‘Absolutely Reckless’: NIH Allows EcoHealth Alliance to Resume Coronavirus Research
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 10, 2023
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) this week reinstated a controversial federal grant to EcoHealth Alliance to study the risk of bat coronavirus spillover.
EcoHealth is a New York-based nonprofit whose stated mission is to develop “science-based solutions to prevent pandemics and promote conservation.”
In 2014, EcoHealth received $3.7 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to study the risk of bat coronavirus emergence and the potential for outbreaks in human populations — research that included genetically manipulating coronaviruses to make them more infectious to humans.
At the time, Dr. Anthony Fauci was the director of the NIAID, which operates under the NIH.
Nearly $600,000 of the $3.7 million went to EcoHealth’s collaborator, the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
However, in April 2020, under the Trump administration, the NIH terminated EcoHealth’s grant over concerns the organization had violated the grant terms, using U.S. taxpayer money to fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.
EcoHealth on Monday announced that the NIH reinstated the grant, but with new terms, and that EcoHealth will collaborate with the Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School to study zoonotic coronaviruses “with the aim of being transparent about the study’s goals.”
Peter Daszak, Ph.D. — who secretly collaborated with Ralph Baric, Ph.D., and Fauci to steer the media and scientific community away from questions about whether COVID-19 could have originated in a lab — is EcoHealth’s executive director and principal investigator on the grant.
Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.), who sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee that found multiple serious violations by EcoHealth of the contractual terms and conditions of the 2014 NIH grant, said the decision to reinstate the grant was “absolutely reckless,” given the organization’s “negligence and breach of their contract with the NIH on the coronavirus research done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).”
Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., bioweapons expert and professor of international law at the University of Illinois, told The Defender he wasn’t surprised to see the grant reinstated.
“People involved in this, like EcoHealth Alliance, Fauci, the Biden administration, et cetera, know they have crossed the Rubicon and there is no turning back. And they don’t intend to turn back unless and until we stop them. It’s as simple as that,” he added.
Boyle, who authored the Biological Weapons Convention known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 that was approved unanimously by both houses of the U.S. Congress and signed to law by President George Bush Sr., also added:
“Clearly, all this gain-of-function work is offensive biological warfare weapons work in violation of the convention and my biological weapons anti-terrorism act, the penalty for which is life imprisonment.”
In January, the Office of Inspector General in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a report outlining missed deadlines, confusing protocols and misspent funds in EcoHealth Alliance’s grant management, particularly as it related to the Wuhan lab.
In response, HHS set new terms for the four-year, now-$2.9 million NIAID grant, under which EcoHealth will receive $576,290 this year.
Under the new terms, EcoHealth is barred from conducting any research in China or collecting any new samples from vertebrates and must implement additional oversight of its finances and accounting practices.
The conditions also prevent EcoHealth from doing any work “involving enhanced potential pandemic pathogens,” although the organization can continue to work with “highly pathogenic agents” or “infectious agent[s] or toxin[s]” that may warrant a biocontainment safety level (BSL) of 3 or higher. The Wuhan lab was a BSL-4 lab.
EcoHealth is the recipient of 17 active U.S. government grants totaling more than $50 million, The Epoch Times reported.
Publications like Nature and Science celebrated the reinstatement of the grant. Nature said the research was “essential for preventing the next pandemic.”
Science wrote that the Trump administration called for the cancellation of the grant, “amid unsupported allegations that a lab leak at WIV started the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The origins of the COVID-19 virus continue to be debated, but evidence has emerged over the past several years that the “lab-leak theory” is a plausible hypothesis despite attempts to dismiss it.
Several U.S. agencies, former agency officials and independent scientists have concluded that a Wuhan lab leak most likely caused the COVID-19 pandemic. A U.S. Department of Energy report released in February and a Senate report released in April both arrived at the conclusion that COVID-19 likely stemmed from a lab leak.
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.
NBC Host Worries No One Will Be Able to “Police” What Tucker Carlson Says if He Moves Show to Twitter
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | May 10, 2023
NBC host Tom Costello is worried that no one will be able to “police” what Tucker Carlson says if he moves his show to Twitter.
Oh no, the absolute horror.
The former Fox News host posted a video to Twitter yesterday announcing that he would move his content to the platform owned by Elon Musk.
“There aren’t many platforms left that allow free speech. The last big one remaining in the world is Twitter,” said Carlson, adding, “You can’t have a free society if people aren’t allowed to say what they think is true.”
The legacy media reacted by panicking that Carlson will go uncensored.
NBC host Costello accused Twitter of peddling “misinformation, disinformation, all out lies” (information that doesn’t fortify regime narratives) before expressing his real fear.
“Will anybody be able to police what Carlson says, or is this the point, it’s just a free for all?” he asked former CNN host Brian Stelter.
Stelter responded by claiming that Tucker’s increased presence on Twitter will cement the platform as a “right-wing website.”
Because God forbid someone be allowed to speak freely without having their activity ‘policed’ by censors – we can’t have that!
Yesterday, CNN faced ridicule for describing Carlson, who at his peak enjoyed a viewership of over 5 million people, as a “right wing extremist.”
Carlson moving full time to Twitter might be a way to circumvent the fact that Fox is trying to keep him locked in a contract until 2025, preventing him from being signed up by other broadcasters and freezing him out of the 2024 election.
