts, the report also claimed.

Online commenters apparently work from multiple offices in Vilnius, Lithuania and Tbilisi, Georgia. They have also reportedly taken to calling themselves “elves” who fight the “Russian trolls” and “orcs.”

The FRF described its troll network as a “strategic communications center,” created solely to “convey the truth about the Kremlin’s crimes and the consequences of the bloody war waged against Ukraine to their compatriots in Russia.” The network brings together “tens and hundreds of Russian activists, media and SMM professionals, working around the clock,” as well as “analysts” to study ways of waging “information war,” the NGO stated.

November 16, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

“I Want Everybody’s Name.” Nikki Haley Ignores the First Amendment As She Demands an End to Online Anonymity

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | November 14, 2023

Presidential hopeful from the Republican party, Nikki Haley, has come out in favor of removing online anonymity, recruiting all social media account holders to verify their accounts with a government ID.

Haley said anonymous social media accounts and “misinformation” are a “national security threat.”

However, her sentiments have fueled concerns surrounding censorship and freedom of speech.

Haley, in an interview with Fox News, emphasized her demand for transparency in social media algorithms. The understanding of algorithms, she believes, would reveal the reasons behind certain content delivery on these platforms.

Haley voiced her concerns over the surge in unidentifiable accounts on social media and the alleged misinformation she says they disseminate. She affirms these as potential threats to national security that need to be addressed swiftly and decidedly. She expressed her viewpoint, maintaining that “Every person on social media should be verified by their name. It’s a national security threat.”

“I want everybody’s name,” Haley said on the Ruthless podcast.

Haley also proposed a strategy to mitigate bot activity originating from Russia, Iran, and China by implementing stringent verifications for social media accounts. She believes this measure would improve conduct on these platforms, positing that the knowledge of their posts being seen by known relations would lead to a rise in “civility.”

In oppressive regimes, anonymity is often a shield for dissidents and activists. It allows them to speak out against government abuses, organize protests, and share information without immediately revealing their identity. Mandatory ID verification would strip away this layer of protection, making it easier for authoritarian governments to identify, track, and prosecute individuals who oppose them.

Knowing that their identities could be easily uncovered, many would-be dissidents might choose to remain silent rather than risk their safety. This chilling effect on free speech would be detrimental to the fight for human rights and democracy. In countries where dissent is already dangerous, further suppression of free speech can strengthen authoritarian rule.

Authoritarian regimes often employ extensive surveillance to monitor and control their citizens. Mandatory ID verification on social media would hand these governments another tool for surveillance. This could lead to more targeted repression, as governments could more easily identify and monitor the activities of dissidents when social media platforms are compelled to hand over the information they hold on users.

The Constitutional Implications of Haley’s Demands

The First Amendment of the US Constitution protects freedom of speech and expression. Mandatory ID verification on social media could be seen as a form of censorship, limiting individuals’ ability to speak freely online. Historically, the Supreme Court has been protective of anonymous speech as a vital part of the freedom of expression, as seen in cases like Talley v. California (1960) and McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission (1995). These cases underscore the right to distribute anonymous literature and the protection of anonymous speech, respectively.

Related to the First Amendment, there’s a historical precedent for the right to anonymity in political speech. In the Federalist Papers, for example, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote under the pseudonym “Publius” to argue for the ratification of the Constitution itself. Without the right to anonymity, there would be no America as we know it.

This anonymity allowed for the free exchange of ideas without fear of retribution. Requiring ID verification could discourage individuals from expressing unpopular or dissenting opinions, thus stifling democratic discourse.

November 16, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

YouTube Boasts About Elevating “Quality” Content, Collaborating With the WHO, and Suppressing “Misinformation”

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | November 15, 2023

YouTube (Google) is yet another in a series of tech behemoths that feel the need to declare their stance on content, including its effective algorithmic manipulation, just as US primaries are ushering the country into another year of presidential elections.

Beating around that bush – Google representatives now talk about processes, procedures, and tools of censorship of health-related information that, unfortunately, can easily be “repurposed” to serve other, for example, political ends.

Much of the conversation rests on what Google wants to portray as its laurels from “the previous epidemic” – which too many people and creators see from a diametrically opposed point of view, as a dark time of nearly unbridled censorship and suppression of free speech.

A video now published by Yahoo Finance reveals not only that Google has a “chief clinical officer,” but also how that officer, Michael Howell, sees the role of this super powerful tech corporation in determining what users are likely to see, see first, or see at all on a platform like YouTube.

Howell, naturally, sees nothing wrong with this and even, to all intents and purposes, brags that YouTube is working to make sure legacy media have advantage over independent creators, and that the latter may easily face censorship.

