Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Liberal Interventionists and Neoconservatives Dominate US Foreign Policy

And the bad outcomes are predictable

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • MAY 10, 2022

Once upon a time United States foreign policy was based on actual national interests, but that was long ago and far away before the country was beguiled into a colonial war with Spain followed by a twentieth century that was chock-a-block full of any type and intensity of warfare that one might imagine, including the use of nuclear weapons. Some might consider that the United States has become a nation made by war, to include a presumption that all the war-making has been both just and necessary, since America is “exceptional” and by default “the leader of the Free World.” Witness what is taking place vis-à-vis Ukraine and Russia right now, pressing forward with a full-scale economic war against Moscow while arming one of the belligerents in support of no actual national interest, as if by habit. The propensity of American politicians to resort to arms to compensate for their other failures is such that among circles in Washington and the media there has long been a joke making the rounds observing that no matter who is nominated and elected president we always wind up with John McCain. But if one is seriously concerned about the tendency of the United States to view nearly every foreign problem as solvable if only one uses enough military force, the joke might be updated to suggest that we Americans now always wind up with the Kagans, the first family of neoconservative/neoliberal advocates for an aggressive, interventionist US foreign policy.

Victoria Nuland, the architect of the disaster in Ukraine and a Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton protege, is married to Robert Kagan and now serving as number three in the State Department. Robert is the Stephen & Barbara Friedman Senior Fellow with the Project on International Order and Strategy in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings and is also a regular contributing columnist at The Washington Post. His brother is Fred, currently a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Fred’s wife Kimberley is head of the aptly named Institute for the Study of War.

When Congress-critters want to justify a new war, they frequently cite judgements made by one of the various groups associated with the Kagans. Robert is a frequent contributor to the national media both in interviews and opinion pieces calling inevitably for harsh measures against countries like Russia and Iran while Fred uses his bully pulpit to argue in favor of a large increases in military spending to counter “future threats.” Fred and Robert are members of the Aspen Strategy Group. They and their father, Donald, were all signatories to the neocon Project for the New American Century manifesto, Rebuilding America’s Defenses (2000).

Characteristically, the Kagan brothers love war but expect someone else to do the fighting. They are both considerably overweight and could never pass a military entrance physical if they were so inclined, which, of course they are not. The Kagans have been closely tied to the Democratic Party on many social issues and would likely describe themselves as liberal interventionists as well as neocons, since in practice both labels mean the same thing in terms of an assertive foreign policy backed by force. Plus, their flexibility gives them access to the foreign policy establishments of both major parties, as also does their support of Israeli interests in the Middle East, to include outspoken support of the Iraq War and for a covert war against Iran.

The Kagans are labeled by many as conservative, but they are not reliably Republican. Donald Trump was much troubled during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns by so-called conservatives who rallied behind the #NeverTrump banner, presumably in opposition to his stated intention to end or at least diminish America’s role in wars in the Middle East and Asia. The Kagans were foremost among those pundits. Robert was one of the first neocons to get on the #NeverTrump band wagon back in 2016 when he endorsed Hillary Clinton for president and spoke at a Washington fundraiser for her, complaining about the “isolationist” tendency in the Republican Party exemplified by Trump. Many other notable neocons also declared themselves to be #NeverTrump, including Bill Kristol, Bret Stephens, Daniel Pipes, Reuel Gerecht, Max Boot and Jonah Goldberg.

To be sure, some high-profile neocons stuck with the Republicans, to include the highly controversial Elliott Abrams, who initially opposed Trump but later became the point man for dealing with both Venezuela and Iran, attracted by Trump’s hardline with both countries. Abrams’ conversion reportedly took place when he realized that the new president genuinely embraced unrelenting hostility towards Iran in particular as exemplified by his ending of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. John Bolton was also for a time a neocon in the White House fold, though he later became an enemy after being fired by the president and then wrote a book critical of Trump.

Even though the NeverTrumper neocons did not succeed in blocking Donald Trump in 2016, they maintained relevancy by slowly drifting back towards the Democratic Party, which is where they originated back in the 1970s in the office of the Senator from Boeing Henry “Scoop” Jackson. A number of them started their political careers there, to include leading neocon Richard Perle.

It would not be overstating the case to suggest that the neoconservative movement together with its liberal interventionist colleagues are dominating foreign policy thinking across the board in Congress and the White House. That development has been aided by a more aggressive shift among the Democrats themselves, with Russiagate and other “foreign interference” still to this day being blamed for the party’s failure in 2016 and for its dreary prospects in midterm elections later this year. Given that mutual intense hostility to Trump, the doors to previously shunned liberal media outlets have now opened wide to the stream of foreign policy “experts” who want to “restore a sense of the heroic” to US national security policy. Eliot A. Cohen and David Frum have been favored contributors to the Atlantic while Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss were together at the New York Times prior to Weiss’s resignation. Jennifer Rubin, who wrote in 2016 that “It is time for some moral straight talk: Trump is evil incarnate,” is a frequent columnist for The Washington Post while both she and William Kristol appear regularly on MSNBC. Russian-Jewish import hardliner Max Boot is a regular feature contributor at the Post.

The unifying principle that ties many of the mostly Jewish neocons together is, of course, unconditional defense of Israel and everything it does, which leads them to support a policy of American global military dominance which they presume will inter alia serve as a security umbrella for the Jewish state. In the post-9/11 world, the neocon media’s leading publication Bill Kristol’s The Weekly Standard virtually invented the concept of “Islamofascism” to justify endless war in the Middle East, a development that has killed millions of Muslims, destroyed at least three nations, and cost the US taxpayer more than $5 trillion. The Israel connection has also resulted in neocon political and media support for the currently highly aggressive and dangerous policy against Russia, due in part to its involvement in defense of Israeli target Syria. In Eastern Europe, neocon ideologues have aggressively exploited the largely illusory policy of “democracy promotion,” which, not coincidentally, has also been a major Democratic Party foreign policy objective, both coming together nicely to justify the current chaos in Ukraine.

The neocons and liberal interventionists are involved in a number of foundations, the most prominent of which is the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), that are largely funded by Jewish billionaires and defense contractors. FDD is headed by Canadian Mark Dubowitz and it is reported that the group takes direction coming from officials in the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Other major neocon incubators are the American Enterprise Institute, which currently is the home of Paul Wolfowitz, and the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at John Hopkins University.

Many former Barack Obama White House senior officials who believe in liberal interventionism and democracy promotion while also hating Russia and Vladimir Putin have developed comfortable working relationships with the neocons. Foreign policy hawks including Antony Blinken, Wendy Sherman, Nicholas Burns, Susan Rice and Samantha Power are calling most of the shots given Biden’s senility but with neocon political and media support.

Unfortunately, nowhere in Biden’s foreign policy circle does one find anyone who is resistant to the idea of worldwide interventionism in support of claimed humanitarian objectives, even if it would lead to an actual shooting war with major competitor power Russia and also possibly China. In fact, Biden himself embraces a characteristically extremely bellicose view on a proper relationship with foreign nations “claiming that he is defending democracy against its enemies.” His language and authoritarian governing style leave no wiggle room for constructive dialogue with adversaries. The script being written by his Administration on how to deal with the rest of the world promises nothing but unending trouble and quite possibly sharp economic decline in the US for the foreseeable future.

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.

May 10, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Sanctions hurt US more than Russia – poll

Samizdat | May 10, 2022

A poll published on Saturday found that 53% of Americans believe that sanctions on Moscow hurt the US more than Russia. Amid soaring gas prices and a rising cost of living, voters are losing confidence in US President Joe Biden’s leadership, and 43% say they’re “OK” with Ukraine losing its ongoing conflict with Russia.

With inflation at a 40-year peak and gas prices near record highs, the Democracy Institute/Express.co.uk poll revealed that Biden is polling negatively in all policy areas, with foreign policy the worst. Some 56% disapprove of his handling of foreign matters, compared to 40% approving. On Ukraine specifically, only 38% approve of his stewardship, while 52% disapprove.

The Biden administration has attempted to blame Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, for the rising cost of living at home, with his officials repeatedly referring to “Putin’s price hike.” However, living costs were rising for months before Russia sent troops into Ukraine, and voters are pointing the finger at Biden for their economic woes.

Some 50% said they’d back Republicans in November’s midterm elections, compared with 42% saying they’d vote Democrat. In addition to more voters being “OK” than “not OK” with Ukraine losing the conflict with Russia (43%-41%), more Americans think it would be better for Biden to leave office than for Putin to step down, by 53% to 44%.

