Family of 24-Year-Old Who Died From COVID Vaccine Sues DOD in ‘Groundbreaking Case’
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 31, 2023
The family of a 24-year-old man who died from complications of COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis today filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), which oversaw the development and distribution of the drug under Operation Warp Speed.
Ray Flores, the attorney representing the estate of George Watts Jr. filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the DOD and Lloyd Austin III in his official capacity as defense secretary.
The lawsuit alleges the DOD engaged in “willful misconduct” by continuing to exclusively allow distribution of the stockpiled version of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine that had been authorized for emergency use even after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted full approval to a different vaccine, Comirnaty.
According to the complaint, the DOD “capitalized on a quintessential ‘bait and switch’ fraud,” using the fact that Comirnaty was FDA-approved to bolster its claims that the vaccine authorized for emergency use was “safe and effective,” in a move that intentionally misled millions of Americans.
The DOD did this despite being fully aware that drugs granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) cannot legally be marketed as “safe and effective” because the FDA standard for EUA is only that drugs “may be effective.”
That means the DOD intentionally, without justification and with disregard for the risks, misrepresented an experimental vaccine as “safe and effective” when it could not legally use that terminology, the lawsuit states.
As a result, the lawsuit alleges, George Watts Jr. was misled into taking the investigational vaccine and he died as a result.
Attorney Michael Baum told The Defender in an email:
“This groundbreaking case filed by George Watts Jr.’s surviving family may provide a path for other Covid vaccine-injured individuals to seek recovery for their injuries.
“The Watts family’s complaint shines a light on the willful steps the Department of Defense took that led to Mr. Watts’ Pfizer-vaccine-induced death from myocarditis. Most people are unaware of the Department of Defense’s directing the development and distribution of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccine …
“The DOD’s actions led to Mr. Watts’ improper injection with the unapproved vaccine. The Watts family’s case provides an opportunity for a wider public awareness of how the Covid vaccine sausage got made under DOD’s irresponsible guidance and the tragic results of that conduct for Mr. Watts and unfortunately much of the American public.”
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) is funding the lawsuit.
Watts waited for a vaccine he thought was ‘safe and effective’
Watts was a student at Corning Community College in Corning, New York, when in the summer of 2021, the school mandated the COVID-19 vaccine for all students attending fall classes. The mandate was part of the mandate at the State University of New York (SUNY), a network of 64 colleges and universities.
Watts waited to get vaccinated until the FDA “approved” the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine and got his first dose at Guthrie Robert Packer Hospital in Pennsylvania on Aug. 27, 2021. He was administered the EUA Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
The FDA approved the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine on Aug. 23, 2021, but the DOD didn’t make it available.
Despite experiencing side effects from the first dose, Watts understood the vaccine to be “safe and effective,” so he took a second dose at the same location on Sept. 17, 2021.
Following the second dose, Watts experienced more severe side effects, including numbness in his extremities, difficulty grasping and holding objects, a sinus infection, cough and sensitivity to light. He visited the ER at the Guthrie hospital on Oct. 12, 2021, also complaining of a lump on the left side of his neck.
The hospital diagnosed him with sinusitis and prescribed an antibiotic. Watts returned to the ER on October 19, 2021, concerned that he was not improving.
After that, his health continued to decline.
On Oct. 27, 2021, at home with his mother, Watts began coughing up blood and then became unresponsive. His mother called 911 and administered CPR.
Watts was taken to the ER where he was found to be in cardiac arrest and subsequently died. He had no previous medical history that could explain his sudden death. Watts also tested negative for COVID-19 in a post-mortem test.
The medical examiner ruled his cause of death to be “complications of COVID-19 vaccine-related myocarditis.” His death certificate also listed COVID-19 vaccine-related myocarditis as the sole immediate cause of death.
An independent physician, Dr. Sanjay Verma, also attested the vaccine was the proximate cause of death as alleged in the complaint.
PREP Act protects vaccine producers, not vaccine-injured people
Watts’ family first sought compensation for his death under the Health Resources & Services Administration’s Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP).
The CICP was established under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act, which protects “covered persons” — such as pharmaceutical companies, or the DOD in this case — from liability for injuries sustained from “countermeasures,” such as vaccines and medications, administered during a public health emergency.
The only exception to PREP Act immunity is if a countermeasure-related injury is caused by “willful misconduct” by a covered person or entity.
Since the start of the pandemic, people claiming injuries related to COVID-19 vaccines and other countermeasures submitted 11,686 requests for compensation.
Of those, only 23 have been declared eligible for compensation. Most of those are undergoing a “medical benefits review” to determine payment. Since last month, when the CICP started making payments to COVID-19 vaccine-injured people, it has made four payments — amounting to a total of $8,592.52. Three of the claims were for myocarditis.
Watts’ family filed a request for benefits with the CICP in August 2022. They received no determination from the CICP within the 240-day period in which the CICP is supposed to respond to complaints.
As a result, to seek compensation for the loss of Watts’ life, his family is suing the DOD.
The DOD, Operation Warp Speed and the COVID vaccines
In January 2020, then-Health Secretary Alex M. Azar of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declared a public health emergency for COVID-19.
The emergency declaration allowed the health secretary to make a PREP Act declaration so the FDA could issue an EUA for an unapproved vaccine or other “countermeasure” to address the emergency if the following emergency circumstances exist:
“(1) the existence of a serious or life-threatening disease; (2) a product ‘may be effective’ in treating or preventing it; (3) there is ‘no adequate, approved, and available alternative to the product for diagnosing, preventing or treating such disease or condition;’ (4) a risk-benefit analysis that measures both the known and potential benefits of the product against the known and potential risks of the product is positive; and (5) that the patient’s option to accept or decline the product is protected through informed consent.”
On May 15, 2020, the Trump White House announced Operation Warp Speed — a partnership between the White House and the DOD to accelerate the development, production and distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine.
Two months later, the DOD signed a contract with Pfizer to manufacture hundreds of millions of doses of its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, guaranteeing that any vaccine produced under the contract would be protected under the PREP Act and therefore not subject to liability.
The FDA issued an EUA for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine on Dec. 11, 2020, and Army Gen. Gustave F. Perna, Operation Warp Speed chief operating officer, announced the vaccine would be rapidly distributed across the country.
Drugs fully approved by the FDA must be found to be “safe, pure, and potent,” but EUA drugs are held to a lower standard — they are required only to demonstrate that they “may be effective,” according to the FDA.
But Perna and his boss, Austin III, conveyed the message that the EUA vaccines were “safe and effective,” and urged the healthcare community to do the same, in order to “counter widespread misinformation” about the vaccines, the lawsuit alleges.
After the FDA approved the Comirnaty vaccine, the DOD did not initiate its production and distribution but instead continued to distribute existing Pfizer EUA products.
As a result, although Watts waited for the COVID-19 vaccine to be FDA-approved, he still received a version of the vaccine that had not been FDA-approved as “safe and effective.”
According to the lawsuit, the DOD blurred the line between the two legally distinct vaccines, promoting the idea that the COVID-19 vaccine was FDA-approved and therefore “safe and effective” — while administering the vaccine that was only “authorized,” and therefore not legally allowed to be described as “safe.”