That’s the takeaway from his words, which he chose to phrase thus: YouTube works to “lift up high quality content, even as we work to lower, and make less prominent content that isn’t accurate or helpful to users.”

The whole interview is positioned as an exploration of how “misinformation grows and spreads” supposedly in sync with the amount of content and the number of users. There is even the assertion made by Yahoo that medical sector “misinformation” is not only very present among users but also “in the broader medical community.”

While this may or may not signal continued censorship of “disfavored” medical professionals, YouTube Head of Healthcare & Public Health (yes, that’s a YouTube job title these days, too) Dr. Garth Graham shared that the platform is the first to start “labeling health information that’s coming from licensed doctors, licensed nurses, licensed healthcare professionals.”

And even after all these years of sometimes completely arbitrary censorship YouTube is supposed to be taken as a “credible source of information (users) can trust” – as it works with the National Academy of Medicine and of course, the World Health Organization (WHO) to craft its definitions, and then “raise that up” – i.e., algorithmically promote, at the expense of other content.

Graham had more curious things to say, such as that while clearly committed to censoring what (or, whatever) Google decides is “delicate (sic) and dangerous information” – people are still supposed to view it as an “open platform”!

Either Graham doesn’t know what an open platform is, or he hopes YouTube/Google users don’t.

There’s also a good amount of patronizing toward those users, as in them needing to be hand-held (by Google) pretty much all the way in order to discern information from misinformation and make appropriate decisions.

“So, you know, we’re an open platform, but the real goal is how do you balance getting good information to people at the right time (…) while making sure that we remove delicate or dangerous information.”

Asked how Google has already managed (shocker) to get the government to participate in posting videos promoting their policies and what “conversations” preceded this, the Google exec said that “the entire healthcare eco-system” was already “energized” to get their message across.

And he counted the government as well as hospitals and physicians as part of this eco-system. One of them, last but not least, is the WHO.

What we know for certain from a great number of internal documents that have emerged over the past months both from Twitter and Facebook is that these two were being “led” to do certain things by the government and its agencies.

Google’s position in the interview is suggested to be the opposite – namely, at one point Howell is asked if the company basically instructed all these national and international healthcare players on what content to make, and have “trending” (mostly artificially, one might add.)

Howell dances around this question – or statement – by saying that the (pandemic) produced a community of creators from the health sector.

But as we know, many of them also got their voices silenced, however, that is not something anyone should expect Google to address.

Instead, the talk is obviously about the “approved” community of healthcare creators.

But, says Howell: “If there’s no good content out there that people want to watch, it’s very hard to show (that) content to users.”

And, cynics would say – then you write an algorithm that shoves that content into everybody’s “recommended” videos anyway.

But, Howell decided to claim that “people responded well to YouTube’s partnerships” – where that last word means, government and international bodies and institutions.

November 15, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , | Leave a comment

Dear Lord, protect us from Our Local Epidemiologist

She knows not what she’s doing and she and her ilk are killing and harming too many people. Amen.

Your Local Epidemiologist at one of her Disinformation Galas. She doesn’t look too traumatized to me.
BY BILL RICE, JR. | NOVEMBER 15, 2023

America’s local epidemiologist is a lady named Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, who publishes the most popular and lucrative “Science” newsletter on Substack. The Substack is called Your Local Epidemiologist.

Since she is my local epidemiologist and has more than 211,000 subscribers (more than 20,000 paid), I sometimes read Dr. Jetelina’s dispatches to see what I shouldn’t think.

Her latest dispatch informed me our local epidemiologist is extremely concerned about the rise in vaccine hesitancy. But what really frightens her is the continued prevalence of misinformation and disinformation and the fact fewer people seem to be trusting our trusted public institutions and experts like herself.

A few excerpts from recent newsletters should give readers a sense of why this particular influencer is terrified for her own safety and the safety of all the other scientists she argues are being “harassed” for speaking “the truth.” As I’m prone to do, I’ll offer a few of my own editorial comments on her editorial comments.

***

In her most recent article, the headline expresses Dr. Jetelina’s concern.

Drop in routine vaccinations

Driven by an increase in vaccine exemptions and misinformation.

The lede paragraph (emphasis added):

“CDC released the latest vaccine exemptions and routine vaccination rates data for last school year. This, coupled with new data on growing acceptance of vaccine misinformation, shows a slow, painful bleed.”

Re-stated: Despite 46 months of highly-coordinated, non-stop, ultra-expensive efforts to defeat vaccine hesitancy, it turns out too many members of the the public still have a “growing acceptance of vaccine misinformation.” If this was not the case, Our Local Epidemiologist (OLE) wouldn’t be so alarmed and wouldn’t have written all these stories.