Biden has sanctioned the Russian banking and energy sectors, and his administration has sent nearly $4 billion worth of weapons to Ukraine, with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin promising last month to “move heaven and earth” to finance Kiev’s fighting. The US president has also asked Congress to approve another $33 billion aid package for Ukraine – of which $20 billion would be earmarked for military aid – and on Monday signed the Lend-Lease Act of 2022, allowing Washington to send unlimited quantities of arms to Kiev.

In the eyes of the Kremlin, this deluge of weapons plus the US and NATO’s intelligence-sharing arrangements with Kiev mean that the West is “essentially going to war with Russia through a proxy.”

American voters, however, are not as earnest as the Biden administration in fuelling this war. According to the latest poll, they consider Russia the fourth biggest threat to the US at 16%, behind North Korea (18%), Iran (20%), and China (40%).

“Americans were very pro sanctions at first, [but] they are not as keen on the sanctions as they were,” Democracy Institute Director Patrick Basham told Express. “Biden made these predictions at the outset – the ruble would be rubble, we were going to crash the Russian economy, people will rise up, Putin will be out, the Russians will run away from Ukraine … [but] none of those things have happened.”

This difference between expectation and reality has made people cynical, he claimed, comparing the apparent loss of trust to public disillusionment with coronavirus policies throughout the West.

“The problem [now] is that at least half of the country in America thinks they were hoodwinked over a lot of the Covid stuff, so they are even more cynical about government and media than they were two years ago,” he said.

May 10, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Brazil rejected US oil request

Samizdat | May 10, 2022

The US asked Brazil in March to increase its crude oil output to curb soaring prices amid international sanctions against Russia, but Brazil refused, Reuters reported on Tuesday.

US government officials approached Brazil’s state-run oil company Petrobras, the outlet quoted its sources as saying, as crude prices started to rise against the backdrop of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine and the ensuing international sanctions.

The officials came away empty-handed, however, as Petrobras said that output levels were determined by business strategy rather than diplomacy and also that a significant short-term production boost would not be logistically possible, Reuters says.

Brazil is the world’s 11th largest oil exporter, with most of its crude going to China, the US, and India, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC).

Also in March, the US approached Venezuela, which has the world’s largest proven oil reserves, offering to ease some of the sanctions on the country in exchange for increased oil exports to the US. However, Washington later backtracked on the issue.

Washington banned the import of Russian oil in early March, with US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm saying that the country was on “war footing,” and calling on domestic producers to boost output. Last year, the US got 8% of its total petroleum imports from Russia, according to the US Energy Information Administration, with other major suppliers being Canada, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia.

May 10, 2022 Posted by | Economics | , | Leave a comment

FDA Just Fast-Tracked a Vaccine for Alzheimer’s

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | May 10, 2022

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted fast track designation to UB-311, a vaccine for Alzheimer’s disease made by biotechnology company Vaxxinity.1 The shot is an anti-amyloid beta immunotherapeutic vaccine that reportedly treats Alzheimer’s disease by targeting aggregated amyloid beta in the brain.2

Aside from the potential problems that can arise when a vaccine is rushed to market, the vaccine may be problematic from the get-go because amyloid beta may be a symptom of Alzheimer’s — not the cause — and could even have a protective role in the disease process.3

Fast-tracking a vaccine that’s targeting an isolated element of Alzheimer’s disease that is not the underlying cause is destined to be a massive disaster.

Alzheimer’s Vaccine Being Fast-Tracked to Market

UB-311 is being touted for eliciting a “robust and durable anti-amyloid beta antibody responses in patients,” according to Vaxxinity.4 Phase 1, Phase 2a and Phase 2a long-term extension trials have already been completed, with the company stating that the vaccine was “well tolerated in mild-to-moderate AD patients over three years of repeat dosing, with a safety profile comparable to placebo and no cases of amyloid-related imaging abnormalities-edema (“ARIA-E”) in the main study.”5

ARIA-E, a marker of fluid retention and microhemorrhages in the brain, occurs in about one-third of people taking the Alzheimer’s drug aducanumab (brand name Aduhelm).6 Similar to UB-311, Aduhelm was brought to market under an accelerated approval pathway by the FDA, despite uncertainty about the clinical benefit.7 The action sparked protests within the FDA advisory panel, and three members subsequently resigned.8

As an amyloid beta-directed antibody drug, Aduhelm also works by targeting amyloid beta in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease, but the findings of ARIA-E in many taking the drugs are alarming. Adam Brickman with Columbia University, New York City, suggested that the drug could potentially make cognitive decline worse instead of better. “It’s hard to put a positive spin on the neuroimaging abnormalities,” he wrote. “… [W]e simply do not know the long-term consequences.”9

While Vaxxinity is touting no cases of ARIA-E among its subjects as a success, the same holds true about the vaccine in that no one knows the long-term consequences. Vaxxinity has planned a Phase 2b trial for late 2022.10 It’s worth noting that drug development for Alzheimer’s has so far been a dismal failure, with at least 300 failed trials to date.11

One study, which was a collaboration between Washington University in St. Louis, drug companies Eli Lilly and Roche, the National Institutes of Health and others, involved 194 participants, of which 52 took Roche’s drug gantenerumab and 52 took Eli Lilly’s solanezumab.12

The drugs were intended to remove amyloid beta (Aβ) from the brain, but they failed to achieve the primary outcome of the study, which was slowed cognitive decline, as measured by tests on thinking and memory.

In fact, while the drugs did target amyloid beta, they had no effect on cognitive measures, with the researchers writing, “Both drugs engaged their Aβ targets but neither demonstrated a beneficial effect on cognitive measures compared to controls.”13

Is Amyloid Beta the Problem?

Even if drugs reduce amyloid beta plaques in Alzheimer’s patients, how this translates to affecting cognitive decline remains to be seen. While Alzheimer’s is characterized by an accumulation of beta-amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles in the brain, there is controversy over their role in the development of the disease.

As researchers from the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science, department of dementia and higher brain function, wrote in Frontiers in Neuroscience :14

“The so-called amyloid hypothesis, that the accumulation and deposition of oligomeric or fibrillar amyloid β (Aβ) peptide is the primary cause of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), has been the mainstream concept underlying AD research for over 20 years. However, all attempts to develop Aβ-targeting drugs to treat AD have ended in failure.”

In 2009, researchers brought attention to the misguided premise of oversimplifying Alzheimer’s disease down to the amyloid-β protein precursor (AβPP) molecule, “implying that this molecule encapsulates AD so completely that the disease itself is almost of secondary importance.” This, they noted, ignores “the complexity of chronic diseases in general” and added:15

“A great deal of attention has focused on amyloid-β as the major pathogenic mechanisms with the ultimate goal of using amyloid-β lowering therapies as an avenue of treatment. Unfortunately, nearly a quarter century later, no tangible progress has been offered, whereas spectacular failure tends to be the most compelling.

We have long contended, as has substantial literature, that proteinaceous accumulations are simply downstream and, often, endstage manifestations of disease.

Their overall poor correlation with the level of dementia, and their presence in the cognitively intact is evidence that is often ignored as an inconvenient truth. Current research examining amyloid oligomers, therefore, will add copious details to what is, in essence, a reductionist distraction from upstream pleiotrophic processes such as oxidative stress, cell cycle dysfunction, and inflammation.

It is now long overdue that the neuroscientists avoid the pitfall of perseverating on ‘proteinopathies’ and recognize that the continued targeting of end stage lesions in the face of repeated failure, or worse, is a losing proposition.”

Amyloid Beta May Be Protective

There is even research to suggest that advanced protein aggregation, such as that seen in Alzheimer’s disease, could offer protective functions, perhaps protecting cells from toxic intermediates.16 Writing in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, researchers suggested that amyloid beta is a response to neuronal stress, one that functions as a protective adaptation to the disease.17

Amyloid beta, they argued, accumulates relatively late in the development of Alzheimer’s disease, and while it has been found to be toxic in cell culture models, this may not hold true in humans. Instead of the prevailing notion that a mutation leads to increased amyloid beta and that leads to Alzheimer’s, the team suggested that a mutation leads to Alzheimer’s, which in turn triggers increased amyloid beta:18

“Mutations lead to cellular stress, which, in turn, leads to increased amyloid-β … in AD, cellular stress precedes increases in amyloid-β … Proteins, such as amyloid-β, that are induced under oxidative conditions and act to lessen oxidative damage are typically thought of as antioxidants and, in this regard, we recently demonstrated that amyloid-β is a bona fide antioxidant that can act as a potent superoxide dismutase.”