The DOD knowingly blurred this line, the lawsuit alleges, because it had already been found liable for violating informed consent and of imposing an experimental vaccine. In the 2004 case of Doe v. Rumsfeld, et al., a federal court ruled the DOD could not mandate the EUA anthrax vaccine for service members because forcing them to take an experimental vaccine violated their right to informed consent.
That ruling stated that absent informed consent or a presidential waiver, “The United States cannot demand that members of the armed forces also serve as guinea pigs for experimental drugs.”
The current lawsuit further alleges that the DOD knowingly deceived Watts and other Americans for the purpose of mass human experimentation, which violates protections provided by the Nuremberg Code.
According to the complaint, the DOD committed “willful misconduct,” having “deliberately misled Mr. Watts and the public at large by blurring the critical distinction between EUA and fully licensed vaccines,” which would nullify the protections afforded the DOD under the PREP Act.
It concludes that Watts died because he believed he was receiving safe and effective vaccines, but in fact “received the deadly ones.”
The lawsuit seeks “general, special, compensatory and punitive damages.”
Commenting on the significance of the case, Kim Mack Rosenberg, acting outside general counsel for CHD, told The Defender :
“The PREP Act purports to provide an extraordinary liability shield to the government, manufacturers, distributors, and others, related to COVID-19 vaccines and other so-called countermeasures covered by the act. The Watts complaint is an important and unprecedented challenge to that liability shield.
“The complaint threads the act’s needle by pointing the finger squarely at Operation Warp Speed leadership while raising critical legal challenges to the act’s protection, particularly where, as is alleged in the Watts complaint, a defendant like the Department of Defense has engaged in willful misconduct.
“But the complaint does more than that. It will educate about the PREP Act’s far reach, actions by the DOD during the ‘state of emergency,’ and the general lack of accountability for entities and individuals protected by the PREP Act.
“The public needs to understand that this act intentionally allows potentially bad actors to go unpunished. Here, a young man lost his life, and the government has remained silent, hiding behind a legal shield.
“That is not justice for George Watts or anyone else.”
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Analysis: Both Parties Always Serve the Military-Industrial Complex
By Connor Freeman | The Libertarian Institute | May 30, 2023
In 2023, despite skyrocketing inflation, debt, as well as rising sociopolitical divisions, leadership among both the Republicans and Democrats will always agree that substantially more US taxpayer money, never less, should be poured into the military industrial complex, according to an analysis by Judd Legum.
Case in point, the debt ceiling agreement established between the Joe Biden administration and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy caps military spending at a record $886 billion, exactly matching Biden’s mammoth budget request.
The GOP was seeking large increases in military spending and would only entertain cuts in non-military expenditures. The agreed upon war budget represents a 3.3% increase over the current year. The tentative deal still needs to make its way through Congress, where hawks will fiercely oppose any and all military spending caps.
Half of this money will go to defense contractors with Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics receiving the lion’s share. Some of these arms industry giants are currently ensnared in a massive “price gouging” scandal, with a bipartisan group of Senators demanding an investigation be opened at the Pentagon’s highest levels.
Legum highlights the lack of any “peace dividend.” after the disastrous 20 year war and occupation in Afghanistan. “This military spending increase has occurred even as Biden ended the war in Afghanistan, the military’s longest-running and most costly foreign intervention… Each year, the costs go up dramatically,” Legum writes.
He explains that the US has added more than $300 billion to the military budget during the last eight years. In 2015, the Pentagon budget was $585 billion. Half of this obscene increase in war spending and profiteering has been bylined by the Biden administration. Legum continues,
(Had military spending kept pace with inflation, [it] would still be less than $700 billion annually.) Biden has added nearly $150 billion to the military budget since 2021, the last budget approved by President Trump. The budget of the Pentagon now exceeds “the budgets for the next ten largest cabinet agencies combined.” In 2020, Lockheed Martin received $75 billion in government contracts, more than 1.5 times the budget of the entire State Department.
Last year, the United States spent more on its military than the next 10 highest-spending countries combined.
A recent report on 60 Minutes, the CBS news program, saw former Pentagon officials, contract negotiators, and insiders accuse these defense firms of “astronomical price increases” and “unconscionable” fraud.
In particular, the CBS report cites Shay Assad, a 40-year veteran contract negotiator, who says military industrial complex behemoths, such as Lockheed and Raytheon, overcharge for “[everything from] radar and missiles … helicopters … planes … submarines… down to the nuts and bolts.”
The cited experts described these practices, as well as the accompanying rampant unaccountability, as largely the culmination of bureaucratic decisions made during the immediate post-Cold War era.
In the early 1990s, ostensibly to reduce costs, the DOD “urged defense companies to merge and 51 major contractors consolidated to five giants.” This drastically reduced competition and put the big five industry “giants” in an extremely advantageous situation. The War Department “has few options today, and the defense contractors know it,” Legum writes.
Assad clarifies the effects of this centralization of power, “In the [1980s], there was intense competition amongst a number of companies. And so the government had choices. They had leverage. We have limited leverage now,” Assad said. “The problem was compounded in the early 2000s when the Pentagon, in another cost-saving move, cut 130,000 employees whose jobs were to negotiate and oversee defense contracts.”
Retired Pentagon auditor Mark Owen bluntly told CBS, this is “not really a true capitalistic market because one company is telling you what’s going to happen. [It’s a] monopoly.”
The report highlighted the fact that, before the clamp down on competition, a shoulder-fired Stinger missile, produced by Raytheon, cost $25,000 in 1991. Now that Washington is subsidizing the provision of so many Stingers to Ukraine, as well as Taiwan, the weapon is now priced at more than $400,000. This is an “eye-watering” seven-fold increase, even when taking inflation into account as well as interim technological advancements.
Lockheed and Boeing were found to have yielded an over 40 percent profit on sales of PAC-3 surface to air missiles to Washington and its allies. Assad explained the companies saw a windfall of hundreds of millions on the deals over seven years, and “based on what they actually made, we would’ve received an entire year’s worth of missiles for free.”
The DOD also “caught Raytheon making what they called ‘unacceptable profits’ from the Patriot missile defense system by dramatically exaggerating the cost and hours it took to build the radar and ground equipment.”
Assad demonstrated to the 60 Minutes host that an oil pressure switch was selling for over $10,000, when he claimed the switch should cost $328. The host asked Assad a question regarding the huge discrepancy, to which the former official responded “Gouging. What else can account for it?”
A major aspect of this problem is the Congress and defense contractors’ bribes. As Legum details, the military-industrial complex spent $2.5 billion on lobbying in the last two decades. “During that period, defense contractors employed an average of 700 lobbyists — more than one lobbyist for every member of Congress.”
Though, some Senators just denounced the contractors, in a letter to the Pentagon chief, saying these firms are “dramatically overcharging the Department and U.S. taxpayers while reaping enormous profits, seeing their stock prices soar, and handing out massive executive compensation packages.”
The lawmakers charged that these “companies have abused the trust government has placed in them… exploiting their position as sole suppliers for certain items to increase prices far above inflation or any reasonable profit margin.”