OLE asks, “What is indirectly causing a decline in vaccinations?” and then answers her own question:

“Misinformation is increasing. Our information landscape has dramatically changed—false news spreads 6 times faster than the truth on social media, and 70% of Americans get health news on social media. Public health has not kept up.”

One might ask who gets to determine “the truth?” The answer, of course, would be: People like Our Local Epidemiologist.

By far, the most massive “social media” platform is Facebook … so I guess Facebook is letting vaccine “false information” spread to its one billion users.

This strikes me as a giant fib as I personally know Facebook has suspended my account at least a half dozen times and, when my account wasn’t suspended, any post I made about a Covid topic was “flagged” or seen by zero people brave enough to hit my post with a “like.”

It would be interesting information to learn how many millions of people have been temporarily or permanently banned or shadow-banned by Facebook’s algorithms, Artificial Intelligence and the company’s more than 15,000 “content moderators.” 

Whatever this number, it’s not nearly large enough for America’s terrified and frustrated local epidemiologist.

Get Vaccinated or Else …

More specifically, OLE says the lack of sufficient censorship is “is directly impacting behaviors like getting vaccinated.”

I now know the answer to just about every public health issue for OLE is more vaccines and more people getting more of these vaccines.

Like the devil, OLE mixes the truth with lies. The first five words of this sentence convey an obvious truth:

“Loss of trust in institutions also drives misinformation and behaviors,” she writes, adding, “This … will surely have dire consequences to communities.”

So what really bothers OLE is that more people have “lost trust in institutions.”

In the thousands of words she’s written about the plagues of misinformation and disinformation, she doesn’t tell us why so many people might have lost faith in their now non-trusted institutions …. except, the only possible answer (for her) … the public has been getting “disinformation” from social media.

It took Our Local Epidemiologist years to get her credentials to become OLE, but one could condense the operative curriculum message to one sentence: “Everyone get your dad-blasted vaccines!”

I think I’ve got it. Not enough censorship = too much disinformation, which leads to too much “vaccine hesitancy” which = “dire consequences” – which means everyone is going to die … from Covid, the flu, RSV and the measles.

***

In a linked article from June 27, 2023, OLE agues that not only are communities going to be in dire straits due to vaccine hesitancy, the nation’s narrative-spouting scientists are also increasingly coming under attack.

The headline gives us OLE’s “truth” …

‘Harassment is out of control’

In this article, OLE reports that she feels increasingly threatened and gives us the example of another scientist, Peter Hotez, who “experienced pile-ons, stalking, and bullying after events unfolded on Twitter. So much so that law enforcement got involved. A complete nightmare.”

Some readers will remember Hotez as the pediatrician/scientist who was afraid to debate Robert Kennedy, Jr. on Joe Rogan’s podcast show.

As far as I can tell, nobody has physically attacked Hotez and his family members are still alive. This ensured that the “survival rate” (from mob violence) of narrative-spouting epidemiologists remains 100 percent.

Whatever happened to the Hotez family … “… He’s not alone. These nightmares are now a common occurrence for scientists and physicians in public health. Both online and offline. For vaccines. For gun violence. For reproductive health. And apparently for wildfires now, too.”

“It’s gotten out of control, which becomes an individual risk as well as a risk to the communities we serve.”

According to this sub headline ….

This is a huge problem

Vaccine deaths, injuries and lockdowns that caused suicides and millions of people to lose their jobs was NOT even an itty-bitty problem … but all these nightmarish non-attacks on well-paid, heroic scientists and doctors are a “huge problem.”

I didn’t know any of this, but I do now.

In her article on terrorized scientists, OLE doesn’t mention whether any “pro-vaxxers” have threatened the life of, say, Robert Kennedy, Jr.. Or if any of the hundreds of thousands of scientists, doctors and nurses who questioned the necessity of Covid vaccines have perhaps suffered some measure of unpleasantness due to their views.

Per Our Local Epidemiologist, it’s only “anti-vaxxers” who bully, smear and attack others.

A political scientist might also ask who actually possesses the power to fire large numbers of people or who has the power to discriminate against unpopular minorities who should not be allowed to use a water fountain … attend a play or travel outside of the country.

OLE informs us with another sub-headline:

‘Women scientists are particularly at risk’

OLE even published an anonymous note someone left her.

I hate to suggest I might be tougher than Our Local Epidemiologist, but if someone left me a note like this I don’t think I’d be traumatized the rest of my life … or even for two seconds.