This would explain, they suggest, why the brains of most elderly people contain amyloid-β, often in amounts similar to those found in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). They noted:19

“While such production and deposition of amyloid-β appears to successfully stave off age-related redox imbalances in normal aging, in AD, where there is a profound and chronic redox imbalance, the presence of amyloid-β, even at high levels, proves insufficient.”

The Link Between Alzheimer’s and Your Gut

If Alzheimer’s pathogenesis cannot be blamed entirely on amyloid beta, what, then, is the cause? It’s likely that many factors are to blame, with imbalances in gut microbiota among them. Research suggests, for example, that the bacteria in your intestines may influence brain functioning and can even promote neurodegeneration.20

In a study of 89 people, high blood levels of lipopolysaccharides (LPSs) and the short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) acetate and valerate were associated with large amyloid deposits in the brain.21 LPSs and SCFAs are markers of inflammation and proteins produced by intestinal bacteria.

High levels of butyrate — an SCFA produced when gut bacteria ferment fiber —were associated with less amyloid. The study represents a continuation of prior research by the team, which found that the gut microbiota in people with Alzheimer’s disease differs from those without the condition; in those with Alzheimer’s, microbial diversity is reduced, with certain bacteria being overrepresented and other microbes decreased.22

“Our results are indisputable: certain bacterial products of the intestinal microbiota are correlated with the quantity of amyloid plaques in the brain,” explains Moira Marizzoni, a study author with the Fatebenefratelli Center in Brescia, Italy.23

Still other research suggests gut microbiota may contribute to Alzheimer’s risk via multiple avenues, including by influencing aging, diabetes, sleep and circadian rhythm.24

It’s also possible, researchers hypothesize, that decades of factors such as diet, stress, aging and genetics, combine to disrupt gut permeability and the integrity of the blood-brain barrier, allowing the entry of inflammatory agents and pathogens and inducing an inflammatory response that triggers a neuroinflammatory response in the brain.25

There’s More to Alzheimer’s Than Amyloid Beta

UB-311 — the fast-tracked Alzheimer’s vaccine — is not going to touch the many complex factors leading to the development of Alzheimer’s disease and is likely to have unintended adverse consequences. Dietary factors, for instance, are being completely overlooked by focusing on a vaccine to target amyloid beta.

Not only does what you eat affect your gut health but it also impacts cholesterol, and cholesterol also plays an important role in the formation of memories and is vital for healthy neurological function. As noted by senior research scientist Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., insufficient fat and cholesterol in your brain play a crucial role in the Alzheimer’s disease process, detailed in her 2009 paper “APOE-4: The Clue to Why Low Fat Diet and Statins May Cause Alzheimer’s.”26

Time-restricted eating is another important strategy, as is reducing your intake of polyunsaturated fatty acids, also called PUFAs, found in vegetable oils, edible oils, seed oils, trans fat and plant oils. For a more targeted approach, natural options are available.

Animal and laboratory studies demonstrate that the spice saffron is neuroprotective, for instance. Data also show it is as effective as the drug memantine to treat moderate to severe Alzheimer’s disease.27 One of the most comprehensive assessments of Alzheimer’s risk is Dr. Dale Bredesen’s ReCODE protocol, which evaluates 150 factors, including biochemistry, genetics and historical imaging, known to contribute to Alzheimer’s disease.

In his book, “The End of Alzheimer’s: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline,”28 which describes the complete protocol, you will also find a list of suggested screening tests and the recommended ranges for each test, along with some of Bredesen’s treatment suggestions.

Overall, nourishing your brain health is best done with a comprehensively healthy lifestyle. By leveraging 36 healthy lifestyle parameters, Bredesen was able to reverse Alzheimer’s in 9 out of 10 patients.

This included the use of exercise, ketogenic diet, optimized vitamin D and other hormones, increased sleep, meditation, detoxification and the elimination of gluten and processed food. For more details, you can download Bredesen’s full-text case paper online, which details the full program.29

Sources and References

May 10, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

FDA Chief Claims “Misinformation” is Leading Cause of Death in the United States

By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | May 9, 2022

During an appearance on CNN, FDA chief Dr. Robert Califf asserted that the leading cause of death in the United States is online “misinformation.”

Yes, really.

Califf spoke about his remarks during an interview with CNN’s Pamela Brown, which were originally made at a health conference in Texas last month when he said online misinformation was “now our leading cause of death.”

After admitting that there was “no way to quantify this,” before mentioning heart disease and cancer (actual killers), Califf went on to bolster the claim anyway.

Claiming that there has been “an erosion of life expectancy,” Califf went on to say that Americans were living an average of 5 years shorter than people in other high income countries.

Califf said that anti-virals and vaccinations meant “almost no one in this country should be dying from COVID,” before going on to explain that there was also a “reduction in life expectancy from common diseases like heart disease.”

“But somehow … the reliable, truthful messages are not getting across,” he said, adding, “And it’s being washed down by a lot of misinformation, which is leading people to make bad choices that are unfortunate for their health.”

The FDA chief did not explain how ‘online misinformation’ was causing more deaths from heart disease, but went ahead and made the claim anyway without being challenged by the host.

As we have exhaustively highlighted, “online misinformation” is indistinguishable from information the regime doesn’t like.

As we previously noted, the woman picked to head up the Department of Homeland Security’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ said free speech makes her “shudder” while also promoting the lie that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation.

Nina Jankowicz also ludicrously cited Christopher Steele as an expert on disinformation. Steele was the author of the infamous Clinton campaign-funded Trump ‘peegate’ dossier’ that turned out to be an actual product of disinformation.

The contrived moral panic over “misinformation” has become more pronounced following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, with CNN guests recently complaining about how it might impact their monopoly on controlling “the channels of communications.”

May 9, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Assad renews Syria’s bonds with Iran

BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | MAY 9, 2022 

The unannounced arrival of the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to Tehran on Sunday makes yet another wrinkle to the geopolitics of West Asia. In a short trip of a few hours, Assad had meetings with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Ebrahim Raeisi and returned to Damascus. 

This is only the second trip by Assad to Iran in the past 11 years since the conflict erupted in Syria. The last occasion was in 2019, when he came accompanied by the charismatic commander of the IRGC’s elite Quds Force late Qassem Soleimani to mark Syria’s “victory” in the conflict. Much water has flowed down down the Euphrates and the Tigris since then. 

There is some speculation that Russia may redeploy its forces in Syria. The Israeli intelligence website DebkaFile reported cryptically on Friday that “Russian units deployed to Syria are assembling at the air bases of  Hmeimim, Qamishli, Deir e-Zor and T4, ready for some to transfer to the Ukraine warfront. DEBKAfile’s military sources report that the Russians are handing over key bases to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Hizballah.” 

Prima facie, this is kite-flying, so to speak. There is no independent word from Moscow. Iran will be certainly in the loop on any big Russian troop withdrawal from Syria. The Turkish air space is closed to Russian [military] planes since April and on February 28 Ankara had restricted the passage of Russian warships through the Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits (unless they are returning to their bases in the Black Sea.) 

Analysts have interpreted the Turkish decisions as “anti-Russian” but they come under the ambit of Montreux Convention (1936) and on closer look, may even work to Moscow’s advantage since the door is also closed to any NATO naval build-up in the Black Sea. Russian papers have pointed out that Moscow has been using the air corridor via Iran and Iraq to supply its troops in Syria. 

Indeed, Turkey is doing a delicate trapeze act vis-a-vis Russia and Ukraine, being a Black Sea power with overlapping security concerns, while also a NATO power. Turkey has deftly created space to manoeuvre since NATO is technically not at war with Russia, and since Turkey is not a EU member country, it isn’t obliged to sanction Russia, either. 

Turkish leadership has actively nurtured contacts with the Kremlin, and the economic partnership continues, including over the construction of the massive $20 billion Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant (comprising four 1,200 MW VVER units), which is expected to meet ten percent of Turkey’s electricity demand when it is completed in 2025. 

Again, Russian carrier Aeroflot has just resumed flights to Turkey in anticipation of the tourist season. Believe it or not, Turkey has found an ingenuous formula to allow Russian tourists to travel to Turkey bypassing the suspension of Visa and Mastercard by making it possible to access their funds through Russia’s homegrown payments system called Mir! Some 4.7 million Russian tourists visited Turkey last year, accounting for 19% of the total tourist arrivals, fetching an annual income exceeding $10 billion. 

When it comes to Russian-Iranian relations too, the picture is broadly similar to India’s — neither supporting Russia nor opposing it while refusing to censure Russian intervention and counselling ceasefire and dialogue as the only solution. 