Elon Musk responded to the announcement by clarifying that Twitter and Carlson have not signed “a deal of any kind whatsoever,” and that the former Fox host will be supported by user subscriptions and advertising revenue.
New Federal Disinformation Offices Created
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | May 9, 2023
The Intercept recently reported the creation of two new federal offices to combat disinformation. The Pentagon will oversee the “Influence and Perception Management Office,” which is consistent with the fact that “Perception Management” is an old DoD euphemism for psychological warfare and deception. According to the investigative journalist Robert Parry, who covered the Iran-Contra Affair, the Reagan and first Bush Administrations adopted the techniques of “Perception Management” for the objective of overcoming the American public’s “Vietnam Syndrome”—that is, its reluctance to get involved in foreign military adventures that were widely perceived as fruitless and likely to end badly.
Given that the federal government is already a Leviathan of agencies for conducting propaganda, influence, and surveillance operations, one wonders why it is necessary to create new offices for these activities. The new Biden Administration offices are purportedly to keep the homeland and its people safe from dangerous foreign adversaries. More likely they will work round the clock to keep our people insulated from outside sources of information that would serve to counterbalance U.S. government and MSM propaganda.
US developed AI tool to battle ‘Russian disinformation’ – Blinken
RT | May 10, 2023
Washington has developed an artificial intelligence-based system to detect and gather ‘Russian’ disinformation online, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed on Tuesday at the Freedom House 2023 Annual Awards Ceremony.
The State Department has created “an AI-enabled online Ukraine Content Aggregator to collect verifiable Russian disinformation and then to share that with partners around the world,” the US top diplomat said.
The government is cooperating with scholars to be able to “reliably detect fake text generated by Russian chatbots,” he added.
Last year, social media analytics company Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory said hundreds of accounts disseminating pro-Western narratives over the past five were likely being run by the Pentagon’s Centcom unit. In March, news website The Intercept reported on federal contract documents, which suggest that the US Special Operations Command is planning to conduct propaganda and deception campaigns online using deepfake technology.
Last month, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused the US of waging “an unprecedented information campaign” against Russia since the start of the conflict in Ukraine. Washington and its allies “need war at any cost, and their favorite method of solving their own problems is provocations, disinformation and threats,” Zakharova argued.
Speaking about artificial intelligence in general, Blinken warned that the technology can backfire and “amplify discrimination and enable abuses.”
“It also runs the risk of strengthening autocratic governments, including by enabling them to exploit social media even more effectively to manipulate their people and sow division among and within their adversaries,” he said.
Since the release of the artificial intelligence bot ChatGPT last November, the debate over the dangers posed by AI has intensified in the industry and in academic circles. Geoffrey Hinton, who is known as one of the ‘godfathers’ of AI, warned last week that the technology could present a “more urgent” threat than climate change.
In March, several tech industry leaders, including Elon Musk, co-signed an open letter, urging a six-month pause in the development of AI technology more powerful than ChatGPT, and the appointment of an independent regulator to provide oversight in the field.
The US, Poland, & Germany Are Responsible For Russia Formally Withdrawing From The CFE Treaty
BY ANDREW KORYBKO | MAY 10, 2023
The Kremlin revealed on Wednesday that it’ll formally withdraw from the long-defunct Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) that it had already partially suspended participation in and then pulled out of its mechanisms in 2007 and 2015 respectively due to NATO failing to fulfill its commitments. This arms control pact did exactly what its name implies by limiting the deployment of conventional forces in Europe, the purpose of which was to preemptively avert future security dilemmas.
That noble goal was sabotaged by the US as part of its global power play that began after the former Bush Administration’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002 on the false pretext of needing to build a “missile defense shield” in Europe to protect against Iran and North Korea. In reality, this was actually aimed at eventually neutralizing Russia’s nuclear second-strike capabilities in order to place it in a position of nuclear blackmail so as to coerce never-ending concessions from it.
Despite being defunct for eight years already, Russia had thus far been reluctant to formally withdraw from the CFE Treaty since it held out hope (naively in hindsight) of US-led NATO once again complying with this pact as part of the larger deal that it sought to negotiate with the West. Even after Moscow was compelled to commence its special operation in Ukraine, its leadership still thought that the West’s return to the CFE Treaty could factor into a forthcoming peace treaty for reforming European security.
The timing behind this decision, being over one year since the start of this proxy war’s latest phase, suggests that some of the subsequent events that unfolded since then were most responsible for the Kremlin’s recalculations in this respect. In particular, this likely concerns the US, Poland, and Germany’s military buildup plans, which collectively leave no doubt about their intent to not even keep up the prior pretense of supposedly complying with the CFE.
Whatever well-intended but ultimately naïve hopes the Russian leadership previously had about this pact playing a role in a post-conflict peace agreement were shattered by these developments, but even then, there was a delay between their respective announcements and this decision. That was likely attributable to still holding out hope against the odds that these were mostly just rhetorical statements that wouldn’t be tangibly acted upon, yet now nobody can deny that these plans are indeed sincere.
America was going to deploy more assets to this theater no matter what since its leadership believed that this aligns with their unipolar hegemonic interests, but what Russia apparently didn’t expect was the gusto with which Poland would seek to exploit events to accelerate its rise as a regional power. The military-strategic complementarity between the US and Poland in this respect exacerbated the Kremlin’s threat assessment of their coordinated moves, which was made all the worse by Germany’s later on.