Speaking for all the terrorized scientists, OLE writes:

“… too often scientists assume the consequences alone. This takes a significant personal toll.”

Which makes me wonder what terrible consequences people like her have been forced bear alone or what this “significant toll” really was or is.

In the case of OLE, before Covid, she was an obscure epidemiologist nobody had heard of. Today, she is a millionaire Substack author who also works for the CDC and the White House.

As she informed us in another article, Dr. Jetelina has been asked to speak at “quite a few” conferences:

“Last week I was invited to the Nobel Prize Summit on information integrity at the National Academy of Science. I’ve attended quite a few of these types of events lately—discussions on mis- and disinformation’s impact on truth, trust, and hope.”

So one toll on her is that she’s been invited to participate at the “Nobel Prize Summit on information integrity at the National Academy of Science” plus a lot of other swanky Disinformation Galas.

I’m sure she was heckled relentlessly by her colleagues and was constantly looking over her shoulder in case some bellboy slipped her a note saying he’s not impressed by her brand of epidemiology.

I include this excerpt to illustrate it’s not just OLE who’s worried about mis- and disinformation – it’s everyone who’s attending all these summits.

My main take-away from the whining of OLE is that her colleagues (millions of them) mean business about stopping this mis- and disinformation.

If you haven’t picked up on her views yet, here they are in another sub-headline:

Mis/disinformation is a major problem.

This sentence must be what really irks our local epidemiologist:

“Truth is now debatable.”

Here, I can only assume that her debating point is that the truth should NOT be “debatable.”

However, I bet she’d get a debate on this point from Socrates, a man who was put to death for asking politically-incorrect questions.

“No questioning allowed” equals no debate, which actually equals no Scientific Method – which is what Our Local Epidemiologist really espouses.

These sentences dropped my jaw:

“The major challenge in scientific communication is that the truth is now networked by peers. Because of this, disinformation and misinformation are eroding public trust in science, becoming a threat to the planet, and costing lives.”

(Aside: The same day I read several articles by OLE, I listened to this classic rift from the late great George Carlin, who told us years ago our planet was one tough sucker and was going to be just fine – even if too many people used plastic or drive in gas-powered cars.)

MORE worry-mongering from OLE …

“But it goes beyond a pandemic—climate change, routine vaccinations, gun violence, reproductive health. Everyone—the private sector, government, researchers, and communities nationally and internationally—is rightfully worried.”

FWIW, this is brazen misinformation.  Everyone is NOT “worried.” For example, I’m not.  In fact, for hundreds of millions of people, the things that worry Our Local Epidemiologist have never caused us to lose one wink of sleep.

This, in fact, is what really worries OLE and her colleagues at the Disinformation Junkets. Not enough people are worried about the things she says we should be worried about.

Not only do we no longer trust our institutions – which have of been spectacularly wrong on everything Covid-related – we don’t trust people like her either.

In fact, what worries us is that people like her have so much power and influence over our lives.

Not only this, she wants more control and power. And since she is our local epidemiologist and consults with the CDC and White House, she’s probably going to get what she wants.

Let me close with a headline that gives us OLE’s professional diagnosis. When it comes to the plague of disinformation and misinformation, What the world has is …

Too much talk. Too little action.

Writes OLE:

“I’m getting increasingly frustrated with inaction.”

“Institutions are needed for the long-term solution:

  • Governments. Congressional courage is needed. In the U.S., other government entities have a role, too: the National Institute of Health (train scientists to communicate and translate; prioritize funding more research in this space), the FDA and CDC … Department of Defense (create a robust, well-funded surveillance system to understand where, how, and what health misinformation is circulating in real-time) …. State governments have a role with medical boards and local action, too.
  • Private industry needs to get their act together: Is this truly the future we want? The lowest hanging fruit is transparency: content moderation, algorithm impacts, data processing, and integrity policies …”

OLE is not subtle; I get her point …

It’s not like Our Local Epidemiologist is camouflaging what she wants. What OLE really wants is for Big Brother to quit pussy-footing around and scare the hell out of many more people, create a lot more “surveillance systems” and use our state medical boards to repeal the licenses of more “science deniers.”

In conclusion, Our Local Epidemiologist is a menace; she’s the worst nightmare for anyone who still values free speech, scientific debate and prefers a “public health” system that’s not killing and maiming so many members of the public.

November 15, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Elon Musk’s Comments On Mechanical Ventilation Betrayed A Stunning Amount of Ignorance – Part 1

BY PIERRE KORY, MD, MPA | NOVEMBER 15, 2023

Recently, Elon Musk was interviewed by Joe Rogan where he shared that, early in Covid, he had access to front-line data in China and “talked to doctors from Wuhan,” implying that if we had known what he knew, our use of mechanical ventilation would have been different. That is almost certainly true but he then went on to make several inaccurate statements which I think further fuel widespread misunderstanding and overestimation of the actual negative impacts of mechanical ventilation use during Covid in the U.S.