According to Iranian media reports, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak is due to visit Iran shortly in connection with the session of the Iran-Russia Joint Economic Committee. The discussions are expected to focus on “strengthening financial cooperation and resolving transit problems” between the two countries as well as cooperating in the fields of oil and gas and promoting trade and tourism. Tehran knows that such camaraderie with Moscow is contrary to the spirit of Western sanctions.   

Moscow has every intention to remain actively involved in Syria. Special Russian Presidential Representative for the Middle East and Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov disclosed to Tass last week that Russia is working on scheduling the next international meeting on Syria in the Astana format for the end of May in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan. Does that look like Russia washing its hands off Syria? To quote Bogdanov, “We already discussed this with partners Iran and Turkey as the guarantors of the Astana process plus with the Syrian government and opposition delegations.” 

The official Syrian news agency Sana described Assad’s trip to Tehran as a “working visit.” It quoted Assad as stressing to Khamenei about “the importance of continuing cooperation in order not to allow America to rebuild the international terrorist system that it used to harm the countries of the world,” adding that the US “is weaker than ever.”

There are four main takeaways from Assad’s talks with the Iranian leadership. First, Assad made it clear in no uncertain terms that no matter Syria’s normalisation with the UAE (or other Arab countries involved in the conflict), he continues to attribute the highest importance to Syria’s alliance with Iran. Assad underscored that Syria is ready for broader coordination with Iran in security, political and economic fields.

Second, Damascus needs Tehran’s help for finally freeing Syria from foreign occupation. Raisi told Assad, “The whole of the Syrian land must be liberated from foreign occupiers. This occupation should not be subject to the passage of time, and the occupying forces and their mercenaries should be expelled.” Sana cited Khamenei as stressing that Iran will “continue to support Syria to complete its victory over terrorism and liberate the rest of the country’s lands.” 

Third, the two countries have a consensus on the effectiveness and vibrancy of the resistance front. Assad acknowledged that the weakening of the US’ influence in West Asia and the end of Israel’s military supremacy regionally is a direct outcome of the strategic relations between Iran and Syria, “which must continue with strength.” 

Interestingly, Khamenei recalled that Soleimani had “a special liking towards Syria and literally sacrificed his life” for that country and viewed the issue of Syria as a “sacred duty and obligation”. Khamenei reminded Assad poignantly, “This bond is vital for both countries and we should not let it weaken. On the contrary, we should strengthen it as much as possible.” Raisi called Assad “one of the figures of the Resistance Front” like his father Hafez al-Assad.

Fourth, Assad sought and obtained assurances from the highest level of Iranian leadership that Iran will help Syria overcome its difficulties. This is particularly crucial at a juncture when regional politics is in flux and Russia is preoccupied in Ukraine. 

A resuscitation of the US-led regime change project in Syria is not to be expected and Washington no longer wields commanding influence over its Persian Gulf allies or Turkey to get them to act as its surrogates. But Assad’s challenge is that Syria is getting relegated to the back burner as new hotspots and topical issues draw the region’s attention — such as JCPOA, Yemen, Iran-Saudi normalisation, OPEC+, etc. 

Although the conflict has ended, Syria still remains under foreign occupation and its economy is in ruins. A frozen conflict may legitimise the status quo. Meanwhile, Israel is waiting in the wings. Assad’s visit to Tehran signals that Iran remains the mainstay of Syria’s future strategy to avoid such a dismal fate. Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian affirmed on Monday that Assad’s visit was held in an atmosphere of “fraternity and friendship,” and it opens a new chapter in the strategic ties.

May 9, 2022 Posted by | Solidarity and Activism | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Insights On Progressive Thinking From The Climate Action Council Public Hearing

By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | May 6, 2022

My previous post on Tuesday contained some highlights from the May 3 public hearing of New York’s Climate Action Council. The CAC is the body that is charged with devising a “Scoping Plan” to inform all us New Yorkers how we will achieve “zero carbon” electricity by 2030 and a “zero carbon” economy by 2050. I attended the hearing for about two and a half hours, during which about 60 people spoke.

Reflecting on the hearing a few days later, I think there are a few more highlights that would interest the readers, and will give some more insights into the nature of progressive thinking.

As stated in my prior post, of the 60 or so speakers, all but myself and four others were vigorous supporters of the critical necessity of achieving the stated zero carbon goals by the given dates as an urgent matter of saving our planet and our children. This was so despite what appeared to me to be manifestly huge issues of physical feasibility and cost that are almost certain to cause these grand “net zero” energy schemes to fail. The CAC’s draft “Scoping Plan,” as it currently exists for public comment, does not consider these feasibility or cost issues in any remotely adequate fashion, if at all. That fact did not appear to bother the overwhelming majority of the speakers.

So what are the things that do drive the thinking of these other 55 or so speakers, who apparently represent the large majority of New York City’s citizenry? The previous post mentioned fear as a common theme — fear that use of fossil fuels by us New Yorkers will bring on storms, floods and other disasters to threaten our lives and livelihoods. But what I failed to mention was another emotion that was even more prevalent in the comments — anger.

Anger at what, you might ask? Good question. I admit that this doesn’t make any sense, but here it is. The anger is directed at the fossil fuel producers and distributors who the commenters, with near unanimity, seemed to believe were hell-bent on destroying the planet. A substantial majority of the 60 or so comments that I listened to expressed this anger in one form or another, and it was an implicit undercurrent in most of the rest.

But, you might say, all of these people are in fact the users of the fossil fuels. Essentially all of them use electricity, which in New York currently comes about 60% from fossil fuels. The large majority of them drive cars, of which some 99% in New York use gasoline. Most of them heat their homes with natural gas, and cook with natural gas. Aren’t they themselves the ones who are responsible for the problem, if there is a problem? They use fossil-fuel-burning cars and furnaces and stoves because those vehicles and appliances are cheaper and/or work better than the alternatives. And yet, somehow these people have convinced themselves that they have no responsibility at all, and the use of gasoline and natural gas by them and others is a fault of evil producers and utilities.

On this theme, two commenters in particular stand out in my mind. First was a youngish (probably in her 30s) woman from Brooklyn who described herself as having a toddler in the apartment. After relating her fears for the toddler’s future in a world of changing climate, she got to the crux of her personal testimony, which was much more about anger than fear. The gas company was putting a dangerous substance into her stove, which when burned to cook gave off toxic substances and fumes that were putting the toddler’s health at risk. Her intense rage was palpable. She urged the CAC in the strongest terms to impose legal prohibitions that would prevent this kind of conduct going forward.

Put aside for the moment that this woman apparently had no idea that there is nothing toxic about the combustion products of natural gas, which are CO2 and water. But even more bizarre was that she apparently hadn’t figured out that if she is concerned about this subject, however irrationally, she can just go out and buy an electric stove tomorrow. And why hadn’t she done that? She didn’t say. The only reasons I can think of are that natural gas stoves work better than electric ones and are cheaper. Those are perfectly good reasons. But I wouldn’t recommend that you try to argue with this woman about why she has a gas stove. She is completely convinced that it has been foisted upon her by the evil gas companies who are intent on destroying the health of her toddler, let alone the planet. I doubt that any amount of logic or reason could talk her out of that belief.

And then there was the case of an equally irrational 60-something man, who said he was from Cedarhurst, Long Island. For those unfamiliar, Cedarhurst is a very wealthy suburb of large homes just outside the New York City limits. You may have seen Cedarhurst out the window of an airplane approaching JFK airport on a flight back from Europe. The guy in question styled his testimony as a confessional. He candidly admitted to his extreme climate guilt. But he claimed that he was unable to do anything about his large carbon footprint right now because the state had failed to compel the suppliers to provide him with zero emissions alternatives. He didn’t give us any details of what fuel he currently uses to heat his home, or to cook, but chose to focus on his driving. He stated that he wanted to buy an electric car, and was ready to do it, but was prevented from doing it. How was he prevented? Because there were no electric vehicle charging stations in his town! Needless to say, he was angry about that, and demanded that the state step up to order somebody to provide the charging stations, and provide funding to be sure that the charging stations got built.

Huh? Why didn’t this guy just get his own charging station at his own house? He didn’t mention that, so we are left to speculate. Again, the only thing I can think of is that he doesn’t want to spend his own money on this. Better to gin up some anger and demand that somebody else pay for it.