Chancellor Scholz waited until last December to signal his country’s hegemonic ambitions in a lengthy article for the influential Council on Foreign Relations’ official magazine, which were arguably influenced by its regional competition with Poland for leadership of Central & Eastern Europe (CEE). Accordingly, “Russia Needs To Once Again Brace Itself For A Prolonged Rivalry With Germany”, which is fighting tooth and nail not to cede control over the EU’s foreign and military policies to Poland.
The US is masterfully playing Germany and Poland off against one another as they compete to remain or become its top partner in Europe respectively, to which end they’re literally in an arms race with each other that’s driven by their shared desire to lead the continent’s containment of Russia. Amidst these newfound military-strategic dynamics, remaining party to the CFE in any capacity makes absolutely no sense, hence why the decision was finally made to formally withdraw from it.
Why American and Kiev regime media keep insisting Russian ‘Kinzhal’ hypersonic missile was shot down?
By Drago Bosnic | May 10, 2023
For approximately a week, the Kiev regime has been claiming it shot down one of Russia’s hypersonic missiles, specifically the 9-A-7660 “Kinzhal”. According to the unsubstantiated (to say the least) claims, on May 4, air defense units deployed in and around Kiev shot down one of the air-launched hypersonic missiles allegedly fired by Russian Aerospace Forces. Various local sources published images supposedly “proving” the incident took place. In the first two days, the news went largely unreported by non-Ukrainian sources, but on May 6, CNN, the infamous neoliberal mouthpiece and the flagship of the mainstream propaganda machine among news networks, broke the story in the political West.
According to CNN, commander of the Neo-Nazi junta’s air force, three-star General Mykola Oleshchuk, announced in a Telegram post that “a Russian ‘Kinzhal’ [commonly designated as Kh-47M2 by various media sources] was inbound until being successfully intercepted using American ‘Patriot’ missiles”. The intercept supposedly took place on Thursday night, with the Kiev regime forces claiming this is the first time the much-touted US “Patriot” SAM (surface-to-air missile) system shot down a target, and no less than a hypersonic one. The aforementioned images published by various sources show an object which indeed seems to have been hit by the “Patriot’s” kinetic kill vehicle.
“Yes, we shot down the ‘unique’ Kinzhal,” General Oleshchuk stated, adding: “It happened during the night time attack on May 4 in the skies of the Kyiv region.”
Oleshchuk claims that “the missile was launched by a MiG-31K jet from the Russian territory and was then shot down” with a missile fired by a battery of “Patriot” SAM systems. In a separate statement from Neo-Nazi junta’s air force spokesman Yurii Ihnat, given to Kiev-based Channel 24, he was boasting about the US-made “Patriot’s” supposedly “proven” capabilities:
“They were saying that the ‘Patriot’ is an outdated American weapon, and Russian weapons are the best in the world. Well, there is confirmation that it effectively works against even a super hypersonic missile… … successful interception of the ‘Kinzhal’ is a slap in the face for Russia.”
However, no military analyst worth his salt has ever taken these claims even remotely seriously. The images presented by the Kiev regime show an object that doesn’t even resemble the air-launched hypersonic “Kinzhal”. While it remains uncertain what sort of weapon the Neo-Nazi junta forces shot down, images show what looks like a KAB-1500L or perhaps a BetAB-500 ShP, both of which are laser-guided bombs. It’s also unclear which of “Patriot’s” several versions were used. The Kiev regime is known to have received one of the PAC-2 variants (MiM-104C, D and F), all of which have proven unable to shoot down even the old Iraqi “Scud” ballistic missiles during the First Gulf War in 1991.
There are reports that one of the newer PAC-3 versions has been delivered as well, but these claims are yet to be supported by any actual evidence. What’s more, this variant is also nowhere near the capabilities to shoot down even older supersonic missiles the Russian Aerospace Forces have been using extensively, let alone a maneuvering hypersonic missile such as the 9-A-7660 “Kinzhal”. On the other hand, even basic knowledge of how physics works makes Western and Kiev regime claims ridiculous. The images show that the Russian weapon was struck by the aforementioned kinetic kill vehicle, which in the PAC-2 variant flies at approximately 4000 km per hour.
The 9-A-7660 “Kinzhal’s” speed ranges from over 12,000 km per hour to almost 16,000 km per hour. If we were to imagine an interceptor missile flying at 4000 km per hour hitting another missile flying three or four times faster than that, can anyone really believe there would be anything more than a bunch of sparks, let alone a wreckage of any kind? Worse yet, the alleged “Russian ‘Kinzhal’ hypersonic missile” fell to the ground in a relatively good condition and was then even photographed and presented as supposed “evidence”. So, again, if nothing more than basic physics is taken into account, the claims become extremely difficult to even consider, let alone take at face value.
Even some Kiev regime media, such as The Kyiv Independent, almost immediately refuted the claims. Only a day after the incident, this outlet published that the Kiev regime forces have denied shooting down the “Kinzhal” over the capital city, because there were neither MiG-31K/I strike fighters nor 9-A-7660 “Kinzhals” in the air that night. However, this didn’t stop mainstream propaganda outlets from parroting the story. Considering the fact that the political West and its Kiev puppets are primarily fighting an infowar, this is the only viable explanation as to why they keep insisting that a Russian hypersonic missile was shot down.
It was only in late April that the Neo-Nazi junta confirmed the delivery of its first “Patriot” batteries from the US, Germany and the Netherlands. The system has had an atrocious track record against any sort of target, be it the Iraqi “Scuds” over 30 years ago or Houthi/Iranian drones nowadays. On the other hand, the political West is decades behind Russia in hypersonic weapons development, meaning that this propaganda story accomplishes at least two objectives – promotes US-made air defenses after decades of humiliating failures and “tarnishes” the reputation of Russian hypersonic missiles. The previous is also aimed to help the sales of US systems, just like the hype about the alleged successes of the HIMARS.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
They’re Coming To Take You Away
By Michael Lesher | Brownstone Institute | May 9, 2023
Suppose I tell you in advance that the essay you are reading is meant to startle you. And suppose I suggest, by way of demonstration, that two people as loosely connected as the leader of the “COVID Crisis Group” and Joe Biden’s “Special Envoy To Monitor and Combat Antisemitism” – both of whom have recently offered recommendations for improving political life in the United States – are in fact determined to unravel American freedoms.
Would you be surprised?
Well, if so, that is exactly the startling fact I am trying to bring to your attention. True, you may not have heard that the 34 COVID-19 “experts” headed by one Philip Zelikow (last seen justifying the concealment of information about the 9/11 attacks) and anti-Semitism “ambassador” Deborah Lipstadt – perhaps best known for slandering scads of Jewish survivors of the Nazis as “soft-core” Holocaust deniers because they objected to the massacre of 1,462 of Gaza’s civilians nine years ago – are both out to dismantle the Bill of Rights. But if you haven’t, it isn’t because they’ve been coy about their objectives.
Take the Zelikow panel. Its new book on “the lessons learned from COVID-19” openly conflates the federal government’s management of a respiratory virus with “wartime” – thus rationalizing the executive branch’s preemption of democratic government. Not only that, Zelikow and his band of “experts” explicitly call for the consolidation of power in the hands of an unelected “health security enterprise” that would control, among other things, a “systematic biomedical surveillance network.” And in case you can’t guess who is likely to benefit from the snooping, the panel goes on to praise the coercive experimental drug program that gave us the COVID-19 “vaccines” – “a bargain at $30 billion,” according to the editors of the Washington Post – signaling at one stroke the experts’ contempt for the Nuremberg Code and their subservience to Big Pharma.
As for Lipstadt, she has launched her attack on the First Amendment by redefining “anti-Semitism” so as to include an extraordinary range of political speech. Her first step in that transformation is the familiar trick of confusing criticism of the Israeli government with anti-Jewish bigotry. But her second step is newer and, arguably, even more disturbing: she tars all denigration of Jews with the hot-button label “conspiracy theory.”
Let’s be clear: however noble the pretext of opposing Jew-hatred, it should be obvious that once you characterize anti-Semitism as a “conspiracy theory” you have made a case for censorship. As Lipstadt herself explained to Jane Eisner of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism (in an interview printed in the latest AARP Magazine but not available online): “[I]t’s a conspiracy theory that Jews control the media, the banks, the election process, etc. If you believe that there is a group controlling these things, then essentially you’re saying that you don’t believe in democracy.”
And there’s the trouble. After all, an overt attack on democracy isn’t a viewpoint; it isn’t even an expression of run-of-the-mill bigotry. It’s a threat to the state. And it follows, if you accept Lipstadt’s formulation, that anyone the government can label an “anti-Semite” may now be punished in the same way the Biden administration is already punishing people who protested the presidential election results of November 2020. Note, too, the selective parameters of the offense: blaming Donald Trump’s election on the Russians is presumably “legitimate” speech; but accusing a “group” of controlling “the election process” can land you in jail – that is, when the “group” is not an official enemy but a favored minority, and when that “process” has reached results endorsed by those in power.
So the Zelikow panel and Ambassador Lipstadt can’t be accused of hiding their illiberal goals. Like the Democratic lynch mob that denounced Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger on the floor of Congress last March for revealing the extent of government censorship of Twitter, these propagandists quite openly assert that surveillance is good for us, while free speech is entirely too dangerous to be entrusted to mere citizens.
“Ordinary folks and national security agencies responsible for our security,” Congressman Colin Allred lectured Taibbi, “are trying their best to find a way to make sure that our online discourse doesn’t get people hurt, or see our democracy undermined.” It’s pretty breathtaking to watch an African-American liberal solemnly declare that the CIA and the FBI are the true guardians of democracy – not to mention his defense of the security state’s behind-the-scenes censorship of political speech. But what’s even more ominous is that not a single prominent Democratic politician nor a single pundit in mainstream liberal media has repudiated anything the congressman said.
Is it any wonder, then, that no one in mainstream media has mentioned the totalitarian tendencies implicit in the COVID Crisis Group’s recommendations for “pandemic” regulation via dismantling democracy, or in Ambassador Lipstadt’s appeals to the public to “discredit” anti-Semitism by recasting it as a criminal conspiracy?
Of course it isn’t. And that is my point. That is my motive in writing in tandem about these two apparently disparate subjects, connected only by the facts that both of them involve recent public declarations and that both of them represent attacks on fundamental liberties.
Because the truth is that condemning freedom is now so entirely respectable that it’s happening practically everywhere – under every possible pretext, almost any day, from just about any left-liberal institution that claims to care about the public good. Close your eyes, and you can hardly tell whether what you’re hearing is coming from a Democratic Party stalwart or from an old-line Soviet apologist explaining why Andrei Sakharov or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Yuri Orlov is really, notwithstanding the accuracy of what he’s been saying, a threat to the state who deserves to be muzzled or jailed.