Now, I find it shocking that I might be putting myself in a position to defend the U.S. Covid response as that would be an outrageous endeavor, however, I take issue with his subsequent statements on mechanical ventilation use as they were almost completely wrong (almost).

I hate misinformation (inaccurate /false information) about Covid and I believe Elon trafficked in the same. I do not believe he did so out of willful, malevolent intent as that would be disinformation (what the now corporate controlled U.S. government regime does to us). His comments were instead borne of a stunning amount of ignorance regarding the real risks of mechanical ventilation and exactly how mechanical ventilation was misused (and not misused) both in China and in the U.S. during that first wave. So, here is my attempt to “set the record straight.”

ELON: “We had 20,000 employees in China and during the first wave we had nobody die and nobody get ill.”

This is both interesting and unsurprising and almost certainly accurate. It brings back harsh memories of all the fear porn that was being blasted out by the world’s media with cherry-picked images of scenes from the hardest hit areas like Wuhan, Lombardy, New York, Seattle etc. They did this while the vast majority of urban areas in the country and around the world did not experience such tidal waves of people in acute respiratory failure.

Although news media trying to get as many eyeballs glued to their shows is not new (i.e. “if it bleeds it leads”) in early Covid, it soon became apparent to many (in my world at least) that they also did so to instill widespread fear to increase compliance with what were soon to be draconian violations of civil liberty, bodily autonomy, informed consent, and free speech. Those violations were deemed necessary in their plight to coerce the entire U.S. population to be vaccinated. This is probably a good time to re-read the anonymous poem I posted last year titled “Message to the Unvaccinated.” Link here:

However, on this point of instilling the greatest amount of fear possible, a recent post by A Midwestern Doctor quoted Scott Atlas, a completely sane member of the White House’s insane Coronavirus Task Force:

As often happened, Fauci spoke up to support Dr. Birx’s concerns, saying people need to be warned even more strongly about the dangers of the virus spreading, about wearing masks and distancing. He claimed Americans didn’t think the virus was serious, and that was the reason cases spread. I was honestly surprised. I thought people were already panic-stricken. Normal life had virtually ceased to exist, even eliminating serious medical care or last visits with dying family. Meanwhile the media were on-message 24/7, instructing the public about masks and social distancing; there were signs and announcements demanding masks and diagrams about distancing everywhere; healthy young people were outside riding bicycles or driving their cars alone, wearing masks. Indeed, surveys showed that most adults perceived grossly exaggerated risks, particularly but not only younger people; and yes, a high percentage were obeying the edicts, distancing and wearing masks, according to virtually every published survey.

I challenged him to clarify his point, because I couldn’t believe my ears. “So you think people aren’t frightened enough?”

He [Fauci] said, “Yes, they need to be more afraid.”

To me, this was another moment of Kafkaesque absurdity. I replied, “I totally disagree. People are paralyzed with fear. Fear is one of the main problems at this point.” Inside, I was also shocked at his thought process, as such an influential face of the pandemic. Instilling fear in the public is absolutely counter to what a leader in public health should do. To me, it is frankly immoral, although I kept that to myself.”

Note: Fauci also fear-mongered for his own benefit throughout the AIDS crisis (which amongst other things created significant stigmatization towards the gay community as Fauci asserted without evidence that HIV might be transmitted without physical contact).

ELON: I called doctors in Wuhan and asked “what are some of the biggest mistakes you made in the first wave” and they said “we put far too many people on mechanical ventilators.”

My motivation for writing this post is to try to correct (but not completely refute) the now widespread, strong belief that it was the “ventilators” that killed people and that if we did not use mechanical ventilators, many lives would have been saved. Or, similarly, “if they hadn’t put my (wife/mother/father etc) on a ventilator, they would be alive today.”

I largely and strongly disagree with the latter assessment (but not completely). The reason for my disagreement is that, based on my experiences running Covid ICU’s at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, Greenville Memorial Hospital in South Carolina, St. Lukes Medical Center in Milwaukee, and Aspirus Wausau in Central Wisconsin, it wasn’t the vents that killed people. It was the lack of effective treatments being adopted.