The thinking is that not only perfect fairness and justice, but also perfect climate, are easily within our reach if only our leaders summon the political will to order the evil people and companies to do the right thing, and perhaps provide some funding from the infinite free pile of government money. I guess, if you believe that, you are right to be angry that the leaders haven’t yet issued the necessary orders to get the job done. What’s wrong with them?

May 9, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

It’s Time We Get Answers About the FBI’s Involvement In the OKC Bombing

By John Kline | The Libertarian Institute | April 27, 2022

This past week marked the 27th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. As the worst terrorist act committed on U.S. soil at the time, we all know the reported facts of the horrific event well: a 27-year-old Desert Storm-vet, Timothy McVeigh, acting with minimal help from Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, detonated a 7,000-pound fertilizer bomb from a parked Ryder truck outside the federal Alfred P. Murrah building, killing 168 people, 19 of them children.

Two years later, in 1997, McVeigh was convicted of “Using a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death,” among other federal charges. For a time, he was held on the same cell block as the Unabomber and WTC-bomber Ramzi Yousef (who tried to convert him to Islam), before being put to death by lethal injection in 2001.

There is much we still don’t know about the case, however. Thanks to years of heroic work by people like Salt Lake City-based attorney Jesse Trentadue, writer and researcher J.M. Berger, and independent investigative reporter Wendy S. Painting, the American public is slowly learning more and more key (and disturbing) facts about the case. Facts involving the FBI’s possible incitement of McVeigh and the subsequent cover-up of these facts by Newsweek magazine.

FBI incitement is more topical than ever, of course. Reports of the FBI being involved in Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer’s kidnapping plot and of FBI agents and assets being involved in the January 6th events has collapsed whatever level of trust the public had with federal law enforcement, not to mention the mainstream media whose related coverage rarely digs deeper than the government’s official line.

What other crimes have been committed or conspiracies planned, the public wonders, where the initial momentum was actually created the FBI? How much have FBI infiltrators pushed constitutionally protected “heated talk” into the unlawful planning and execution of deadly crimes? To what extent has the FBI been, as the saying goes, arsonists posing as firefighters? These are especially important questions when it comes to the OKC bombing.

Operation PATCON

As most know, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have conducted surveillance and infiltration operations against right-wing groups for decades. Chief among them being the “Patriotic Conspiracy” or “PATCON” operation. Despite its official ending in late 1993 (although some say it was carried forward in some form), PATCON only became public in 2007 thanks to a public records request.

Partly citing internal FBI documents, Painting in her explosive 2016 book about PATCON and McVeigh, describes how the former’s secret operatives and paid informers “were given license to engage in provocateur activities and instructed to make known their willingness to commit violence and advocate for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.”1 She quotes one informer who went public about the operation, John Matthews, saying he realized that although initially told “the objective was to infiltrate and monitor,” he would later come to understand that its real objective was to “to infiltrate and incite.”2 This, says Matthews, included providing “the ideas, detailed instructions, and even live C4 explosives and automatic weapons to targeted individuals as a way of entrapping them into terrorist plots, so the FBI could capitalize on foiled and actualized plots.”3 According to Trentadue, through PATCON, the FBI was actually trying to sow a full-on rebellion.

While the FBI has indeed infiltrated hard-left and Islamic groups in the past, the extent and complete failure of the FBI’s overreach when it comes to right-wing groups (which diversely included pro-gun, ultra-libertarian, survivalist, and white racist or advocacy groups) makes this area especially alarming. For instance, there was just one minor conviction over stolen military night-vision goggles that was ever made through PATCON, and it relied on army, not FBI, intelligence. As Oklahoma City journalist J.D. Cash said about PATCON and certain precursor programs of the 1980s, “there isn’t a neo-Nazi or racist group in the country that isn’t operationally controlled by the FBI.” This seems to concur with what a former young Aryan Nation-member told Painting for her book4:

It was well known that at any Aryan Nation event, in a crowd of 300 people, there’d be at least 30 undercover federal agents in attendance to monitor us, and another third of the crowd were informants… It was rampant, just like cops at a Grateful Dead show trying to sell people LSD.

One of those assets was Vietnam War veteran John Matthews. Up until 1986, the government had been supporting U.S. civilian groups conducting operations in Nicaragua for anti-communist contra forces; a cause which Matthews chose to serve. When such efforts turned into a political scandal, however, the government broke-off ties with these groups and refused to help its members. This included people like Matthews’ fellow soldier Tom Posey who would later be indicted on weapons-smuggling charges.5 While he beat the rap, Posey felt cheated and shifted his efforts to anti-U.S. government organizing. When he revealed plans to break into a federal armory, however, Matthews contacted the FBI, establishing a relationship with law enforcement that led him to infiltrate over 20 militia, libertarian, gun-rights, and racist groups over a 20-year period.

Matthews, who has long been suffering from an Agent-Orange-related cancer, is key to what understanding we have about PATCON’s connection to the OKC bombing. In the early nineties, Matthews was assigned to attend a PATCON-infiltrated, militia-training camp in Texas. While there, he met Timothy McVeigh. After the bombing and when McVeigh was arrested, Matthews immediately recognized him and called his FBI handler, Don Jarrett, to tell him this was the same man he saw at the Texas training camp. Jarrett assured Matthews they knew this already and told him to “forget about it.”

In interviews with Painting, Matthews says he was disturbed by this for a few reasons, a major one being, she paraphrases, that “if they were watching McVeigh and friends back then, they had likely continued watching them throughout the bombing plot.”6 “I felt Don knew more about this,” he said elsewhere.

What other items he knew may have been what came out later in Trentadue’s public records suit against the FBI. Dozens of witnesses to the bombing had apparently reported to police and the FBI they had seen someone in the passenger side of McVeigh’s truck while parked outside the Murrah building. Other witnesses reported seeing McVeigh with several people at his motel the night before, including someone sitting at some point behind the wheel of the truck—And Nichols himself (who was in Kansas when the bombing took place) told journalists in 2007 that FBI provocateurs had lent their support to McVeigh’s plans.7

Also disturbingly, using a fertilizer truck to blow up a federal building had been an idea Matthews had actually heard a few times before, including from suspected FBI infiltrators. For instance, he had heard it raised by two militia members he met who later became part of a busted plot to rob a bank, but who never got arrested, let alone jailed for it.

All of this would seem to point to the OKC bombing being something like 2010’s Operation Fast and Furious, in which the FBI intentionally put guns into the hands of criminals, but failed to close the loop leading to a border agent being killed by a Mexican cartel. Was OKC a similar ‘gunwalking case gone awry’? Only one, far, far deadlier? Someone who McVeigh contacted two weeks before the bombing, Andy Strassmeir, later told a journalist it is possible the FBI was “going to arrest McVeigh at the site with the bomb in hand, but he didn’t come at the right time.” “[M]aybe he changed the time”, he said, “you never know with people who are so unreliable.”8

Newsweek’s Complicity

In 2011, wishing to tell his story before he died, Matthews was put in touch with former Associated Press-writer and then-editor of Newsweek, John Solomon. At the time, Newsweek was still foremost in the U.S. media field, coming in second in circulation only to Time magazine. It was an important and respected news source. Over months, Solomon and article-author Ross Schneiderman worked with Matthews and other sources, including former FBI officials, to confirm everything he told them about the murky workings of PATCON, including the unanswered questions about its operatives’ possible involvement in the OKC bombing.

Enter Newsweek managing editor, Tina Brown. Above the heads of Solomon and Schneiderman, Brown (who left in 2013 and has been blamed for the periodical’s collapse) took what may have been a Pulitzer-worthy piece of journalism and cut away virtually all detail that could directly or indirectly impugn the government for the fallout of its PATCON operations. In the process, she reduced the original 7,000-word draft (found here) down to a mere 4,000 words (found here). As the since-defunct Examiner detailed at the time, all of the aforementioned suspicions Matthews aired about the FBI’s hand in the OKC bombing were cut.

Brown’s puzzling decision had real consequences for Matthews. As Painting recounts in her book, the dying Matthews had taken a lot of risk by coming forward. He was now Newsweek’s cover story, but for reasons that had been omitted. Now, he was still a target but “for no good reason and he regretted coming forward.”9

More broadly, by keeping such information away from the public, Brown was confirming the existence of a state-media axis in America. While examples of such direct state-interventions into our otherwise free media system are rare (although certainly plentiful enough), media analysts like Noam Chomsky have long posited that, yes, news outlets do profit off the circulation of their stories and are thus incentivized to objectively report on events potentially embarrassing to the powerful elite. But, the big media houses still need government access and wish to maintain good relations with major power centers; hence, their occasional compliance with direct government demands—One might add the promise of future political jobs as an incentive for compliance or, in cases such as this where right-wing groups were clearly being mistreated, plain old liberal media bias (consider, for instance, the fairly wide–reporting on the FBI’s infiltration of Islamic extremist groups).