The Union State Expects That The NATO-Russian Proxy War Will Expand
BY ANDREW KORYBKO | JUNE 1, 2023
The 52nd session of the CIS Council of Heads of Security Agencies and Special Services took place in Minsk on Thursday, during which time representatives from the Union State expressed concern that the NATO-Russian proxy war will expand. FSB chief Bortnikov from the Russian side shared his assessment that this bloc is responsible for sabotage in their two countries. He also warned that “The West actively encourages Moldova to get involved in the Ukrainian conflict by cleansing Transdniestria and Gagauzia.”
As for the Belarusian side of the Union State, it was most importantly represented by President Lukashenko, who raised awareness of the West’s impending coup plot against him. According to him, “this is no longer 2020, when girls went to rallies wearing short white skirts and holding flowers. People are ready to come here with weapons.” He said that this is because the West now demands that those “opposition” figures who they’re hosting commit terrorist attacks in order to continue receiving funding.
Bortnikov and Lukashenko shared their views on the same day as the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that it had beaten back Ukrainian terrorists earlier that morning who tried infiltrating Belgorod Region in a repeat of last week’s incident. These three developments suggest that Kiev’s upcoming counteroffensive will possibly attempt to expand the geographic scope of this proxy war to include Belarus, Moldova, and/or Russia’s pre-2014 territory, perhaps even all at once.
The strategic reason for going all out like that would be to compensate for the seven key challenges that place Ukraine in a position of weakness vis-à-vis Russia even in spite of the over $165 billion in aid that it’s received from NATO since the start of the special operation. Aware that the counteroffensive will likely fail to meet the Western public’s expectations exactly as unnamed US officials told Politico in late April, Kiev seems to be preparing a set of spectacular provocations to spin as a success instead.
The potential plan appears to be for Kiev to lash out in those three directions in the hope of achieving a breakthrough across at least one of those fronts, not to mention the Line of Contact (LOC) between its forces and Russia’s in the territory that Ukraine claims as its own. The West wanted Georgia to play a role in this scheme too in order to maximally divide Moscow’s attention, but its Color Revolution agents couldn’t get Tbilisi to go along with this despite trying their best to pressure it to do so in March.
In the event that Kiev gains and holds ground in Belarus, Moldova, Russia, and/or Ukraine’s former regions, none of which can be taken for granted of course, then the West can claim that the counteroffensive was worth it. NATO doesn’t think that the last-mentioned front along the LOC will see much progress, if any at all, which is why it appears to be preparing Kiev for a multifront attack that stands a better chance of meeting the public’s expectations of success.
The scenario of a direct NATO military intervention in Moldova and/or up to the LOC also can’t be ruled out either. The second one would of course spike the risks of nuclear brinksmanship, but since “Biden’s Re-Election Hinges On The Success Of Kiev’s Counteroffensive”, the US’ ruling liberal–globalist elite might gamble with the apocalypse out of desperation if Kiev fails to achieve any success at all. The possibility of Russia reversing the dynamics to achieve its own breakthrough could also prompt that dark scenario too.
The West is in a dilemma since NATO’s “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” with Russia that Secretary-General Stoltenberg declared in mid-February is gradually trending in Moscow’s favor as proven by its victory in the Battle of Artyomovsk. Such an astronomical sum has already been invested in this counteroffensive, which has also been hyped up to an absurd level, that it has to go forward no matter what despite the Washington Post warning in mid-March about how poorly Kiev’s forces are really faring.
It’s therefore politically impossible to do the pragmatic thing by agreeing to a ceasefire that freezes the LOC before Kiev loses even more territory, hence why the West seems to be seriously contemplating the previously unthinkable scenario of escalating along four separate fronts at once. This is being done from a position of weakness out of desperation for something tangible to be achieved that can then be spun as a success in order to partially meet the Western public’s expectations.
The counteroffensive’s full failure would reflect terribly on the ruling Western elite and possibly pose a major electoral challenge to their figureheads the next time that voters go to the polls, which is why they’re ready to do whatever is required to prevent that perception among their people. There’s of course the slim chance that cooler heads will prevail, but the latest developments suggest that Kiev is being pressured by NATO to go all out, which could lead to the proxy war expanding in four directions at once.
Zelensky “turned the country into a new Afghanistan” – former Ukrainian PM
By Ahmed Adel | June 1, 2023
The legacy of Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky will be turning Ukraine into “a new Afghanistan,” according to former Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov. Azarov was head of government three times and presided over Ukraine’s largest economic growth in its post-Soviet history, thus making his opinion about Zelensky’s legacy, especially scathing.
“Over the years, presidents of Ukraine made promises to turn the country into either a new France or a new Switzerland. However, Zelensky went further than anyone and turned the country into a new Afghanistan, to the delight of the Anglo-Saxons and defence companies,” Azarov wrote in a social media post.
“What do you think? Is there a chance that Washington will get tired of its ‘toy’ in the foreseeable future? Or is the pleasure of playing dirty tricks on Russia more important than the lives of the hostages of the Kiev regime?” the politician asked on Facebook.
It is recalled that Azarov explained in an interview in early May the role played by the US and the UK in transforming Ukraine into a failed state, outlining how since the Euromaidan coup in 2014, the country’s population halved. He also characterised the current Ukrainian president as “an empty vessel” who cares more about profits and popularity abroad than the Ukrainian people, which makes him a tool of Western powers and oligarchic interests.
Azarov is certainly not the first to compare the war in Ukraine to that of the 20-year US war in Afghanistan, with experts believing that both conflicts were prospects for the US military-industrial complex to profit from massive new defence contracts. However, experts also warn that Ukraine could become Washington’s next Afghanistan-style forever war.
It is recalled that analyst Scott Ritter, a former United Nations inspector and US Marine in Iraq, said that President Joe Biden should tell his Ukrainian counterpart that his country realistically has no chance of emerging victorious from its confrontation with Russia and that the US runs from fights as it does not have to deal with the terrible consequences of leaving, just like in Afghanistan and Vietnam.
In this same light, The American Conservative published in August 2022 that “defense contractors shed a tear when America’s war in Afghanistan came to a close […] But just after one protracted conflict came to a close, another came to the complex’s rescue. Though there is little national interest for the U.S. in Ukraine, and everything to lose given Russia is a nuclear-armed power, Biden has vowed that the U.S. will be alongside Ukraine for the long haul.”
It is suggested that the US continues its useless but destructive wars, such as in Vietnam, Afghanistan and now Ukraine, to prop up the American military-industrial complex. The same publication, but in a later article, highlighted that the war in Ukraine was a “new 1980s-style Afghanistan, with the U.S. playing both the American and the Soviet roles at times,” adding that “while NATO countries and others sent small numbers of troops and material to Afghanistan, the U.S. has gone out of its way to make Ukraine look like a NATO show when it is not.”
The comments by Azarov came days before Zelensky said that the start time for the activation of the Armed Forces of Ukraine had been approved. According to Zelensky, at the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief meeting, there was also a discussion on the issue of supplying ammunition to soldiers.
However, Zelensky is merely speaking for the sake of speaking when we consider that we are in the last day of spring and the first days of summer, and the long-awaited offensive never began, which is especially humiliating considering the boastful claims made of soon capturing Crimea and Mariupol from Russia.
It is likely that, just like in the Afghanistan case, military offensive methods will not be used by Ukraine but rather terrorist methods instead, such as reconnaissance, drone weapons, airspace intrusion, and infrastructure destruction. As The Telegraph concedes, Ukrainian troops are exhausted, and Kiev is in a “desperate push to replenish its battle-stricken military ahead of a looming counter-offensive.”