Initially, it was the lack of any treatment (i.e. “supportive care only” approaches, particularly at UW) that led to widespread death after what was often weeks on a ventilator and later it morphed into sub-optimal, insufficiently aggressive, sometimes harmful, monolithic treatments like Remdesivir and a modest dose of corticosteroids instead of a broad, multi-component, safe, synergistic combination of therapies such as the MATH+ protocol that FLCCC members were using and recommending for hospital patients (forgive me for I am biased). However, Elon then said the following regarding mechanical ventilation:

“This is what is exactly damaging the lungs it is not Covid. The treatment, the cure is worse than the disease.”

“People yelled at me saying I am not a doctor but I said yeah but I do make spaceships with life support systems, what do you do?”

Well, Elon, although I don’t build spaceships, I actually used and taught mechanical ventilation to keep people alive for a living and did so throughout most of Covid. Further, mechanical ventilation was a deep interest if not passion of mine for almost 20 years prior.

The act of of sedating and paralyzing someone to place an endotracheal tube through their vocal cords and into their trachea is called “intubation” and is required to transition someone to support by an invasive mechanical ventilator. What I witnessed in the first wave (but not later waves) was doctors favoring “early intubation/mechanical ventilation” out of fear that the patient would suddenly crash (intubating a “crashing” patient is a higher risk procedure). And yes, another subtle, but not overt motivation, very early on, was to “protect” staff from exhaled breath due to fear of heated high flow nasal cannulas (this is an intermediate support device often used to avoid intubation) – more on this issue/aspect in Part 3 which is already available here).

Now, although it is true that each extra day on a ventilator can worsen prognosis, the harms are much more from prolonged, poorly responsive illness requiring prolonged sedation and immobility which then cause confusion/delirium and disuse atrophy of the muscles. So for him to say it is the ventilators which damage the lungs more than Covid is completely off – know that patients with neurological injuries affecting respiration can be kept alive safely on ventilators for weeks to months to years to decades without significant “damage” accumulating to the lungs.

Admittedly, the situation of someone with a lung injury is different in that inappropriate ventilator settings can certainly further damage the lungs, but with modern ventilator techniques such as low tidal volumes, daily spontaneous breathing trials, use of appropriate positive-end expiratory pressure, highly responsive inhalation triggers etc, the harms of mechanical ventilation to the lungs are generally minimal.

To wit, I have successfully extubated thousands of patients in my career despite devastating injuries to their lungs requiring prolonged periods on the ventilator, even in situations where the ventilator was particularly difficult to set in order to achieve the holy grail of mechanical ventilation, that of “patient-ventilator synchrony.” All I am saying is that his comment on the harms of mechanical ventilation was grossly overstated to an un-credible degree. He then went further:

“The treatment is worse than the disease.”

Ugh. Mechanical ventilation is not and has never been a treatment, it is simply a means to support a patient’s breathing to keep them alive while you administer therapies (more on this below) to reverse the underlying insult or infection that landed them on the ventilator in the first place – no-one, and I mean no-one in medicine has ever viewed the ventilator as a treatment or cure for anything.

However, the initial practice of “early intubation” caused unmanageable and chaotic situations in many hospitals by increasing demand for ICU rooms and ventilators, but I will argue below that this situation was almost completely fueled by the lack of effective treatments being adopted.

This is a key distinction, i.e the harm of ineffectively or not treating the disease far, far outweighed the harms of intubating too early. Further, “early” intubations largely occurred during the first wave, and as physicians became more familiar with the disease they began to defer intubation to much more advanced degrees of respiratory failure and hypoxemia (obviously there were exceptions to this, but, as I mentioned above, I travelled and worked fairly widely, and in each center I found that the ICU docs quickly learned to defer intubation to as late as possible in Covid induced hypoxemic respiratory failure. This issue is what I will explore in further detail in Part 2.

I instead maintain that the absurdly high death rates in many hospitals in the U.S and across the world in the early waves of Covid was due to an over-reliance on “supportive care only” approaches (i.e. limiting interventions to just supplemental oxygen, fluids, nutrition, fever suppressants, mechanical ventilation). Rarely were effective treatments targeting the underlying pathophysiology being offerred at most academic medical centers based on the widespread belief that patients were dying of a viral pneumonia and that no effective anti-viral therapies existed.

What was not being sufficiently taught or disseminated at that time is that Covid-19 disease had multiple phases, i.e. an early “viral replicative phase” marked by typical viral syndrome symptoms such as cough, fever, congestion, sore throat, fatigue etc with a minority of those patients then going on to develop the later “hyper-inflammatory phase” involving the lungs. The FLCCC tried very hard to alert “the system” to the fact that early studies found no live, culturable virus in patient secretions beyond Day 6 (cue the folks who state there is no virus and/or they don’t exist. To those, all I can offer is this excellent post addressing the issue by A Midwestern Doctor).