It seems without a doubt that the FBI did get to Brown. At the time Matthews approached Newsweek, Attorney General Eric Holder’s Operation Fast and Furious-debacle was still in the news. How could the Obama Administration handle yet another and far bigger scandal involving the FBI helping dangerous people do harm against innocent Americans?

More Alarming Questions about FBI Conduct

Elsewhere, the FBI has demonstrated a serious interest in keeping any questions about the OKC bombing firmly under wraps. When Matthews was slated to testify in Trentadue’s 2014 public records case over the release of Murrah building surveillance footage, his fear of retaliation led to the judge allowing him to testify at a secret location by video—Trentadue thought what Matthews had witnessed while a PATCON operative would help provide a motive for what had become the FBI’s ongoing, unlawful refusal to provide the footage under public records law.

And despite the judge’s precautions, Matthews’s testimony still never took place. At the last minute, Matthews was supposedly threatened with having his VA medical benefits cut off and told to “stand down” by Jarrett and another FBI agent, Adam Quirk. Such a rank case of witness tampering, in fact, led to the judge ordering the FBI to reveal what exactly they had communicated to Matthews; an investigation that has been strangely ongoing since 2015.

At the heart of Trentadue’s marathon public records case certainly has the FBI worried. Someone who did manage to testify early on in the case was an Oklahoma police officer and first responder to the OKC bombing. He told the court he witnessed the FBI actually stop the beginning of the recovery process while victims were still under piles of rubble in order to remove a surveillance camera from the Murrah building. Some believe the camera would have recorded anyone else besides McVeigh who left the truck after it was parked and, in fact, did so.

Finally, there’s the questions about the FBI’s conduct vis-à-vis Trentadue himself. Why Trentadue got involved with the OKC case is because six weeks after the bombing, his brother Kenneth, another war vet, was taken into custody after a traffic incident triggered a parole violation relating to a minor event from years previous. Soon after, he was found hanging in a cell of a federal detention center.

Photos released to Trentadue following a subsequent lawsuit against the federal Bureau of Prisons, however, showed his brother’s throat having been cut and his body covered in bruises—authorities had apparently tried to cover his wounds with make-up before releasing it to Kenneth’s family. The theory behind his death is, having shared a close resemblance with someone called Richard Guthrie, a white supremacist who the FBI thought had information about the OKC bombing, Kenneth was mistaken as Guthrie and taken in by the FBI for interrogation. McVeigh himself called and advised Trentadue of this, telling him he heard that the FBI had indeed mistaken Kenneth for Guthrie and that his death was the result of a botched interrogation session.

Adding to suspicions, the DOJ formed a special team to handle media inquiries and the Trentadue family’s immediate requests for information. It apparently obstructed and delayed the Trentadue’s right to know what happened to Kenneth in every way it could, even when it came to releasing his corpse. Who happened to be the head of this operation (dubbed internally as “the Trentadue Mission”)?10 Then-Deputy Attorney General, Eric Holder.

Finally, there are the other related and mysterious deaths. After Guthrie himself was arrested, he told the LA Times he had “a couple grand juries to talk to” about what really happened with the OKC bombing, and was also later found hanging in his cell.11

And later in 1999, a supposed inmate and witness to Kenneth’s murder, Alden Gillis Baker, threatened to come forward about what he saw. He too was later found hanging in his cell.12

Conclusion

The details surrounding the OKC bombing show it to have all the elements of a “perfect,” post-war American tragedy: Vietnam vets disrespected by the liberal-media class and tossed aside by a government they loyally served; an unhinged federal bureaucracy using its sprawling resources to violate the civil rights of poor and ignored Americans; and, a state-liberal media-axis willing to cover up for government when the “cause” was right.

And consider the following. Even if we ignore the aforementioned evidence about the FBI’s hand in the OKC bombing, remember that the twin motivations for McVeigh’s crimes were Waco and Ruby Ridge—McVeigh chose April 19 as his bombing date because it was the same day as the Waco massacre two years previous. Matthews has actually expressed the view that both massacres had PATCON fingerprints all over them. That’s certainly the case with Ruby Ridge. There, a federal agent/infiltrator pushed former Green Beret Randy Weaver into selling him an illegal sawed-off shotgun. This led to his attempted arrest and an eventual standoff, which then led to the shooting deaths of his 14-year-son by federal marshals and his unarmed wife (baby in hand) by an FBI sniper.

In public and in private correspondence, McVeigh tore into the federal government over these events, expressing fear of a state that was at war with its own citizens. Without federal law enforcement acting so heinously in these events, it’s likely McVeigh would not have carried out the crime that he did.

Further, these rank FBI abuses ironically pushed “right-wing terror groups” to become the threat we were warned about all along. As the original Newsweek article rightly said about Ruby Ridge, the FBI’s conduct “quickly galvanized the radical right like never before” with talks between “various white supremacists, Neo-Nazis and anti-government groups… about joining forces… quickly turn[ing] to action.”

And as Painting writes, even more absurd perhaps, Ruby Ridge was used by federal law enforcement as a justification for increased PATCON resources and investigatory powers.13

So, we have FBI abuses leading to organized rage and resistance, which is then given even more momentum by FBI infiltration and incitement. And with the help of a media sphere that refuses to do its job, all of this works to amp up yet more fear, anxiety and division among the public. It’s a spinning wheel which loyal, patriotic Americans never asked for and certainly want off of.

While we should certainly hope these allegations can be explained away, it’s high-time the OKC victims and the American people generally get the transparency they deserve about what really happened that fateful day.

May 9, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

FDA limits use of J&J vaccine over blood clotting disorder, but experts say Pfizer, Moderna shots pose similar risk

By Julie Comber, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 6, 2022

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Thursday put strict limits on the use of the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) COVID-19 vaccine, citing the risk of a blood-clotting condition the agency described as “rare and potentially life-threatening.”

In a statement Thursday, the FDA said the risk of vaccine recipients developing thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) after receiving the vaccine “warrants limiting the authorized use of the vaccine.”

The FDA said it has identified 60 cases of vaccine-induced thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, including nine deaths, out of about 18 million doses administered — although the condition is likely underreported.

Women 30 to 49 years old are at the highest risk of TTS from the J&J vaccine, with about eight cases per 1 million doses of vaccine administered, according to the FDA.

According to the latest data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 29, 2022, there were 13,873 reports of blood-clotting disorders following COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S.

Of those, 6,227 reports were attributed to Pfizer, 4,943 reports to Moderna and 2,662 reports to J&J.

In the U.S., 575 million COVID-19 vaccine doses had been administered as of April 29, including 339 million doses of Pfizer, 217 million doses of Moderna and 19 million doses of J&J.

The agency said the “known and potential benefits” of the J&J vaccine for preventing COVID-19 outweigh the known and potential risks for individuals 18 and older “for whom other authorized or approved COVID-19 vaccines are not accessible or clinically appropriate,” or “who elect to receive the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine because they would otherwise not receive a COVID-19 vaccine.”

The agency described TTS as “a syndrome of rare and potentially life-threatening blood clots in combination with low levels of blood platelets with onset of symptoms approximately one to two weeks following administration of the Janssen [J&J] COVID-19 vaccine.”

The updated restrictions to the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the vaccine, marketed under the Janssen brand, also apply to booster doses, CNN reported.

People who can still get the Janssen vaccine include:

  • Those who had a severe allergic reaction to the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna mRNA vaccine.
  • Those with personal concerns about the mRNA vaccines who would remain unvaccinated unless they can choose the Janssen vaccine.
  • Those with limited access to mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.

Symptoms of TTS include shortness of breath, chest pain, leg swelling, persistent abdominal pain, neurological symptoms (like headaches or blurred vision) or red spots just under the skin called “petechiae” found beyond the site of injection.

Experts question timing, and why just J&J?

Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said limiting the authorized use of the Janssen vaccine “demonstrates the robustness of our safety surveillance systems and our commitment to ensuring that science and data guide our decisions.”

Marks said:

“We’ve been closely monitoring the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine and occurrence of TTS following its administration and have used updated information from our safety surveillance systems to revise the EUA.

“The agency will continue to monitor the safety of the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine and all other vaccines, and as has been the case throughout the pandemic, will thoroughly evaluate new safety information.”

However, Brian Hooker, Ph.D., P.E., Children’s Health Defense chief scientific officer and professor of biology at Simpson University, had a different take on the news.