Even though Ukraine has received a lot of NATO equipment and weapons, there is nonetheless a shortage of troops that officials consider key players in the counter-offensive. Recruiters are facing a huge challenge trying to attract the right number of men into the army, and now they are adopting harsher recruitment tactics to find people for the Army. All this points to a similar scenario experienced in Afghanistan, something Zelensky has made Ukraine akin to.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
North Korea rejects US criticism of failed satellite launch
RT | June 1, 2023
The US is in no position to condemn North Korea for trying to launch a satellite, having sent thousands into orbit itself, the influential sister of leader Kim Jong-un said on Thursday. Pyongyang will soon launch its first-ever reconnaissance spacecraft, Kim Yo-jong promised.
On Wednesday, North Korea confirmed that its rocket carrying military satellite Malligyong-1 crashed into the Yellow Sea due to a malfunction of the second-stage engine.
The development was criticized by Washington and its allies in South Korea and Japan. US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said the attempted launch by Pyongyang was a reason for “major concern,” even if it failed. “Kim Jong-un and his scientists and engineers, they work and they improve and they adapt. And they continue to develop military capabilities that are a threat not only on the peninsula but to the region,” he explained.
Kirby’s colleague Adam Hodge suggested that “the door has not closed on diplomacy but Pyongyang must immediately cease its provocative actions and instead choose engagement.”
In her statement, cited by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), Kim Yo-jong argued that “if the DPRK’s (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) satellite launch should be particularly censured, the US and all other countries, which have already launched thousands of satellites, should be denounced. This is nothing, but sophism of self-contradiction.”
“The far-fetched logic that only the DPRK should not be allowed to do so… though other countries are doing so, is clearly a gangster-like and wrong one of seriously violating the DPRK’s right to use space and illegally oppressing it,” she said.
A UN Security Council resolution forbids Pyongyang from using ballistic missile technology for any purposes, including space launches.
Kim’s sister, who is a senior figure in North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party, insisted that “it is certain that the DPRK’s military reconnaissance satellite will be correctly put in space orbit in the near future and start its mission.”
As for the US calls for negotiations, she said the authorities in Pyongyang “do not feel the necessity of dialogue with the US.” North Korea will continue its “counteraction in a more offensive attitude so that they should not but realize that they will have nothing to benefit from the extension of the hostile policy toward the DPRK,” Kim Yo-jong added.
5 Things I Truly Don’t Understand About the ‘Inevitable Energy Transition’
RealClear Wire | May 29, 2023
Please note: this article was pulled down offline from Forbes. I will let you draw your own conclusions as to why. Factually, there was no justification for it.
This list could be closer to 50 but let’s just stick to a handful of them. I literally live in this business every day, and I’m just so confused.
1. In a world that is apparently getting both warmer and colder because of global warming, how is it that we can increasingly rely on non-dispatchable (i.e., intermittent, usually unavailable), weather-dependent electricity from wind and solar plants to displace, not just supplement, dispatchable (i.e., baseload, almost always available) coal, gas, and nuclear power? In other words, if our weather is becoming less predictable, how is it that a consuming economy like ours can, or should even try, predictably rely on weather-dependent resources? ERCOT exemplifies this: the Texas grid operator has around 31,000 MW of wind capacity but goes into winter expecting only 6,000 MW (just 20%) of wind farms to be available to generate electricity. Again, in the marketplace, the “alternatives” you keep hearing about are proving to be far more supplemental than alternative.
Further, good wind and solar spots are finite, based on geography, so new builds, naturally, will be forced into areas that are less windy and less sunny, lowering their already very low 35% capacity factors. And because they devour immense swaths of land, interrupting a whole host of things, that Renewable Rejection Database is mounting very quickly. If wind, solar, and electric cars too are as effective and low-cost as so many keep promising us, there would obviously be no need for government subsidies for broad adoption. Yet, there is, gigantically so. Huge amounts of taxpayer money going into this, what I call “the holy climate panacea triad,” are vulnerable to changing politics and bound to become politically untenable at some point: “Ford Is Losing $66,446 On Every EV It Sells.” Our limited financial resources are obviously very precious, so these NEVER CONSIDERED and wasted opportunity costs forcing wind, solar, and electric cars into the energy complex are truly catastrophic. Schools investing in electric buses over STEM? The $200 Billion Electric School Bus Bust. How can any of this be justified? I’m so utterly confused.
2. Climate change is a global issue, so how is it that we can claim climate benefits for unilateral climate policy. For example, U.S. gasoline cars constitute just 3% of global CO2 emissions, so how will getting rid of them impact climate change? But this dose of real science doesn’t stop California leaders, a state responsible for just 1% of global CO2 emissions, from telling us that energy policy in the nine-county region of Northern California alone is “responsible for protecting air quality and the global climate in the nine-county Bay Area.” No wonder then that a Biden administration official was incoherent when asked how $50 trillion in climate spending in the U.S. will lower any global temperature rise. Indeed, despite the Sierra Club in 2014 promising us that “China’s Thirst for Coal Is Drying Up,” the Chinese Communist Party approved two coal plants a week in 2022. But, don’t worry guys, China promises to be net-zero by 2060. On climate, you don’t matter nearly as much as some want you to think.
So, it becomes very obvious very quickly that no energy policy in northern California has any relevance in terms of changing the climate. The region could literally disappear and there would be no discernable impact on climate change. Even our climate czar John Kerry, loving the CO2-devouring life in a private jet and $250 million, has been forced to admit that the U.S. could even go to zero emissions and it would make no material impact on climate change. Talk about all pain, no gain. The real science is that incremental global emissions are “not here but over there” U.S. CO2 emissions are in structural decline regardless of what policies we pass (save 2021 and the rebound from Covid-19’s devastation in 2020). So, where is the climate benefit for Americans when it comes to U.S. climate policy? Because we’re continuously told to “believe science,” any positive answer to that question can only be deemed as anti-science. In fact, common sense and science itself tell us that unilateral climate policy can actually be really bad for climate change because it encourages carbon leakage (e.g., climate policy in the U.S. increases costs and just pushes a manufacturing firm to re-locate to coal-devouring China).
3. Back to electric vehicles. Even green-tinted but surely practical Bloomberg admits that more than 85% of Americans can’t afford an electric car, since they are well more than double the price of oil-based cars. How can a product bring racial justice for Black Americans when the vast majority of them can’t afford it? Worse then, huge and growing subsidies for electric cars are a “reverse Robin Hood,” taking money from poor taxpayers to give to the rich ones that are, actually, in the market to buy an electric car. Forcing electric equipment over natural gas? Sorry but “gas is four to six times cheaper than electricity.” Battery costs might be much higher than expected: 1) rising global demand, 2) rising costs and unavailability of their raw materials, 3) mining complications and environmental damage, and 4) China flexing its muscles since it controls the supply chains and uses hoarding as political leverage (see Covid-19 and medical supplies). Reality check, unlike what we keep hearing about “green energy,” no technology continues to decline in cost in perpetuity: “EV battery costs could spike 22% by 2026 as raw material shortages drag on.”
And this one I’m really confused on. President Biden promotes his climate agenda as a way to create jobs. Besides lacking in economic literacy (i.e., jobs are costs not benefits), the truth is that electric cars, for instance, entail far less jobs because they, for one thing, have far less moving parts. And there’s all kinds of evidence that electric car life-cycle emissions could be way worse than advertised, mostly because of the massive amounts of mining required to make them. We all know about child labor and your electric car, but even pro-EV outlets are being forced to report on the mounting problems from mining, the latest on how bauxite for the aluminum needed is destroying the Amazon. And about our President’s we’ll need oil for “another decade” claim? The U.S. Department of Energy just modeled that our oil demand will actually slightly INCREASE, not decline, to over 21.1 million b/d by 2050. Reality check: planes, industry (petrochemicals), heavy trucking, and sheer Energy Inertia will have oil dominating way longer than you’re being told.
4. How on Earth could anybody expect those in Africa and the other horrifically poor nations to “get off fossil fuels” when the rich countries haven’t come close to doing it. Germany and California, the world’s two greenest governments, are still overwhelming fossil fuel-based and overwhelmingly dependent on imports (dangerously so in Germany’s case). This comes despite decades of huge subsidies, scores of mandates, deploying the best engineering expertise, and having low population growth and thus low incremental energy needs, all giving them a huge advantage in “going green.” The energy stat to remember most? No U.S. state will ever “try to go green” like California has over the past 20 years, yet oil and gas still supply 70% of the state’s energy, even above the national average of 65%.
Germany and California have shown us what these climate policies bring: Germany has the highest electricity prices in the world; and California’s are the highest in the continental U.S. and soaring out of control (Figure). How the heck can we push for “deep electrification” to fight climate change if we are going to follow policies that surge the price of electricity, while also lowering grid reliability? And rich Westerners, spare us the judgments, demands, and hypocrisy on climate change: Germany thrives on a GDP per capita per year of $51,200, compared to a horrifically sad $2,260 for India.
5. But, perhaps I’m most confused about the whole air quality thing. The obsession over it gets attached to all energy policies. But there’s clearly a strawman to the “we need cleaner air now” demand. First, the air quality conversation in the U.S. reminds me of Voltaire’s “the perfect is the enemy of good.” Americans seem completely unaware how drastically our air quality has improved. Check data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), our criteria pollutants have been plummeting over the past many decades. The risks seem exaggerated. Let’s just take Los Angeles, which for a big city notoriously has the worst air quality in the country. Tell me, please, if air quality is such a problem and such a health concern for Americans, why is it that Angelinos have a life expectancy of 82 years, a hearty three years above the national average. Just think of all the coal that China has devoured since 2000 (I figure around 70 billion tonnes), yet the country’s life expectancy, apparently shockingly to so many, is up a very impressive six years to nearly 78 since then. Maybe it’s because Chinese GDP per capita per year has skyrocketed nearly 9-fold to over $18,500. Even for rising asthma rates in the U.S., smoking is way down, coal usage is way down, and criteria pollutants are way down. So what gives?
“Better air quality and environment” are not free, as attaining government standards cost businesses hundreds of billions of dollars per year. These costs are ultimately paid by Americans in the form of higher prices, lower wages, and less choices. And at some point, the cost of the regulation to achieve better air outweighs its benefit. We’ve won on water too: the water in your toilet is cleaner than what the vast majority of humans on Earth drink. For every time that we hear “environmental justice” we need to say “economic justice” 100 times. In this country for all Americans, Blacks and Hispanics/Latinos make 30% less money than Whites and Asians. Too many politicians focus on the endless pursuit of “better air quality” and other abstract, seemingly impossible to measure benefits because they have no clue on the real ways to help communities of color and other low-income Americans: help them get a better education, help them get a better job, and help them make more money. Career politicians love bottomless, money-devouring pits the most: “America’s $100 billion climate change flop.” And although its entire existence is based on never being able to declare victory (imagine a football game with no time and no keeping score), EPA should consider that it’s wealth that matters most for health equity.
But, that’s not its business, is it?
Taiwan under an American nuclear umbrella? Excellent move if US wants WW3
By Drago Bosnic | June 1, 2023
After years of belligerent moves aimed at undermining China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity virtually everywhere, be it Hong Kong, Xinjiang, South/East Sea China or Taiwan, the United States is showing no signs of ever stopping with its aggression against Beijing. As if billions of dollars worth of weapons earmarked for China’s breakaway island province weren’t bad enough, including at least 400 anti-ship missiles and the latest F-16 Block 70/72 fighter jets, reports now indicate that Taipei and Washington DC are in talks about Taiwan gaining the protection of the US nuclear umbrella in a similar manner to Japan and South Korea.
According to RealClearDefense, citing local sources, Taiwanese foreign minister Joseph Wu announced that the island is in talks with Washington DC about possibly being brought under the US nuclear umbrella. RealClearDefense warns that the move would likely be seen by Beijing as a clear escalation and would likely greatly increase the potential for a future war with China. This assessment can only be considered an understatement, as the Asian giant is essentially guaranteed to respond directly to such escalation. Being under the American nuclear umbrella entails several key changes that would be absolutely unacceptable to China and would certainly provoke an adequate reaction.
The Taipei Times reported that local defense experts find this a “positive for Taiwan”. On May 23, Institute for National Defense and Security research fellow Su Tzu-yun stated:
“Taiwan’s national security doctrine explicitly rejects the development of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, despite the nation facing the threat of such weapons being used against it. The extension of an ally’s nuclear umbrella over Taiwan would be significantly beneficial to Taiwan’s security.”
The nuclear umbrella is a deterrence policy stemming from the (First) Cold War and entails a nuclear power to guarantee the usage of its nuclear weapons to retaliate if its ally was exposed to a nuclear attack by any third party. This also includes the option of hosting US nuclear weapons, as was the case with countries such as South Korea between 1958 and 1991. Taipei’s Foreign Minister Wu made the comments about this possibility during a session with the Legislative Yuan (Taiwanese parliament). However, he declined to give any details about the talks and whether Taipei itself had asked the US to bring the island under its nuclear umbrella or if the initiative came from Washington DC.
“Regarding the discussion of this issue with the United States, it is not suitable for me to make it public here,” Wu said, as reported by The South China Morning Post.
Most US allies and satellite states/vassals are under the protection of its nuclear umbrella, including Japan, South Korea and every member of NATO, with nearly half a dozen member states (Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey) even having nuclear sharing programs with Washington DC. As previously mentioned, giving the same or similar guarantees to China’s breakaway island province would require the US to use thermonuclear weapons in case of hostilities between Beijing and Taipei. It should be understood that in case Washington DC goes ahead with such an agreement, the question of Taiwan would become much more than just an issue of respecting Chinese sovereignty, territorial integrity and international law.
As per the (rather correct) assessment of The South China Morning Post, this idea is “an unthinkable prospect” for Beijing. Indeed, such a move would further internationalize the Taiwan dispute, as well as accelerate the potential formation of “Asia-Pacific NATO”, while jeopardizing China’s strategic security. Although the US has encountered significant hurdles with attempts to form yet another iteration of the North Atlantic geopolitical monstrosity, the belligerent thalassocracy likely believes that including Taiwan in its global nuclear umbrella would push others in the region to be more accepting of the idea of an “Asia-Pacific NATO”. How likely this is to work is up for debate, however, what it would surely cause is a dramatic surge in the potential for escalation and yet another step toward a world-ending thermonuclear conflict.
Although there is still hope that cooler heads might prevail in the Pentagon, the sheer number of warhawks in the US establishment makes the prospects of such escalation all the more possible and no less disturbing, particularly as top US generals are openly talking about the “inevitable war with China”. Such belligerence has already pushed China and Russia to further strengthen their already close ties in all aspects, be it economic, military, scientific, etc. The troubled Biden administration has already vowed to send troops and intervene if hostilities between China and its breakaway island province were to happen, which in itself was a borderline declaration of war. However, by including Taiwan in its nuclear umbrella, the question of war between Beijing and Washington DC would become “when” instead of “if”.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
Time to ban drug advertising on TV in America?
BY MARYANNE DEMASI, PHD | MAY 30, 2023
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr recently said that if he becomes president, he will ban pharmaceutical advertising on US television.
“It’s not good to have pharmaceutical advertising on TV,” said Kennedy. “It’s good for the television stations, it’s good for the pharmaceutical companies, but it’s not good for public health.”
The US and New Zealand are the only two nations globally that allow drug companies to promote their products directly to the consumer – known as direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA).
Kennedy said that because of pharmaceutical advertising in the US, Americans use more prescription drugs than anywhere else in the world, and yet, they have the worst outcomes.
Americans have the lowest life expectancy compared to other wealthy nations and the highest rate of avoidable deaths, despite spending nearly 18% of GDP on healthcare in 2021.
Kennedy told me he blames “the influence of the pharmaceutical lobby in Washington, and indirectly, the influence of media companies that earn some $18 billion in revenue annually from direct-to-consumer drug advertising.”
In the 80s, there were few prescription drug ads broadcast on US TV because the regulatory standard made it difficult to provide adequate information about drug labelling to consumers. David Kessler, FDA Commissioner between 1990 and 1997, also vigorously opposed DTCA.
But when Kessler left the agency, the new administration eased regulatory restrictions and the floodgates opened. Within a decade, DTCA went from US$2.1 billion in 1997 to US$9.6 billion in 2016.
“They do it because it works,” said Barbara Mintzes, professor of evidence-based pharmaceutical policy at the University of Sydney. “Drug companies would not be spending the money if it did not lead to expanded sales.”
Proponents argue that DTCA empowers the consumer with information about diseases and drug treatments by encouraging informed discussions between patients and their medical providers. But Mintzes is not convinced.
“I totally agree that people need information on medicines but getting that information from advertising is not the same as getting it from an unbiased source,” said Mintzes.
Mintzes has long argued against DTCA saying, “There is no public health rationale and no reliable evidence that it leads to better care, public or patient empowerment, or to the type of information needed for shared informed treatment choices.”
Many Americans are unaware of the persuasiveness of DTCA. A national FDA survey found that 29% of consumers believed that only completely safe medicines could be advertised on TV. In California, it was 42% of consumers.
The decision about which drugs are advertised is not made on public health grounds, but on what will maximise profits.
“It’s a marketing decision,” says Mintzes. “Often, it’s a small, select group of drugs that are very expensive, on patent, and are not necessarily the best available treatments in terms of effectiveness or safety.”
According to a recent study published in JAMA, most of Big Pharma’s spending (68%) on the top-selling prescription drugs in 2020, were of ‘low added benefit’ for patients.
The study’s lead author Michael DiStefano, a researcher at Johns Hopkins said it’s probably a strategy of the pharmaceutical industry to “drive patient demand for drugs that clinicians would be less likely to prescribe.”
“When a consumer sees these advertisements on TV or social media, they should really question if it’s the best drug for them and have a conversation with their provider,” said DiStefano.
The FDA regulates the promotion of medicines and the content of DTCA, under the authority of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA). It requires that advertising is accurate, and only promotes the drug for approved conditions, clearly stating harms and ways to get more information.
However, the agency lacks the resources to police it properly.
A 2002 Government Accountability Office report found the FDA’s oversight of DTCA was lacking. The agency had allowed some drug companies to repeatedly disseminate new misleading advertisements for the same drug.
Further, a change in the FDA’s procedures for reviewing draft regulatory letters led to a significant lag in issuing letters to demand the removal of misleading advertising – some regulatory letters were not even issued until after the advertising campaign had run its course.
From 1999 to 2004, Vioxx was among the most aggressively advertised medicines in the US. Merck spent more than US$100 million per year in advertising to consumers and generated annual sales of more than US$1 billion.
But Merck ran a deceptive advertising campaign, which misrepresented the safety of Vioxx and improperly concealed the drug’s increased risk of stroke. Vioxx was estimated to have caused 88,000–140,000 heart attacks in the USA alone – 44% of which were fatal.
A significant proportion of those people who died, took Vioxx after seeing it advertised on TV.
During the pandemic, the FDA began promoting covid-19 products – antivirals and vaccines – something that is not in the agency’s remit.
FDA commissioner Robert Califf, for example, repeatedly advertised the benefits of Pfizer’s antiviral drug paxlovid and covid-19 vaccines for reducing the risk of long covid.
“The FDA commissioner can’t tweet like this,” wrote Vinay Prasad, a practicing haematologist-oncologist at the University of California San Francisco. “How does the FDA preserve the authority to regulate truthful marketing, when the FDA commissioner is a billboard for Pfizer? These claims are not validated by the highest methods. This is unbelievable.”
In addition, director of the FDA’s vaccine division Peter Marks, featured in multiple videos on the FDA’s website, encouraging people to take the newly authorised bivalent boosters.
“It always feels odd to see the FDA promote products,” said Jessica Adams, a regulatory affairs expert. “The agency used to go out of its way to respect patient-provider decision-making and not interfere with the practice of medicine.”
In fact, the FDA’s own homepage was promoting the covid-19 vaccines.
“The FDA acts like a cheerleading or marketing arm of pharma companies, not a regulatory agency” said Aaron Siri, attorney at Siri & Glimstad law firm. “By promoting these shots, the FDA has hopelessly conflicted itself from later admitting these products have serious issues.”
“It is not the role of the FDA to promote vaccines or advise people to get them. Its role is to objectively assess whether they are safe and effective to its standard,” added Siri.
Kennedy has renewed calls to put an end to the FDA→Big Pharma “revolving door” which leads to undue influence over the agency.
Ten of the last 11 commissioners have gone on to secure roles with the pharmaceutical or biotech industries they once regulated – most within a year or two of leaving the FDA (see table).
Califf was announced as FDA commissioner on 17 Feb 2022 (his second time). SEC filings indicate that he resigned from the board of directors of Centessa Pharmaceuticals, the day before the announcement.
“That is an indication of just how completely industry has captured this agency,” said Kennedy vowing to shake up the system if he becomes president.
“We will institute new rules extending the waiting period before former officials can enter industry, consulting, and lobbying. We want real public servants in positions of public trust,” he added.
Kennedy believes the key to reforming the FDA will be to put qualified people in positions from outside the pharmaceutical industry, and to call on whistle-blowers, dissidents, and other people of integrity from within the FDA.
The FDA did not comment on the agency’s ‘revolving door’, nor did it answer whether the agency had considered instituting an extended waiting period between the time officials leave the FDA and enter industry.
Weapon US gave Ukraine spotted in cartel hands – Mexican media
A member of the Cartel Del Golfo (CDG) in Tamaulipas, Mexico carrying a US-made anti-tank weapon, May 30, 2023 © screenshot/Milenio TV
RT | May 31, 2023
A militant wearing the insignia of Mexico’s notorious Gulf Cartel (Cartel Del Golfo, CDG) was filmed in the state of Tamaulipas carrying a US-made anti-tank missile launcher. Milenio TV identified the weapon as a Javelin, thousands of which were sent to Ukraine by the Pentagon.
Footage filmed in Matamoros on Monday and aired on Tuesday evening by the news channel Milenio TV showed a man with CDG patches armed with a Kalashnikov rifle and a missile they said was the Raytheon-made FGM-148.
Over 10,000 Javelins from Pentagon stockpiles have been sent to Ukraine since last February, to the point where the US military has begun to run out of the missiles itself.
Milenio presenter Azucena Uresti noted on Twitter that the estimated value of a Javelin launcher on the black market was anywhere from $20,000 to $60,000, while the average cost of a missile was about $30,000.
Keen-eyed military experts believe the weapon in the Milenio footage may actually be the AT-4, a Swedish-made disposable anti-tank launcher, which is also in use by the US military and likewise supplied to Ukraine by the thousands.
Russia has repeatedly warned the US and its allies not to “stuff” Ukraine with weapons and ammunition, both because this risked a direct confrontation and since nonexistent controls would result in the weapons ending up in the criminal underworld.
A RT investigation in July 2022 found a variety of Western-supplied weapons, including anti-tank rockets, for sale on the “dark web.” Several months later, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned that $1 billion a month worth of Western weapons was ending up in the hands of “terrorists, extremists and criminal groups in the Middle East, Central Africa, and Southeast Asia.”
Kiev has denounced this as “propaganda” and insisted all were accounted for.
The US outlet CBS censored their documentary on weapons supplies to Ukraine after the government in Kiev objected. Last month, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said the West was aware its weapons were ending up on the black market, but that most governments did not care because arming Ukraine mattered more to them.
The Gulf Cartel is based in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, specifically in the border city of Matamoros, just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. It dates back to the 1930s, but gained in notoriety in the late 1990s, when it spun off a notorious militia called Los Zetas. The group has since broken off on its own. Though primarily known as a drug smuggling cartel, CDG has also been accused of racketeering, abductions, money laundering, and trafficking of people, sex slaves and weapons.
In March, the cartel apologized for one of its factions kidnapping four Americans and killing two of them, in what they said was a case of mistaken identity. Five members of that faction were handed over to the Mexican police.
The Final Durham Report: Democracy’s Horror Show
By Peter Van Buren | We Meant Well | May 26, 2023
Hillary knew. She knew her campaign paid for Russian disinformation (including the alleged pee tape accusations) to be washed through a report by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. She knew the information was false but could potentially allow her to win the election. Hillary lied to the FBI about all this, and lied to the American public. Such was her appetite.
The FBI knew. They knew none of the information in the Steele Report could be corroborated, and they knew most of it was false. They turned a blind eye, purposefully and with the intent to defeat Donald Trump in the 2016 election, to basic investigative and tradecraft rules to use the corrupt information to surveil the Trump campaign via the FISA court. When Trump won the election anyway, the FBI continued to use this information to assault the loyalty and viability of President Trump and ultimately tried to use the information via the Robert Mueller investigation to impeach or indict Trump.
Only one person went to jail for all this, a minor player named Kevin Clinesmith for provided false info to the FISA court. No changes are planned for the FBI. No charges are to be brought against Hillary Clinton. The Deep State came within an eyelash of bringing down an unwanted president as surely as they are believed to have done in Dallas ’63. Words were the weapon this time, not bullets.
These are the conclusions of the final Durham Report released last week. The report was written by former Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham, who was chosen in 2019 to examine the FBI probe known as “Operation Crossfire Hurricane.” Durham provides the only comprehensive review of what came to be called Russiagate, and shows how close to the edge our democracy came to falling into the abyss at the hands of the Deep State. It all sounds dramatic, as those terms have been bandied about so often and in so many contexts they may have lost some of their meaning. But make no mistake about it — the FBI tried to shape the 2016 election and failing, tried to run Trump out of office. If you thought the “Hunter Biden Letter,” the one signed by dozens of intelligence professionals calling the Biden Diaries potential Russian disinformation was just wrong, you should find the conclusions of the Durham report a horror show.
There was nothing true in the Steele Report, for example, this key paragraph: “Speaking in confidence to a compatriot in late July 2016, Source E, an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald TRUMP, admitted that there was a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between them and the Russian leadership. This was managed on the TRUMP side by the Republican candidate’s campaign manager, Paul MANAFORT, who was using foreign policy advisor, Carter PAGE, and others as intermediaries. The two sides had a mutual interest in defeating Democratic presidential candidate Hillary CLINTON, whom President PUTIN apparently both hated and feared.”
The FBI had no intelligence about Trump or others associated with the Trump campaign being in contact with Russian intelligence beyond Steele. Despite being unvetted and uncorroborated and coming from a single source with direct political ties to Trump’s opponent, the FBI used such accusations to justify a full-spectrum surveillance operation against the Trump campaign, the first known such operation in American history. The FBI omitted the fact from its FISA application that Carter Page was in fact not a Russian agent but a paid source for the CIA who had been vetted by the Agency as loyal and reliable. They just lied and even when the lie could not be ignored the FBI lied more times to keep the surveillance application alive before the FISA court.
Durham found investigators “ignored exculpatory evidence, put too much stock in information provided by Trump’s political opponents, and carried out surveillance without genuinely believing there was probable cause to do so.” “Throughout the duration of Crossfire Hurricane, facts and circumstances that were inconsistent with the premise that Trump and/or persons associated with the Trump campaign were involved in a collusive or conspiratorial relationship with the Russian government were ignored or simply assessed away,” Durham wrote. The FBI acted “without appropriate objectivity or restraint in pursuing allegations of collusion or conspiracy between a U.S. political campaign and a foreign power.”
It could not be more clear. The FBI knew what it was doing was wrong and did it anyway because the ends, defeating Trump, appeared to justify the means. No surprise, that has been the slogan behind every democratic election U.S. intelligence agencies have overthrown overseas, so why not follow the same logic when the tools of war came home to attempt to drive the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton.
We now know that almost all of the disinformation in the Steele Report came from one man, Igor Danchenko (whom the FBI had until 2011 investigated as a Russian spy.) Danchenko also fed disinfo to a Clinton supporter and registered foreign agent for Russia, Charles Dolan (who was known to but never interviewed by the FBI) to pass on the Steele to further obscure its origin. But according to the Durham report “The failure to identify the primary sub-source [Danchenko] early in the investigation’s pursuit of FISA authority prevented the FBI from properly examining the possibility that some or much of the non-open source information contained in Steele’s reporting was Russian disinformation (that wittingly or unwittingly was passed along to Steele), or that the reporting was otherwise not credible.”
Everyone knew. The Durham Report confirms on August 3, 2016, the Russiagate allegations were briefed to President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and FBI Director James Comey by CIA Director John Brennan at an Oval Office meeting. None of the men briefed, and none of the agencies involved, did anything to intercede in the FBI’s efforts alongside the Clinton Campaign to manufacture collusion between Trump and Russia. Indeed, everyone allowed the falsehoods to linger into the Mueller Report and when that document concluded publicly there was no collusion between Trump and the Kremlin, pivot the same pile of falsehoods to claim Trump somehow obstructed an investigation which actually exonerated him, concluding without indictment as it did.
As for the FBI, the Durham report brutally tells us “the FBI failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law.” That they “displayed, at best, a cavalier attitude towards accuracy and completeness.” That the Bureau “disregarded significant exculpatory information that should have prompted investigative restraint and re-examination… there were clear opportunities to have avoided the mistakes and to have prevented the damage resulting from their embrace of seriously flawed information that they failed to analyze and assess properly.” And that “senior FBI personnel displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor towards the information that they received, especially information received from politically affiliated persons and entities.” That “important aspects of the Crossfire Hurricane matter were seriously deficient.” The Report concludes “although recognizing that in hindsight much is clearer, much of this also seems to have been clear at the time.” As for recommendations, the Report states “more training sessions would likely prove to be a fruitless exercise if the FBI’s guiding principles of Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity are not engrained in the hearts and minds of those sworn to meet the FBI’s mission of “Protect[ing]the American People and Uphold[ing] the Constitution of the United States.”
Without the help of the FBI Russiagate would have been nothing but a flimsy Clinton campaign scam. Thus the Durham Report offers one over-arching implied conclusion: Be skeptical of the FBI and watch accusations of collusion and foreign interference closely around the 2024 election. Treason is indeed a twisty path.
Bipartisan Group of Senators Call for DOD to Investigate ‘Price Gouging’ by Major US Defense Contractors
By Connor Freeman | The Libertarian Institute | May 29, 2023
A bipartisan group of Senators sent a letter to the Defense Department chief calling for an investigation into major American arms dealers accused of systemic “price gouging,” on Wednesday, according to The Hill.
The letter, signed by the likes of Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Mike Braun (R-IN) Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Chuck Grassley (R-IA), cites former Pentagon officials, auditors, and other insiders who spoke to CBS and accused military-industrial complex giants, such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing, of ripping off the US taxpayer.
During a recent 60 Minutes report, Shay Assad, who worked as a Pentagon contract negotiator for 40 years, cites numerous examples while explaining to the outlet that these firms overcharge the DOD for “[everything from] radar and missiles … helicopters … planes … submarines… down to the nuts and bolts.”
The report said these “astronomical price increases” have worsened sharply amidst Washington’s exponentially rising demand for weapons systems to both bolster Taiwan – in a thinly-veiled effort to destabilize China – and support NATO’s proxy Kiev during its war with Russia.
“Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and TransDigm are among the offenders,” the senators asserted. Their letter continues, “[these contractors are] dramatically overcharging the Department and U.S. taxpayers while reaping enormous profits, seeing their stock prices soar, and handing out massive executive compensation packages.”
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, the letter’s recipient, sat on Raytheon’s board of directors before accepting his current post. The lawmakers charge that these companies are securing profits ranging from 40% to even as high as 4,000%.
The military budget will soon surpass the once unthinkable $1 trillion mark. The DOD has requested a record $842 billion for the next fiscal year, roughly half of which will go to “the offenders,” just such private defense contractors.
While the Joe Biden administration has asked Congress to approve a nearly $900 billion military budget. The hawkish legislature will almost certainly add tens of billions more to Biden’s proposed budget. For 2023, Congress added another $45 billion to Biden’s already mammoth request for $813 billion, resulting in a finalized $858 billion annual military spending bill.
Even these eye-opening numbers do not tell the whole story, because the real national security state budget is already fast approaching $1.5 trillion.
The lawmakers’ letter also expresses concerns about the Pentagon’s ability to audit, track and mitigate fraud risk. The DOD’s accountability system is completely “broken.” Assad said, “No matter who they are, no matter what company it is, they need to be held accountable. And right now that accountability system is broken in the Department of Defense.”
The Senators complained that, for decades, this obscene, unaccountable spending has been ongoing. The letter cites a 2021 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report which found the Pentagon failed to implement any comprehensive solution to combating this “unconscionable” fraud, as Assad has described it.
“The DOD can no longer expect Congress or the American taxpayer to underwrite record military spending while simultaneously failing to account for the hundreds of billions it hands out every year to spectacularly profitable private corporations,” the Senators declared. These firms “have abused the trust government has placed in them…exploiting their position as sole suppliers for certain items to increase prices far above inflation or any reasonable profit margin,” the letter continued.
“It’s not really a true capitalistic market because one company is telling you what’s going to happen. [It’s a] monopoly,” retired DoD auditor Mark Owen told CBS.
Connor Freeman is the assistant editor and a writer at the Libertarian Institute, primarily covering foreign policy. He is a co-host on Conflicts of Interest.
Featured Video
Iranians Want Revenge /Sulaiman Ahmed
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Are There 50,000 ‘Israeli-born’ Individuals Living in the UK?
By Professor David Miller | August 18, 2026
Recent disclosures by the Zionist regime show that some 2,069 British nationals were serving in the IDF as of March 2025, according to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests submitted to the occupation forces (1,686 dual British-Israeli, plus 383 multinational). We cannot tell from the figures how many of these were already settler colonists and intend to stay in the colony, and how many will return or have returned to the UK. Presumably, those returning to the UK will number far fewer than 2,000, since many are known to have become permanently residents of the colony.
Additionally, the IDF figures only provide a snapshot, and do not tell us how many have served in the Jewish supremacist military either before or after March 2025. One way into the question of how many genocidaires are living in Britain is to ask how many current British residents were born in the Zionist colony. There is data on that, as we shall see. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Iranians Want Revenge /Sulaiman Ahmed
- ‘Israel’ bombs Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, killing 5
- The beginning of the end: Israel at the heart of America’s political civil war
- US-Israeli war on Iran cost Persian Gulf states nearly $1T in damage, lost growth: Report
- Congress probe could put ‘Israel’ in dock over Iran war: Israeli media
- Spanish public prosecutor backs US demand to extradite pro-Palestine philanthropist Fergie Chambers
- Zelensky spent over 740 days outside Ukraine while West serves as his real home
- Indian captain of Russian ‘shadow fleet’ tanker faces 10-year jail term in UK
- Europe, US face higher heating bills amid Iran war fallout
- The Leak That Arrived Right on Cue
- If Americans Knew
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
- No Tricks Zone
- German Authorities Start Initiative To Evaluate Public Register For Climate “Disinformation” Spreaders!
- Zonal Asymmetry of Temperature Change in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current
- New Study: The Net Fossil Fuel Contribution To Rising Atmospheric CO2 Has Been Zero For 500 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Transition Becoming Increasingly Expensive…Another 6 Trillion Euros!
- Sudden Stratospheric Warming, Powerful El Niño Combination May Lead To Extreme Europe Cold, Energy Crisis!
- Two New Studies Find Thwaites Glacier Melt Cannot Be Driven By Human Activity Or A Warming Ocean
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