Thus, after about Day 6, a minority of Covid-19 patients began to develop morphed a hyper-inflammatory, pulmonary phase due largely to activated macrophages (an immune cell) as well as micro-clumping or clotting of blood cells and proteins. In this latter phase, anti-inflammatory or immunosuppressive therapies combined with anti-coagulants were required (this is why the FLCCC recommended corticosteroids and blood thinners in hospital patients from the outset and were observing excellent results with early use).

To wit, my first paper on Covid (and the one I am most proud of) was initially drafted in April of 2020. I argued then that Covid-19 pulmonary disease was not a viral pneumonia but instead an “organizing pneumonia” (a form of lung injury with many causes (viruses are only one of them) but whose mainstay of therapy is corticosteroids).

From the abstract:

I arrived at that hypothesis after a couple of weeks of being mystified by the repeated presentations of Covid patients with what was called at the time, “happy hypoxia”, i.e. the state of requiring high amounts of supplemental oxygen yet without exhibiting a significant increase in the work of breathing.

I knew I had seen “happy hypoxia” on a couple of occasions in my career but could not remember what was wrong with those patients until one morning during a shower before an ICU shift in New York City it hit me – “these patients remind me of patients with organizing pneumonia!” As soon as I got to work, before my shift, I called Dr. Jeff Kanne at the University of Wisconsin, one of the top chest radiologists in the world and an expert on organizing pneumonia.

“Jeff, what would you say if I told you that I think that all of these Covid patients are suffering from organizing pneumonia?” I asked. His answer? “Of course they are. We wrote this up in March in the journal Radiology after an expert panel that I chaired completed our review of all the CT scans from Wuhan.” They had actually written in their expert report that “the most common reported CT findings in Covid-19 patients are typical of an organizing pneumonia pattern of lung injury.”

“Clinicians don’t read radiology journals,” I shouted into the phone. “We need to publish this in a clinical medical journal! Like NOW!” We quickly agreed that we would write it up together.

I went home after my ICU shift and started working furiously. The paper included radiographic, pathologic, and clinical evidence to try to prove that the pulmonary phase of Covid-19 was an organizing pneumonia and that the first line of therapy for this condition was (wait for it)… corticosteroids.

Note that my paper above was not published until September 2020 due to 5 journals rejecting it, with one journal rejecting it because a peer-reviewer said “this cannot be published until a randomized controlled trial of corticosteroids is conducted.” Welcome to my life.

The problem we in the FLCCC had with getting the world to use corticosteroids in the hospital phase were many and will be explored in Part 2 (already available).

November 15, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Mayo Clinic is Sued For Suspending Doctor Over Online Posts on Covid and Transgenderism

By Ben Squires | Reclaim The Net | November 15, 2023

Dr. Michael Joyner, backed by the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA), has initiated a lawsuit against the Mayo Clinic College, including its president and board chair. The suit arises from disciplinary actions taken against Joyner following his public comments on topics within his field of expertise. Specifically, the controversy revolves around statements he made to the New York Times about gender differences in athletic performance and to CNN regarding the use of convalescent plasma in COVID-19 treatment. The Mayo Clinic’s response, which involved suspension, salary review implications, and strict media interview oversight, is at the heart of this legal challenge.

We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.

Lucas Morel, chair of the AFA’s academic committee, emphasized the lawsuit’s significance, asserting that “academic freedom is a key guarantor of scientific integrity.”

Morel expects the case to establish a precedent for the freedom of scientists and academics to express their professional opinions without undue influence from financial or political interests. The AFA, which previously supported Joyner during his disciplinary hearings, is now financing this lawsuit, highlighting the organization’s commitment to protecting academic freedom.

Joyner’s legal action, filed with the State of Minnesota’s Third Judicial District, seeks compensation for the damages incurred from the disciplinary measures. These included a week-long unpaid suspension, denial of salary increase, and a potential termination threat, all of which have reportedly harmed Joyner’s finances and professional reputation. The lawsuit, handled by Allen Harris Law, was filed after allowing the defendants to review and respond, which they declined.

November 15, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

US public support for Israel shrinks: Poll

The Cradle | November 15, 2023

Public support in the US for Israel’s ongoing war in the Gaza Strip has dwindled significantly, with only a third of US citizens saying Washington should continue to support Tel Aviv, according to a new poll carried out by Reuters. 

“Most [US citizens] think Israel should call a ceasefire to a conflict that has ballooned into a humanitarian crisis,” the outlet writes. 

According to the poll – which closed on 14 November – 32 percent of respondents said Washington should support Israel in the war with Gaza. This was a marked drop from 41 percent who said the US should support Israel in a Reuters poll conducted in mid-October. 

The poll indicates that those who believe “the US should be a neutral mediator” rose to 39 percent from 27 percent last month. 

“Four percent of respondents in the poll said the US should support Palestinians and 15 percent said the US shouldn’t be involved at all, both similar readings to a month ago.” 

Western countries have witnessed a significant shift in public opinion recently, as evidenced by massive protests that have taken place across many cities. 

In the US, tens of thousands have flocked to the streets of numerous cities, including Washington DC, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and many others. Those marching rejected Israel’s disproportionate response to the 7 October operation by the Gaza resistance and demanded an immediate ceasefire.

On 11 November, around 300,000 people marched through central London, demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

The brutality of Israel’s response to Operation Al-Aqsa Flood has shocked the world. The killing of over 11,300 – more than half of which are women and children – as well as open calls by Israel for ethnic cleansing and mass displacement, have been labeled a genocide by numerous international organizations and UN experts.

Condemnation of Israel’s actions is also growing within the US government. 

An internal State Department dissent memo alleges that Israel is committing “war crimes” in Gaza and that President Biden is “spreading disinformation” and showing “disregard for Palestinian lives,” according to a copy of the memo obtained by Axios. 

The five-page memo was transmitted to the State Department’s policy office on 3 November. It was signed by 100 State Department and USAID employees urging senior US officials to reassess their policy toward Israel and demand a ceasefire in Gaza. 

November 15, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment

Al-Shifa Hospital under Israeli control, turned into center for ‘detention and torture’

The Cradle | November 15, 2023

Gaza’s largest medical complex, Al-Shifa Hospital, fell under the control of the Israeli army on 15 November following an overnight raid that saw dozens of troops storm the hospital based on Israeli and US intelligence that alleged the complex houses a “Hamas command center.”

“Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) use some hospitals in the Gaza Strip, including Al-Shifa and tunnels underneath them, to conceal and to support their military operations and to hold hostages,” US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Tuesday night, in comments that preceded the brutal raid on the besieged medical complex.

Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh made similar comments before the raid, claiming that Washington obtained “newly declassified intelligence” showing Gaza resistance factions use hospitals as a “way to conceal and support their military operations and hold hostages.”

Neither US official provided evidence to back their claims, citing simply a “variety” of intelligence sourcing to back up the assertion.

“Since last night, it’s been a nightmare that cannot be imagined […] Before storming the compound, they targeted all the floors, the generators, the communications unit, and now we can have no contact with the outside world,” Palestinian journalist Jihad Abu Shanab, who is inside the Al-Shifa compound, told Al-Jazeera on Wednesday morning.

“[The Israelis] have told everyone to go up a floor, then go to a lower floor for investigation, and then they are forced to be interrogated, and they have seen a lot of humiliation,” he added.

The Qatari news agency also cites sources saying “about 30 people [were] taken outside of the building, stripped of their clothes. They are in the courtyard of the hospital, blindfolded, surrounded by three tanks. There is one tank right at the front of the emergency department targeting any moving object inside these buildings.”

Sources add that the Israeli tanks surrounding the hospital “blew up a warehouse of medicines and medical devices.”

According to a statement by the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, Israel has turned Al-Shifa Hospital into a center for “detention and torture.” The monitor also expressed concerns that patients, medical staff, and refugees will be executed as sporadic gunfire continues inside the complex.

“Israeli allegations about the use of the Al-Shifa Medical Complex for military purposes do not need all these long hours of searching and raiding. Therefore, there are concerns that the army may be creating an artificial scene for a new play,” Rami Abdu, the Chairman of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, said on Wednesday.

Staff inside the hospital report that the Israeli army has continued its attacks against the hospital, bombing several sections while live fire can be heard inside the complex.

“Israeli drones are shooting anything moving inside the hospital,” the head of the orthopedics department told Al-Alam Radio.

Videos shared online showed medical staff and volunteers transferring babies from one ward in Al-Shifa to another to protect them from the Israeli raid.

According to Israeli media, the invading troops discovered “weapons and Hamas assets” inside the hospital. Nonetheless, Tel Aviv claims there is “no indication” of Israeli captives held inside the complex, as they previously claimed.

“We hold the occupation [Israel] and President Biden wholly responsible for the assault on Al-Shifa medical complex,” Hamas said in a statement early on Wednesday.

“The adoption by the White House and the Pentagon of the occupation’s false claim that the resistance is using Al-Shifa medical complex for military ends has given the green light to the occupation to commit more massacres against civilians,” the statement added.

November 15, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , | Leave a comment

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