“It seems like the FDA pays lip service to the fact that the spike protein can cause clotting, and to the widespread reports of clotting, by punishing Janssen, who has become the ‘whipping boy’ of the COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers through the pandemic,” Hooker said.

“I believe this is partially because of the limited use of the Janssen vaccine in the U.S. as compared to Pfizer and Moderna,” he added.

Hooker said the FDA can limit the use of the J&J vaccine without significantly impacting vaccine distribution overall, “while having the appearance of addressing the myriad vaccine adverse events caused by all the types of COVID-19 vaccines.”

As of Thursday, CNN reported only 7.7% of those considered fully vaccinated received the J&J vaccine.

Dr. Pierre Kory, founder and president of Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, told The Defender :

“My only hypothesis is this action is some attempt for the FDA to be able to claim that they took at least some action to protect the safety of the public, akin to ‘virtue signaling.’

“Having been a keen observer of their actions throughout the pandemic, I find this action to be completely insufficient and demonstrates a calculated attempt to ensure vaccinations with similarly dangerous vaccines continue.”

Dr. Meryl Nass questioned the timing of the FDA’s restriction of the EUA.

“Why did the FDA just throw the kill switch on the Janssen vaccine, when it knew of the thrombosis problems since the rollout?” Nass asked.

Nass told The Defender the FDA may have known about the thrombosis problem even before the Janssen vaccine rollout, “since the adenovirus vector platform is known to be associated with thrombosis” for “more than 15 years.”

Kory, who noted that all COVID-19 vaccines have had a high rate of adverse events, also questioned the timing of the new restrictions.

“I find the timing of this action to be both irrational and alarming given there is extensive data from around the world, much of it being censored from media and medical journals, that all the COVID-19 vaccines, not just Janssen, have long had unacceptable and diverse toxicity signals — beyond just clotting disorders from numerous pharmacovigilance databases and epidemiological and public health data reports,” Kory said.

As far back as April 2021, U.S. and European health officials were investigating whether the J&J COVID-19 vaccines were causing blood clots.

However, there was already mounting evidence the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines could cause similar adverse reactions. U.S. regulatory officials were alerted to this risk as far back as December 2020.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in December 2021 recommended the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID vaccines over the J&J vaccine due to the risk of blood clots, despite data showing the Pfizer and Moderna shots also cause blood-clotting disorders.

In January 2021, shortly after the rollout of Pfizer’s vaccine in the U.S., The Defender reported on the death of a 56-year-old Florida doctor who developed a blood-clotting disorder after the Pfizer vaccine and died 12 days later.

The Defender also reported on numerous other deaths related to blood-clotting disorders that developed after the Moderna and J&J vaccines.

The J&J vaccine received EUA on Feb. 27, 2021.

On April 13, 2021, the FDA and CDC paused use of the vaccine to investigate six reported cases of TTS.

The agencies lifted the pause only 10 days later, after confirming a total of 15 cases of TTS had been reported to VAERS, including the original six reported cases, out of approximately 8 million doses administered.

© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.

May 8, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

American progressives join the War Party

Some leftist commentators can barely conceal their enthusiasm for American involvement in the Ukraine war

US representative Alexandra Ocasia-Cortez is among the Democratic Party members to vote in favor of a Republican sponsored Ukraine war bill
By James W Carden | Asia Times | May 6, 2022

Russia’s war on Ukraine has, among many other things, highlighted a consequential, indeed historic, shift taking place in American politics with regard to foreign policy.

A recent vote in the House of Representatives helps tell the tale. On April 28, Congress voted by an overwhelming majority of 417-10 to pass Republican Senator John Cornyn’s bill that would revive Lend Lease and apply it to Ukraine.

As is well known, Lend Lease was the brainchild of Franklin D Roosevelt as a way to get around the series of Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the 1930s, in order to help supply the British war effort against Nazi Germany.

One might be forgiven for wondering if such legislation is really necessary today; after all, according to numbers released by the State Department, the US has provided more than $6.4 billion in “security assistance” to Ukraine since 2014. And last week President Joe Biden put forward a request for another $20.4 billion in “additional security and military assistance” as part of a $33 billion aid package to Ukraine.

So what was the actual point of reviving Lend Lease? Well, it was in part, as is the case with many things that happen on Capitol Hill, performative: a way to signal to US arms manufacturers that constitute much of the political donor class that the money spigot will remain wide open for the foreseeable future.

But the Cornyn bill also tells us that the center of gravity of the anti-war movement is shifting away from its traditional home on the progressive left.

In the century since the US embarked on its journey to global hegemony with the Spanish-American War of choice in 1898, it was most often progressive Democrats who rallied under the banner of peace.

Jeanette Rankin of Montana, the first woman elected to Congress, was one of 50 dissenting votes against American entering the First World War. Progressive magazines such as The Nation were a thorn in the side of proud American imperialists like Henry Cabot Lodge, Brooks Adams and Theodore Roosevelt.

The historian Barbara Tuchman noted that Roosevelt in particular “confused the desire for peace with physical cowardice.” Roosevelt took delight in targeting papers and magazines like the Evening Post and The Nation, which he wrote, “in all of whom there exists absolute physical dread of danger and hardship and who therefore tend to hysterical denunciation and fear of war.”

The Vietnam era marked perhaps the high point of progressive dissent against the American war machine. The anti-war movement was certainly well represented (especially by today’s standards) in the US Senate, where J William Fulbright, William Proxmire, Wayne Morse, Robert F Kennedy, George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy and Frank Church opposed president Lyndon B Johnson’s war.

Perhaps the most recent example of exemplary progressive bravery on Capitol Hill is that of Representative Barbara Lee, who cast the sole vote in the House against granting the George W Bush administration practically unrestricted power to wage war (via the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF) in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Now, it seems we have entered a new era.

The House’s overwhelming passage of the Cornyn bill will in effect cement Washington’s status as a co-belligerent in a war against a nuclear-armed and increasingly unpredictable Russia.

A look at the roll-call vote in the House shows that only 10 members voted against Cornyn’s bill, all of whom were Republicans.

Not a single Democratic progressive voted against the legislation. All the leaders of the progressive left in Congress, including Ro Khanna (D-CA), Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Pramila Jaypal (D-MI), voted for Lend Lease – as did every member of the so-called “Squad,” including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Cori Bush (D-MO).

But perhaps most important of all was the vote cast by Representative Barbara Lee.

Not only did Lee vote for the Cornyn bill, she accompanied Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House’s leading Russia hawk Adam Schiff on a trip to Kiev last weekend, where they paid homage to the Ukrainian president and promised US support “until victory is won.”

Lee’s vote takes on additional significance since she chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations, which oversees foreign-aid programs such as those funneling billions of taxpayer dollars to Ukraine.

Still worse, progressive activists, journalists and thought leaders have likewise joined the American War Party. A longtime progressive hero and anti-poverty activist, the Reverend Dr William J Barber II, recently released a statement that attempted to leverage the tragedy of the war to drum up support for his grassroots campaign of poor people’s marches.

In a fundraising letter, Barber writes that “Russia’s assault on Ukraine has produced scenes that demand action from people who want to hold on to our humanity.”

“If Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine demand action,” said Barber, “then so too does the failure of the US Senate to pass Build Back Better’s provisions for affordable housing, green jobs, living wages for care workers, and a child tax credit that will immediately lift 4 million children out of poverty.”

After reading the statement, a Chicago-based labor activist wrote to me in disgust. “This [expletive] happens all the time in the left-wing non-profit industrial complex,” he wrote. “They have a really, really bad sense of history, and specious moral claims and comparisons like these are made all the time – usually done to raise money.”

The darling of the progressive foreign policy community, Bernie Sanders’ foreign-policy adviser Matt Duss, recently defended the policy that arguably brought us to this point, NATO expansion.

Brooklyn lefties were once so besotted by Duss that he landed on the cover of the The Nation magazine. His recent comments will no doubt keep him high in their esteem because, with few exceptions, progressive writers and activists have abandoned their commitment to peace: We are all Ukrainians now, or so we are told.

Some progressive commentators can barely conceal their enthusiasm for American involvement. Here is the chickenhawk founding editor of the progressive magazine American Prospect, Robert Kuttner:

“It is appalling that the West keeps lionizing Zelensky, giving him standing ovations after he addresses national parliaments, but denying him what he needs to save his country.

“What does he need? He needs warplanes.

“Sooner or later, NATO will have to give Ukraine planes powerful enough to annihilate Russia’s invading armies. It might as well be sooner.”