And the media’s silence about it all is as ominous as the Orwellian nattering of the freedom-haters themselves.
Take another look at the Zelikow panel’s assessment of the US government’s performance during the “COVID crisis.” Writing about what the “experts” praise or blame in their report, the Washington Post never once mentions the crippling of the US working-class economy due to arbitrary confinements and business shutdowns, the educational damage done to a whole generation of children through needless school closures, the reckless suspension of representative democracy in four-fifths of our states, the medically unjustifiable trauma caused by “mask mandates,” or the undermining of the national healthcare system through an obsessive focus on one respiratory virus while more serious issues were sidelined for over a year. As far as the Post is concerned, the real outrages of the COVID coup never happened at all.
Even when the experts and the editors do manage to notice something sinister, they go out of their way to miss the point. The Zelikow panel specifically notes the “four pandemic planning exercises” staged by the US government barely a year before the announcement of the COVID-19 outbreak. And it offers a few technical criticisms of the proceedings.
But neither the panel nor the Post editors’ congratulatory summary of its conclusions addresses the fact that the exercises – which omitted any suggestion for using repurposed drugs as early treatment for a novel virus, as in all previous influenza-like outbreaks – made a point of discussing the importance of thought-policing social media. That prescription for censorship became a grim reality after March 2020. But you’d never know it from reading the Zelikow panel’s assessment of the government’s mistakes in addressing the “pandemic.”
And Lipstadt? She claims to be a passionate defender of free speech. But that didn’t stop her from smearing Senator Ron Johnson as a “white nationalist sympathizer” because of his politically incorrect comments about Black Lives Matter. And when that issue made it to the op-ed page of the New York Times, it was only to further demonize Johnson; Lipstadt’s slander got a pass.
Why do I worry so much about this? Well, first of all because an attack on freedom is an attack on all of us.
But I think there is a special reason for alarm. It’s not just that our ruling elites believe that we, the people, need to be stripped of our right to free expression. I’m afraid that the freedom-haters clustered around our figurehead President are not even aware just how thin the ice is onto which they’re propelling us. Their position (taking the most charitable possible view of it) runs something like this: if the public isn’t exposed to views of which the censors disapprove, hoi polloi will meekly accept whatever policies are imposed on them (for their own good, of course).
But the censors are wrong. The fabric of American political life has been strained to such tautness that a single acute crisis might rupture it altogether. And if that happens, people who have been deprived of reasonable dissent will not shrink from violent opposition; on the contrary, they will embrace it. When the monolithic narrative that is all they have been taught lies in ruins, they will replace it not with a rational, informed alternative – for they will know of none – but with whatever satisfies the rage of a population that realizes, too late, that it has been hoodwinked.
Woe to the freedom-haters when the lion they think they have tamed turns its fury on the liberal society that soothsayers like Zelikow and Lipstadt still imagine they are defending!
Imran Khan’s Arrest Will Bring Pakistan’s Year-Long Crisis Much Closer To Its End Game
BY ANDREW KORYBKO | MAY 9, 2023
The post-modern coup that removed former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan from office last April as punishment for his multipolar foreign policy catalyzed cascading crises across the economic, judicial, political, and security spheres that have shaken this South Asian state to its core. The US-backed regime that was installed in his place refuses to hold free and fair elections as early as possible since they know they’d lose after the former premier’s PTI party won multiple by-elections over the past year.
During that same time, the post-modern coup regime viciously cracked down on society by abducting dissidents and censoring the media out of desperation to retain power. Far from pressuring the Pakistani people into silence and forcing them to accept what Khan calls their imported government, they continued peacefully protesting for the right to exercise their democratic will sooner than later. Only upon resolving Pakistan’s political crisis in that manner, these patriots believe, can the other ones then be tackled.
To their credit, they remained committed to this path despite last November’s assassination attempt against Khan that he blamed on The Establishment, the raid on his home in mid-March, and the Interior Minister’s continued death threats against him. Their red line was always that he wasn’t to be arrested on trumped-up charges as part of the post-modern coup regime’s lawfare since this scenario would pose a threat to his life due to The Establishment’s reputation and also likely doom any democratic solution.
That red line was just crossed after dozens of Ranger paramilitary forces stormed an Islamabad courthouse to abduct him on Tuesday in a move that former PTI Human Rights Minister Shireen Mazari described “as if (they were) invading an occupied land”. Nationwide protests were organized in response and are still occurring at the time of this analysis’ publication, but the post-modern coup regime might exploit this reaction to justify a conventional military coup in the worst-case scenario.
The Establishment’s latest power play is extremely dangerous since these stakeholders already know very well how polarized society has become over the past year. They could have responsibly exerted influence on their political proxies that replaced Khan after last April’s regime change to organize free and fair elections as early as possible in order to serve as a pressure valve. That could have averted the cascading crises that followed and just risked reaching their breaking point on Tuesday.
Some sort of pragmatic working arrangement could still have been brokered between them and the PTI in theory upon the latter returning to power as expected in that case, yet no such outcome appears possible now after The Establishment crossed the opposition’s red line as part of their power play. They’re practically daring people to publicly defy them and thus put their lives on the line, yet a large number of them are doing precisely that out of patriotic fervor since they fear losing their country.
In their minds, a new dark age is rapidly descending upon Pakistan, which might never restore the sovereignty that it’s losing by the day as a result of the cascading crises catalyzed by last April’s regime change. They can’t in good conscience sit back and let this happen without knowing in their hearts that they tried doing something tangible to stop it. This explains why they’re literally risking their lives right now protesting against Khan’s abduction and all that it entails for their country’s democratic future.
At present, it appears unlikely that The Establishment will relent by releasing him and pressuring their political proxies to publicly agree on a date for holding free and fair elections sometime in the very near future, but that doesn’t mean that their calculations might not change. In any case, it’s clear that Pakistan’s year-long crisis is reaching its end game since there are really only two mutually exclusive outcomes that are possible: a chance at true democracy or continuing to languish under dictatorship.
Syria’s Return to Arab League Shows US Gulf Allies Tired of ‘Regime Change’
By James Tweedie – Sputnik – 09.05.2023
Syria’s secular government is still standing after more than a decade of sectarian terrorist insurgency backed by the US and its regional allies. Independent investigative journalist Christopher Helali said its readmittance to the Arab League was a sign of waning US power in the Middle East.
Return of Damascus to the bosom of the Arab League after 11 years of pariah status shows the failure of the US doctrine of regime change, a journalist says.
The regional group of nations voted on Sunday to reverse its 2012 decision to expel the Syrian Arab Republic over President Bashar al-Assad’s resistance to religious-sectarian ‘rebels’ backed by the Western powers and several of the Gulf monarchies.
The tide of the conflict turned in 2015 with Russia’s military assistance, helping to break the sieges of Aleppo and other cities alongside volunteers from Iraq and Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Christopher Helali told Sputnik that the major change of stance by the Arab nations was “part of the ongoing geopolitical shifts that we’re seeing in the wider region.”
“Syria being allowed back into the Arab League is certainly a coup, not only for the Arab countries, but I think for countries like China behind the scenes who have been pushing diplomacy and pushing rapprochement between different sides in the Syrian civil war,” Helali said.
The welcome back for Damascus and President Bashar al-Assad showed there was “no more appetite for regime change” or for backing the “alphabet soup of jihadist groups” funded and armed by Washington — the al-Nusra Front, Islamic State, various al-Qaida affiliates and the Free Syrian Army (FSA).
Those sectarian terrorist forces were supported by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and possibly Qatar and Jordan, the journalist said.
The journalist noted there was “growing discontent” among the Arab states over how the conflict has progressed and its unwanted effects. “People are saying, okay, let’s just let’s finish it and let’s send a lot of these refugees back.”
The other question is who Assad must negotiate with to finally end the 12-year conflict, given the Gulf monarchies previous insistence on a political “transition” that brings the “rebels” into the mainstream.
Those groups have been “allowing different Western journalists there to show that ‘we are moderate rebels… we are Islamists, but we’re not fanatical like ISIS, even though they are underground’,” Helali said.
“Ultimately, Assad would have to speak to the great power brokers in this conflict — the people who supported those groups. So you’d have to think about Turkiye, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, the United States, Russia, Iran, everybody would have to be at the table,” he continued. “But of course, nobody’s coming to that table except for the people already on Assad’s side. Plus Turkiye, because it’s being pushed to find a settlement, especially for the northern part of Syria, especially by Russia and as well as Iran.”
The elephant in the room remains the illegal US occupation of north-eastern Syria, with its concentration of lucrative oil fields, along with its outpost at al-Tanf in the southern desert near the border with Jordan.
“There can be no peace plan, there can be no situation in which everything is resolved so long as foreign troops, including US troops, still occupy sovereign Syrian territory and so long as arms and equipment and funding keeps funnelling in to Syria, to other armed groups,” Helali stressed.
“Once that stops and once there can be sovereignty over in territorial integrity, Syria reclaiming all of its borders, then there can be some plan. But that plan will have to be Syrian-led” and not imposed form outside, he said.
The ultimate significance the republic’s return to the League is the tacit admission that the US-led plan to overthrow Syria’s government failed — with disastrous consequences for her neighbours.
“What the Arab League is saying is that we’ve tried, it’s failed. Assad is here to stay and we have to find some normalization because we’re also dealing with millions of refugees in the region,” Helali said. “There has to be some political resolution to this conflict so that people can return home. Turkiye has 5 million Syrian refugees. Everybody wants a resolution to this.”
The Difference Between Secrets and Lies
Can the White House even understand the difference?
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • MAY 9, 2023
Recent developments in Washington relating to Ukraine and the Middle East remind me that there is a big difference between maintaining secrecy when a situation warrants it and lying over issues where there is no compelling reason to do so beyond political expediency. Having spent more than twenty years in American intelligence agencies where secrecy was the operative norm, I would illustrate that difference as follows: a legitimate secret would be something like not revealing information that would place people or vital national interests in jeopardy, while a lie would be committing a crime and fabricating a narrative that would deny or obfuscate that anything dire had actually taken place. When it comes to lying, I am, of course, referring to the bizarre behavior by the United States government, most particularly ever since 9/11, to commit war crimes and then come up with reasons for its foreign and national security policies to have taken a singular aggressive and coercive turn not justified by reality or by any real threat. That shift in behavior has had a profoundly negative consequence, with much of the world now inclined to identify the United States as the most dangerous country globally speaking in terms of being the greatest threat to peace among nations.
One might reasonably award the gold medal for creative destruction in that light to the Administration of George W. Bush, which elevated lying to a level hitherto hardly imagined in Washington. Bush had a neocon dominated foreign policy team, concentrated in the Pentagon with Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Doug Feith and with Scooter Libby in the Vice President’s office, which did not hesitate to stovepipe fabricated information through the system to justify a totally fraudulent war against Iraq. The conspirators, most of whom were Jews who had close ties to the Israeli government, were supportive of the Jewish state’s desire to have the US attack Baghdad. They were joined in their drive to war by a hapless Secretary of State Colin Powell, a woefully ignorant National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and a ruthlessly ambitious George Tenet at CIA to go along for the ride. Within that context, what the president of the United States actually thought, if he was thinking at all, remains unknowable. The result was the catastrophe of Iraq, with hundreds of thousands of dead civilians over a totally invented threat of “weapons of mass destruction” in the hands of Saddam Hussein. Currently, twenty years after the event, Washington still has soldiers in Iraq even though the Iraqi parliament has repeatedly asked them to leave.
Interestingly, however, what played out under George Bush was child’s play compared to the contemporary political environment where the media has joined the Joe Biden Administration in lying about nearly everything. This has included an act of war committed against both a nuclear armed adversary and an ally in the form of the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, which was clearly carried out by the United States against Russia and Germany after Biden even incoherently warned publicly that he would do it. Since investigative journalist Seymour Hersh blew the lid off the story, the US and its captive media have responded by helping to float a completely implausible alternative tale of how it may have been accomplished by a handful of rogue Ukrainians operating off a fishing boat. Russian attempts to get the incident investigated by the United Nations and/or the International Criminal Court (ICC) have been successfully blocked by the US, which has in response supported a British jurist’s successful attempt to get the Russians themselves investigated for war crimes by the ICC.
In the latest edition of lies and more lies, the US is hanging out to dry a twenty-one year old Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira whom it is charging with stealing and making public on an internet chat room highly classified national security related information. The airman might indeed be guilty of having done just that though his motive continues to be elusive and his actual ability to access some of the material he obtained is questionable. More to the point, however, is the back story, which is that the documents reveal that the Ukrainians are clearly losing the war against Russia, prompting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to seek both NATO membership and newer longer-range weapons so he can hit Russia directly and hard enough to bring the US and NATO directly and fully into the conflict. The recent possible attempt to kill Vladimir Putin using a drone may be part of such planning and, if it had come closer to being successful, the Russian overwhelming response would likely have escalated the conflict to produce a disaster of possibly global proportions.
The leaked intelligence suggests that Ukraine will not be able to defend its airspace at all after this month and will also soon be running out of ammunition. These “facts” were known to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin when he testified several weeks ago that the Kiev was winning its war against Moscow. Biden, for his part re the conduct of the war, has continued to deny that US soldiers are “boots on the ground” engaged in Ukraine. The leaked documents demonstrate that he is also either lying or poorly informed about that. The only intelligence item that seems to reflect some measure of acknowledgeable truth is the information indicating that there is no intention on the part of Washington to take steps to initiate peace talks to put an end to the fighting in 2023. That is clearly what the White House wants going into the 2024 elections, where Joe Biden or whoever succeeds him will want to look like a “war president,” a vigilant defender of the United States to appeal to voters.
From the viewpoint of a tax paying American citizen, the fact that the US Treasury has given or promised well in excess of $100 billion to a hopelessly corrupt Ukrainian government to oppose a nuclear-armed Russia that did not threaten the United States in any way prior to the fighting breaking out last February should be significant. And what happened to the so-called War Powers Act requiring Congress to make a declaration of war? So where is the upside of all of this for the American people?
And there’s more. There is also the recent revelation, also from Sy Hersh, that Volodymyr Zelensky and his gang of crooks have stolen $400 million from the cash provided by the Biden Administration to buy diesel fuel for the Ukrainian Army. The fraud was discovered by the CIA, whose Director William Burns actually personally confronted Zelensky with the numbers and names of those involved in January. Zelensky and his profiteers carried out their project by obtaining the money from the United States Treasury at the US petrodollar rate per gallon plus shipping costs before turning around and buying the fuel from cheaper suppliers located regionally, including the Lukoil Neftohim Burgas refinery located in Bulgaria. The difference then disappeared into the pockets of Zelensky and his generals. And where did the less expensive fuel come from? Mostly from Russia and also from Iran!
To be sure there has been some pushback from a small group of mostly Republican congressmen. Matt Gaetz has introduced a bill in the House of Representatives requiring the White House to provide full information, to include “copies of any and all documents outlining plans for military assistance to Ukraine. Additionally, the resolution directs Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to disclose the number of United States Armed Forces, including special operators, deployed to Ukraine without Congressional authority. The Biden Administration and other allied countries have been misleading the world on the state of the war in Ukraine. There must be total transparency from this administration to the American people when they are gambling war with a nuclear adversary by having special forces operating in Ukraine.”
Maverick GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene also got into it with her GOP colleagues after she praised the alleged leaker of the Pentagon documents due to his exposure of the lies surrounding the Ukraine war. She said “Jack Teixeira is white, male, Christian, and antiwar. That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime. And he told the truth about troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more. Ask yourself who is the real enemy?” Senator Lindsey Graham as well as the Republican Party leadership immediately jumped on Greene, denouncing her for being against the war. Graham, who recently advocated invading Mexico to solve America’s drug problem, in particular dubbed her response “one of the most irresponsible statements she could make,” adding that it would “destroy America’s ability to defend itself.”
Former CIA Director John Brennan also denounced Greene’s comments, declaring that “From my perspective, I think Marjorie Taylor Greene has demonstrated time and time again that she’s not fit to hold public office…” Recall for a moment that Brennan was himself one of the most disastrous CIA Directors to ever hold office. He advocated torture of “terrorists” by the Agency as well as “signature” drone strikes to kill suspects on the ground in the Middle East and Asia. He collaborated with efforts to derail the Donald Trump campaign and signed on to a letter in October 2020 claiming that Trump’s re-election campaign might well be benefitting from a Russian disinformation operation, an initiative that may have influenced the election outcome. On one occasion, after a Trump meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2018, Brennan observed that “Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors.’ It was nothing short of ‘treasonous.’ Not only were Trump’s comments ‘imbecilic,’ he is wholly in the pocket of Putin.”
The exchanges with the GOP as well as from nearly all Democrats serve as one more indication that the problem with the United States government is systemic: going to war while also denigrating critics and then lying about it all to avoid a perceived problem is always the preferred option for both the White House and Congress. No matter who wins in 2024, with the possible exceptions of Robert Kennedy Jr. or Tulsi Gabbard, the outcome in terms of a fractured and incoherent foreign policy that actually itself threatens the United States at every level will be roughly the same.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Serbian president reveals what West wants him to do
RT | May 9, 2023
The West has not given up on steamrolling Serbia into imposing sanctions on Russia, the country’s president, Aleksandar Vucic, has revealed. However, he said Belgrade has so far been able to resist the pressure.
Speaking to Serbia’s Happy TV channel on Monday, Vucic said that “whoever comes [to Belgrade feels their] first obligation is to explain to me that I am a jerk who did not introduce sanctions.”
The Serbian head of state acknowledged that he had already gotten used to constant “pressure [and] ultimatums” from Western representatives.
Last month, the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee slammed Serbia for its failure to join the EU sanctions against Russia, and urged Belgrade to shut down Russian “disinformation” outlets, including RT Balkans.
The US State Department also called for a ban on the media outlet, which began broadcasting in November 2022.
Speaking in mid-March, President Vucic reiterated that his government’s “position is to not impose sanctions” on Moscow over its actions in Ukraine. He made it clear that this could be changed only in “circumstances when there is no way out.”
His remark came in response to calls made earlier that month by the country’s Economy Minister Rade Basta on social media. Basta argued that Belgrade should impose punitive measures because Western pressure was becoming unbearable.
The minister quickly came under fire from within his own party for his comments.
Serbia has resisted pressure from the EU and the US to sanction Russia, citing, among other things, the apparent discrepancy between Western demands that Belgrade recognize the independence of the breakaway province of Kosovo and their simultaneous insistence on Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
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From the Archives
USS Liberty Massacre: A Pivotal Moment in the Hostile Takeover of America
By Kevin Barrett | Crescent | Dhu al-Qa’dah 24, 1445
In corporate America, hostile takeovers are commonplace. They occur when an aggressor—a larger corporation or rich individuals—seizes control of a smaller corporation without asking permission.
What few recognize is that the United States itself has been subjected to a hostile takeover. Since the aggressor, the illegitimate settler colony known as “Israel,” is much smaller than the US, the takeover has necessarily been surreptitious.
As of June, 2024, Israel’s gradual takeover of the US has become obvious and undeniable—a proverbial “elephant in the living room.” … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Seyed M. Marandi: US-Iran War Inevitable: Kuwait and Bahrain May Fall
- Leaders Condemn Ansarallah Attack on Saudi Arabia While Ignoring Illegal War Against Yemen
- Leaked: Britain’s Covert Iraqi Psyops Network
- Yemeni Armed Forces Warn Airlines Against Using Saudi Airports, Exempt Mecca and Medina
- Iran security chief says powers greater than US tried to conquer Iran but ended in ‘dustbin of history’
- Europe’s mounting social chaos… chickens coming home to roost for proxy war against Russia
- US-Russia Diesel Deal Becomes Massive Defeat for Ukraine
- Hormuz and the Looming Economic Catastrophe
- Dhubab offensive, media blitz and the rapid unraveling of Saudi-backed coalition’s new gambit
- Putin Conveys to Trump Iran’s Vision on Possible Conflict Resolution – Kremlin
- If Americans Knew
- Gaza: Ceasefire Anniversary Marks Year of Failed Promises
- The American Conservative: Mike Huckabee Should Resign
- A C-Section in Shackles: A Palestinian Woman’s Harrowing Birth in Israeli Detention
- ‘He’s Desperate’: AIPAC Begins Spending Against Abdul El-Sayed to Boost Mike Rogers:
- Trump, Hormuz, and the Looming Economic Catastrophe
- For three years, Israel has killed a child in Gaza every 71 minutes – Daily Update
- Israeli forces kill another child in Gaza – Daily Update
- Gaza ceasefire exists in name only, say more than 100 organizations
- Nearly 2 Million in Gaza Need Urgent Shelter Assistance as Winter Looms: IOM Chief Warns
- Suppressing Palestinian resistance: US charity under fire for AI monitoring of Gaza classrooms
- No Tricks Zone
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