Quincy Institute non-resident fellow Joe Cirincione, a longtime nuclear-arms-control expert, has, like Kuttner, embraced his inner chickenhawk. He recently praised the US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization for supplying more arms to Ukraine, and hence prolonging the war in blithe disregard of the possible consequences, including Russia resorting to the use of tactical nuclear weapons, writing:

“Supplying Ukraine with artillery that can out-range Russian artillery can be a dramatic shift in the war. It may save cities now threatened by brutal Russian bombardment. Smart move by US/NATO.”

In the end, the unanimous Democratic support for the Ukrainian Lend Lease bill and the calls for more and more weapons by leading progressives shows they have abandoned their traditional and long-held opposition to American wars of choice.

What a shame.

James W Carden is a former adviser to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the US Department of State. His articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications including The Nation, The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, The Spectator, UnHerd, The National Interest, Quartz, the Los Angeles Times and American Affairs.

May 7, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | | Leave a comment

Virologists push back on more regulation of viruses made more lethal in the lab

By Emily Kopp | U.S. Right To Know | April 27, 2022

Virologists pushed back on the possibility of tighter regulation of viruses tweaked in the lab to be more lethal at a public meeting Wednesday.

An enhanced pandemic potential pathogen is a virus or microbe that has gained increased transmissibility —  capacity to spread from person to person and reverberate throughout a population —  or virulence — capacity to cause serious disease.

Experiments that are reasonably anticipated to generate deadlier pathogens are supposed to receive heightened oversight from the Department of Health and Human Services under what is nicknamed the HHS “P3CO,” short for the pandemic potential pathogen committee.

Though established just a few years ago, critics say the committee’s work is hidden from public view, suffers from glaring loopholes and needs a reboot. Work that contributes to vaccine development or results from viral surveillance efforts in nature is exempted from this extra layer of review, for example.

Speculation by some in the U.S. intelligence community that SARS-CoV-2 may have seeped out of a lab at the pandemic’s epicenter may have prompted a public meeting to consider whether current policies are adequate. Reporting irregularities by a nonprofit partner of the lab involved in gain-of-function research on coronaviruses and funded by the National Institutes of Health called EcoHealth Alliance has also led many to conclude the P3CO needs to apply to more research projects and be more accountable to the public.

One million Americans have died of COVID-19. A review by the U.S. intelligence community last summer about whether the novel coronavirus spilled over from an animal or spilled out of a lab was inconclusive.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy and NIH cohosted the meeting Wednesday.

White House COVID-19 testing czar Tom Inglesby was harshly critical of the existing framework. His top recommendation: Scientists should be required to explain in detail the goals of undertaking such research in the first place, and why less perilous methods could not reach the same goal.

“There must be an extraordinary and public justification,” he said. “I do think there are experiments we shouldn’t do.”

But lobbying groups representing virologists and other life scientists pushed back.

“The systems of review should not be a solution looking for a problem,” said Felicia Goodrum, president of the American Society for Virology.

Goodrum said regulation risks “tying two hands behind our backs” when it comes to modeling pandemic risks.

Goodrum added that the inherently unpredictable nature of manipulating viruses means that it’s unwieldy to determine whether or not an experiment will make a virus more dangerous, so the regulations should be lax.

“We must be careful about dichotomizing research as simply either ‘risky’ or not because it is not possible to absolutely predict the biology of a virus with the committee,” she said.

But Gregory Koblentz, director of the biodefense graduate program at George Mason University, said that an EcoHealth Alliance grant that funded research that made coronaviruses more deadly by swapping their spike proteins is emblematic of lapses in oversight at NIH.

The research was not regulated as gain-of-function work, but NIH did add language to the grant requiring extra reporting if the viral engineering led to viruses that were 10 times more pathogenic. (The chimeric viruses proved to be much more pathogenic than even that threshold, but EcoHealth Alliance did not report it.) That language amounts to a “tacit admission” that NIH reasonably anticipated the work was gain of function, Koblentz said.

Stefano Bertuzzi, CEO of the American Society for Microbiology, conceded that labs should report more often to Congress and that scientists could do a better job allaying public concerns, but stated that the framework is otherwise sufficient.

Bertuzzi signaled he is concerned that Congress could step in.

Labs taking steps toward greater transparency “helps guard against well intended but sometimes overly prescriptive legislative approaches that could undermine the important work that needs to take place.”

Gigi Gronvall, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said that the “breathless hyping of risks” overshadows strong existing biosafety measures, such as U.S. efforts to train maximum containment labs abroad.

Asked which risks have been misunderstood, Gronvall said that “there is a lot of gray” and that the proper expertise is needed to interpret gain-of-function experiments, but did not go into further detail.

Indeed, some experts called for decreased transparency for controversial research. Colorado State University Biosafety Rebecca Moritz called for limiting the scope of public records requests. U.S. Right to Know has submitted a public information request for records about the university’s research on bat coronaviruses in collaboration with EcoHealth Alliance, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The documents raise questions about the contagion risks, for example, of shipping of bats and rats infected with dangerous pathogens.

Kanta Subbarao, director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza, disputed the idea that research that contributes to vaccine development or results from surveillance should be included in the framework.

Many representatives of the life science and biodefense fields emphasized weighing any regulation against lost opportunities for science. But members of the public who participated in the meeting were much more skeptical of the value of certain gain-of-function work.

Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, said that the public should not be surprised by controversial gain-of-function experiments for the first time in scientific papers, long after the research has been approved and completed.

Chan called for controversial experiments to be published on preprint servers and the genomes of novel viruses to be deposited into publicly available databases within a year of discovery.

She also called for greater transparency from private “virus hunting” organizations and middlemen between the NIH and labs, an apparent allusion to the EcoHealth Alliance and the Global Virome Project.

Kevin Esvelt, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said creating novel viruses in the lab, combined with the ease of synthesizing viruses from a genome sequence, poses a national security threat.

“More Americans have died of COVID than would perish if a Russian Topol SS-25 thermonuclear warhead were to be detonated in the center of Washington, DC,” said Esvelt. “Pandemic viruses can be more lethal than thermonuclear weapons. That makes them a proliferation concern.”

May 7, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Pfizer and FDA reveal Paxlovid fails clinical trial, as FDA tries to evade its responsibility

FDA emphasizes the drug is not approved, not even for COVID

By Meryl Nass, MD | May 2, 2022

Suddenly Pfizer’s website and the FDA want to emphasize all the problems with Paxlovid. So in the case of this drug, these two co-conspirators apparently think that disclosures will save them from something.

Just look at this language! Compare to the lack of disclosure of adverse effects long known to be due to the COVID vaccines. Have you EVER heard FDA refer to the vaccines for children as unapproved?

U.S. FDA Emergency Use Authorization Statement

PAXLOVID has not been approved, but has been authorized for emergency use by FDA under an EUA, for the treatment of mild-to-moderate COVID-19 in adults and pediatric patients (12 years of age and older weighing at least 40 kg) with positive results of direct SARS CoV-2 viral testing, and who are at high-risk for progression to severe COVID-19, including hospitalization or death.

The emergency use of PAXLOVID is only authorized for the duration of the declaration that circumstances exist justifying the authorization of the emergency use of drugs and biological products during the COVID-19 pandemic under Section 564(b)(1) of the Act, 21 U.S.C. § 360bbb-3(b)(1), unless the declaration is terminated or authorization revoked sooner.

AUTHORIZED USE

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the emergency use of the unapproved product PAXLOVID for the treatment of mild-to-moderate coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in adults and pediatric patients (12 years of age and older weighing at least 40 kg) with positive results of direct severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) viral testing, and who are at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19, including hospitalization or death.

LIMITATIONS OF AUTHORIZED USE

• PAXLOVID is not authorized for initiation of treatment in patients requiring hospitalization due to severe or critical COVID-19
• PAXLOVID is not authorized for use as pre-exposure or post-exposure prophylaxis for prevention of COVID-19
• PAXLOVID is not authorized for use for longer than 5 consecutive days

PAXLOVID may only be prescribed for an individual patient by physicians, advanced practice registered nurses, and physician assistants that are licensed or authorized under state law to prescribe drugs in the therapeutic class to which PAXLOVID belongs (i.e., anti-infectives).

PAXLOVID is not approved for any use, including for use for the treatment of COVID-19.

PAXLOVID is authorized only for the duration of the declaration that circumstances exist justifying the authorization of the emergency use of PAXLOVID under 564(b)(1) of the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act unless the authorization is terminated or revoked sooner.

IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION … continue

May 7, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »