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Ukraine War Frenzy Proves: It’s Still John McCain’s GOP

By Michael Tracey | April 7, 2022

“The senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin,” fumed John McCain back in March 2017. His target: Rand Paul, who had committed the unforgivable offense of momentarily delaying the latest round of NATO expansion. Montenegro, a tiny country in southeastern Europe that most Americans have never heard of, was about to join the sprawling military alliance — and McCain was determined to see the final ratification ritual proceed with as little debate as possible. So he hurled the time-honored “working for Putin” accusation, and sure enough, Paul quickly withdrew his minor procedural objection. The glorious ascension of Montenegro to NATO membership status was thereby assured.

Since that episode, a lot has transpired regarding the public perception of McCain. He delighted liberals by feuding regularly with Donald Trump — even going so far as to denounce Trump for engaging in “disgraceful” and “pathetic” flattery of Putin. “No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant,” McCain raged. He undermined Congressional Republicans’ legislative agenda during the brief window in Trump’s presidency when the party had unified control of government — famously delivering a dramatic thumbs-down gesture to derail GOP hopes of repealing Obamacare, as a chagrined Mitch McConnell watched powerlessly on.

McCain had returned to his most natural state. After annoying Democrats by running against Barack Obama in the 2008 election, and being surly about his defeat for some time afterwards, he had once again resumed playing the “maverick” role he so relished — reviled by “his own side,” and loved by the “other side.” His death in 2018 brought forth the most effusive display of state-sanctioned grief that any US political figure had received since Ronald Reagan died in 2004, with all the universal media adulation that entails. Trump’s exclusion from the funeral proceedings, at McCain’s posthumous direction, was just the icing on the cake.

But nowadays, if you bring up McCain in certain GOP circles, it will often be claimed that his influence has mercifully dissipated. The Republican Party experienced a bonafide ideological upheaval under Trump, they’ll say, and the McCain worldview — defined mainly by his unwavering commitment to a hyper-interventionist US foreign policy — has since fallen starkly out of favor. (Back when opposing interventionist foreign policy was still considered something of a “progressive” virtue, Mother Jones would routinely mock McCain by merely counting up the comically large number of countries he’d expressed a desire to attack. Did you know McCain once wanted to impose a No Fly Zone in Sudan?)

By “conservative opinion elites,” I refer roughly to the kind of people who write for obscure magazines with obscure funding sources, earnestly enjoy Think Tank social hours, and incessantly convene panels to discuss “the future of conservatism.” These types have a particular incentive to believe that McCain’s foreign policy paradigm has really been purged from the party. They’re deeply invested in the idea that the GOP underwent a genuine transformation in the past decade or so — discarding the outmoded “neocon” dogmas associated with the reign of George W. Bush, and embracing the hardened, nationalist realism associated with Donald Trump.

For a particular kind of ambitious professional conservative, this is a very flattering theory. Because if true, it means the GOP old guard is being slowly but surely displaced, and all kinds of new, innovative ideas are in the offing. Ideally with lots of ambiguous sinecures, TV gigs, and consultant opportunities attached. There’s just one problem though: when it comes to the issue area that always animated McCain the most — which was without a doubt foreign policy — recent events demonstrate that his influence is far from buried. On the contrary, it couldn’t be more alive and well. The year might be 2022, and he might have been physically dead for a while. But it’s still John McCain’s GOP.


A common fallacy heard among conservative opinion-makers who might wish to disassociate from McCain goes something like this: yes, there’s a contingent of the Republican Party that stubbornly hews to McCain-like foreign policy dogma, but it’s really only a limited handful of wackadoodles like Lindsey Graham. In other words, “the neocons” are a small, dwindling faction of the party, and aren’t representative of the typical Republican elected official or rank-and-file voter, who tend to be increasingly skeptical of US interventionism.

That’s a clever little exercise in self-rationalization, but also a bunch of baloney. On the one hand, it’s true that Graham is a… unique figure in various respects. He’s the person currently in elected office who had the closest political and personal association with McCain. Alongside their former cherished colleague, Joe Lieberman, these “three amigos” bonded over a shared, impassioned commitment to omni-directional foreign policy belligerence. (Right on cue, Lieberman was rolled out of semi-retirement last month to demand a “No Fly Zone.”)

But while Graham occasionally blurts out something uniquely insane, such as his tweeted call for the assassination of Putin — he’s far from some kind of wild outlier. In fact, his foreign policy views are comfortably ensconced in the mainstream of the GOP, notwithstanding the popular conceit that “MAGA” has supplanted “neocon” as the party’s dominant sensibility. Because if Graham is the closest living incarnation of the traditional McCain worldview, then perhaps that worldview isn’t nearly as incompatible with “MAGA” as some may want to think.

Recall: even as McCain and Trump brawled over what was essentially a clash of personalities, Graham successfully insinuated himself as one of Trump’s most trusted confidants — regularly hitting the golf links with him, and advising him on key policy matters. This has continued even into Trump’s post-presidency, with Graham operating as one of the most ardent advocates of another Trump run in 2024. “I think he’s the best person in the Republican Party to take up the cause in 2024,” Graham exuberantly told Fox News in January. “I expect him to run… I’ll take bets if anybody wants to bet. I’ll give odds.”

Do you really think Graham would be staking out this position if he viewed Trump’s foreign policy outlook as antithetical to his own?

If there’s some kind of enormous ideological conflict between Trump and Graham — who, remember, proudly carries on the McCain mantle — it has not been at all evident for a long time. It would also be weird to characterize Graham as some kind of aberrational nuisance within the GOP, considering that Graham raked in a record-shattering amount of donations for a GOP Senate candidate during his 2020 re-election campaign in South Carolina. And he accomplished this mostly by utilizing conservative media and direct-mailing lists to hammer home the pledge that he would serve in office as an unflinchingly loyal backer of Trump.

For a vivid illustration of persistent McCain/Graham influence as it relates to current events, take a look at this video that recently resurfaced from December 2016, featuring the esteemed Senatorial pals on a trip to Ukraine. Joined in wonderfully “bipartisan” fashion by Amy Klobuchar, the trio delivered a searing address to a unit of Ukrainian soldiers. If you haven’t seen the video, please do watch, because it confirms the extent to which a vocal faction of the US establishment — with McCain and Graham at the forefront — had invested ideologically and militarily in the cause of Ukraine, and by extension the cause of defeating Russia. Graham proclaims to the assembled soldiers: “Your fight is our fight. 2017 will be the year of offense. All of us will go back to Washington, and we will push the case against Russia.” McCain similarly declared, “I am convinced you will win. And we will do everything we can to provide you with what you need to win.”

While in 2016 the cause of arming Ukraine to defeat Russia on the battlefield was a somewhat more marginal preoccupation, today it’s been sanctified as virtually unshakable consensus in both parties. Funneling weapons to Ukraine was once seen as cranky McCain’s pet cause, a fixation that stemmed from his peculiarly hyper-interventionist worldview. Now, whether the US should be waging a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is barely even considered a debatable proposition: just another McCain priority eventually consecrated as mainstream orthodoxy. “It’s bringing Congress together in a way, frankly, I haven’t seen in my 12 years,” Chris Coons, the Democratic senator from Delaware and Biden advisor, reverentially told the New York Times. “You’d have to go back to 9/11 to see such a unified commitment.” McCain is no doubt smiling down from the heavens at this great outbreak of “unification.” Because it’s proof of his enduring legacy; with his worldview and geopolitical objectives having arguably become more widely adopted than ever before.

But the coalescence of McCain-like consensus didn’t start with Russia’s invasion in February 2022. For one thing, Graham was proven right when he prophesied that 2017 would be the “year of offense” — because that was the year he, McCain, and other hawks successfully lobbied Trump to sign off on transfers of lethal weapons to Ukraine. Whatever personality conflict existed between McCain and Trump, the actual policy portfolio enacted by Trump vis-a-vis Russia wasn’t all that different from what McCain’s might’ve been. Indeed, when Trump announced the weapons transfers, McCain showered him with praise. And when Trump abrogated the INF Treaty, he was fulfilling another longtime McCain goal.

Listening to Republican politicians comment on Ukraine policy today, you can almost close your eyes and hear McCain’s irascible voice. For an example of how the McCain worldview is far from limited to so-called “neocons,” but instead a feature of entirely mainstream GOP thinking, consider the recent activities of Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL). If there’s any apt descriptor for Scott, it’s that he’s basically a conventional Republican. Not some kind of overly-ideological “neocon,” but rather a business guy who made a huge fortune defrauding Medicare, somehow leveraged that into becoming Governor of Florida, and is now in the US Senate. He also appears to have higher ambitions, as evidenced by his position running the National Republican Senatorial Committee — the campaign wing of the Senate GOP caucus. Scott isn’t especially bright, but he’s more or less able to articulate the standard bromides aimed squarely at the median Republican, and is thus capable of formulating strategy on behalf of the party for the upcoming midterm elections. He also released a manifesto outlining his bold vision for conservatism, which among other things includes that all Americans be made to pay income tax regardless of their income bracket.

The point is, Scott is situating himself at the center of the party in service of some future gambit, may be to challenge Mitch McConnell for GOP Leader (which Trump has encouraged) or maybe even to launch his own presidential campaign at some point, which I’m sure would be a barrel of laughs.

So what is Rick Scott’s big proposal on the Ukraine issue? You guessed it: demanding a No Fly Zone, or short of that, demanding the US send fighter jets into Ukraine. This is apparently the position that Scott calculates will resonate most potently with the prototypical GOP donor and voter. Again, Scott isn’t intrinsically some sort of deeply ideological McCain-Graham foreign policy fanatic. Yet, he’s espousing views that could have been directly pilfered from the McCain-Graham school of thought — just because that school of thought is so thoroughly mainstream within the GOP, whatever superficial animosities some party members may still harbor against McCain.

Part of this owes to standard partisan reflex. Desperately seeking some angle of attack against Biden in relation to Ukraine, Republicans have settled on denouncing him for not escalating the US proxy war aggressively enough. It’s incredibly easy to imagine the ghost of McCain making the exact same criticisms as, say, Ted Cruz is making at the moment. Days after Biden committed the threshold-crossing act of calling for regime change in Russia — thereby announcing that the policy of the US is to depose Putin — Cruz went on Newsmax and complained that Biden’s “approach to every enemy of America is weakness and appeasement.” Only in a McCain-inflected universe does it make even the faintest sense for a president orchestrating a giant weapons-funneling operation, and waging a proxy war of unprecedented scale — which continues intensifying by the day — to be accused of “appeasement.” But it’s clearly still McCain’s world that the GOP is living in. That was always McCain’s tack: his problem with any given US intervention was of course never the intervention itself, but rather that it wasn’t going far enough, and if you weren’t willing to go as far as he wanted, you were some sort of abject appeaser.

On the subject of Ukraine, this pattern gets repeated over and over by GOP chieftains. Biden proposes the biggest Pentagon budget in US history, and right on cue, Mitch McConnell denounces it as somehow “soft” on Russia and “far-left.” Biden announces yet another massive tranche of missiles, grenades, and heavy artillery being dispatched to Ukraine, and Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, immediately ridicules him for not giving Ukraine fighter jets. “Provide them the planes where they can create a No Fly Zone,” McCarthy demanded in a March 16 press conference. (It’s unclear whether McCarthy is satisfied with Biden’s latest decision to send tanks.)

Though it is now common to characterize Russia as committing “genocide” since footage emerged in the past several days purporting to show Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians, Steve Scalise, the House Republican Whip, led the charge in making that designation weeks ago. “There’s nothing less than genocide going on in Ukraine,” he alleged during that same March 16 press conference, alongside McCarthy. Scalise had been so profoundly moved by Zelensky’s expertly-crafted Zoom address to Congress earlier in the day that he was compelled to issue the “genocide” allegation immediately thereafter. (No word on what independent investigative mission Scalise carried out in order to ascertain the relevant facts.)

Biden may have caused a stir when he condemned Putin as a “war criminal” — thus confirming a complete lack of interest in facilitating any kind of negotiated settlement to the conflict — but first out of the gate in making this accusation was Elise Stefanik, the New York GOP Congresswoman who serves as the chair of the House Republican Conference. Initially viewed as a “moderate,” Stefanik gamely generated big attention in recent years as a bombastic defender of Trump, raising a ton of money in the process. “As a new mom, it is heart-wrenching to watch the video that President Zelensky just played in terms of the bombing of maternity wards,” Stefanik weepily inveighed, also during the March 16 press conference with McCarthy and Scalise. “Make no mistake, there will be consequences on the global stage for Vladimir Putin, who is a war criminal and a thug,” she cried. The pattern is clear: all throughout the run-up to the invasion and ever since, it’s generally been the GOP which employs the most extreme rhetoric and makes the most extreme policy demands, with Biden eventually coming around not long afterwards. In taking this tack, Republicans could hardly pay a more fitting tribute to McCain.

Joni Ernst, the GOP Senator from Iowa, recently debuted a new criticism: apparently, the Biden Administration hasn’t been forthcoming enough about the weapons it’s transferring to Ukraine. But don’t be silly: seeking actual transparency on behalf of the American public is the farthest thing from Ernst’s mind. She totally supports the Biden Administration’s secrecy — she just wants to make sure that the US is dumping what she regards as a sufficient quantity of weapons. “Certainly, we do need to keep it secret, what is being transferred,” Ernst clarified during an appearance on Fox. “And that’s why we’ve asked to have those numbers provided to us in a classified setting.” Explaining the ultimate objective for these efforts, Ernst might as well have been paying direct homage to McCain: “We want to make sure that [Ukrainians] win this war, and they can win this war,” she roared.

But the biggest blow dealt to those conservative opinion elites — the guys who cling to the conceit that the GOP has really and truly changed its foreign policy orientation — comes in the form of Josh Hawley, one of their great hopes for a supposed convention-defying thinker willing to buck party consensus. Because when push comes to shove, it turns out Hawley is just another McCain mini-me.

A central venue for the recurring attempt to “re-imagine conservatism,” or something to that effect, is currently this outfit called “National Conservatism” (NatCon for short) which hosts occasional conferences. I actually attended one in Orlando last October out of morbid curiosity, and the big tell that maybe soaring intellectual heights would not be achieved there was the organizers’ decision to anoint Dave Rubin as a featured speaker. In all honesty, I have never once heard Dave Rubin utter anything resembling an original thought — but there he was, at the podium, sharing his keen insights on behalf of this exciting new GOP faction.

The three GOP elected officials chosen by NatCon to exemplify a re-invigorated “national conservatism” — presumably one which departed from the legacy of old fogies like McCain — were Hawley, Cruz, and Marco Rubio. Few would be surprised that Rubio soon thereafter turned around and started beating the standard war drums. And Cruz will just do whatever best positions him to win the GOP presidential nomination at some point. But Hawley in particular is often touted as a sort of tribune for the emerging “heterodox” wing of the GOP, alienated from the tired ideological construct that weds together military intervention and free markets. Yet, all three NatCon speakers joined the majority of their Senate GOP colleagues in signing a letter last month to demand that Joe Biden send fighter jets into Ukraine — exactly the kind of escalation you’d think these enlightened “NatCons” would be eager to reject. (Surprise! The letter was organized by Lindsey Graham.)

While there are some NatCon types who really do go against the grain, ultimately the larger enterprise functions as an attempt by the same old GOP establishment forces to perpetually re-brand themselves. Kind of like the Tea Party in the early 2010s, which was initially painted as some sort of revolutionary force, but immediately got subsumed into the Republican National Committee and conservative infotainment complex. The NatCon movement’s three elected standard-bearers behaving exactly as McCain would have wanted them to is good evidence that there really has not been any profound break from the past.

Just look at the latest super-serious “Policy Brief” issued by the Heritage Foundation — still the in-house “Think Tank” of official Washington, DC movement conservatism. It’s basically a litany of generic interventionist prescriptions for how the US can “do much more” to ensure Ukraine’s battlefield victory. Suggestions include facilitating “the free and unrestricted transfer of weapons, munitions, and other supplies to the Ukrainians, including a continuous flow of intelligence” — which just translates to an endorsement of the Biden Administration’s status quo, except a degree or two more aggressive. If there really is this wave of insidious anti-interventionism that we’re always being warned is on the brink of taking over the GOP, nowhere is it evident at the GOP’s most influential Think Tank, the place dopey members of Congress — most of whom barely ever thought about the concept of Ukraine before February 2022 — go to receive their talking points.

Then there’s conservative media, which has returned triumphantly to its 2003 heyday as a reliable organ for pro-war agitprop. Republican “id” Sean Hannity is predictably leading the charge. One day he’s calling on NATO to bomb a Russian convoy in Ukraine; the next he’s having a friendly on-air chat with Sean Penn of all people, discussing their mutual support for sending in fighter jets. Meanwhile, in order to keep up the facade that the GOP is somehow nefariously pro-Putin, the non-conservative media continuously seeks out the handful of marginal exceptions who ultimately have no real influence at all on the priorities of the party. (Yes, I’m aware that Tucker Carlson exists, as I appear on his show occasionally. But to whatever extent he’s skeptical of US intervention in Ukraine, this is not reflected in the behavior of the mainline GOP.)

Which brings us to Donald Trump himself. To the degree that Trump appears to have any criticisms of Biden Administration policy in relation to Ukraine, it consists of the retrospective counter-factual whereby Trump claims Putin never would’ve invaded on his watch. Which is possible, but unprovable. With the invasion having happened, though, Trump now assails Biden for “allowing” Putin “to get away with this travesty and assault on humanity.” In a speech shortly after the invasion, Trump insinuated that the US should be threatening to “blow him to pieces” — i.e., threatening nuclear retaliation.

“No president was ever as tough on Russia as I was,” Trump declared on February 28. Those convinced he was compromised by Putin in some sort of extravagant collusion plot never seem to have noticed, but many of the key US actions which precipitated the invasion were committed under Trump: the most obvious being the successful McCain-Graham lobbying effort to get him to start sending Ukraine lethal weaponry. Trump still brags about the decision to this day, stating, “We also gave a lot of the javelins that you’re hearing so much about, we gave those javelins when President Obama was giving sheets and pillows and I guess blankets. That didn’t help too much. But we gave javelins, and a lot of them too, and I guess that’s helping a lot.”

Well, maybe it would’ve been a smarter idea to stick with the blankets. At least if the goal was to avert war. Because for years, Putin warned that these kinds of US weapons shipments were going to drastically heighten tensions. In his speech announcing the invasion, Putin couldn’t have been more explicit about one of his primary motivations to launch the war: “Any further expansion of the North Atlantic alliance’s infrastructure or the ongoing efforts to gain a military foothold of the Ukrainian territory are unacceptable for us.”

It was under Trump that Ukraine was elevated to “Enhanced Opportunities Partner” status within NATO — exactly the sort of military-infrastructural encroachment that Putin denounced. Trump also happens to be the one who formally effectuated the accession of Montenegro into NATO, which McCain had fulminated against Rand Paul for temporarily impeding, as well as the subsequent accession of North Macedonia — thereby continuing the process of NATO expansion which Putin also angrily cites as a central reason for the invasion. When Putin reproaches the US/NATO “military machine” for expanding so much that it is now “approaching our very border” — that’s a process which culminated under Trump!

Even as Democrats screamed that Trump was somehow surreptitiously governing on Putin’s behalf, what he was really doing was enacting a McCain-like policy agenda that cratered US-Russia relations — a trend which proceeded apace under Biden. While the media obsessed over their delusional theory that Trump was collusively enabling Putin, the real issue was always that his Administration did everything in its policy capacity to fray the US-Russia relationship. Hence the diplomatic impasse on bitter display right now.

Oh and by the way, half of the hawks that are constantly on TV demanding more confrontational action against Russia — including Mike Pompeo, H.R. McMaster, Fiona Hill, Kurt Volker, and of course uber-hawk John Bolton — were all hired by Trump.

Unsurprisingly, this McCain-inspired frenzy engulfing Republican elected officials and conservative media is also reflected in the sentiments of rank-and-file GOP voters. During the Trump years, it was Democrats who led the way in declaring Russia a top “enemy,” convinced as they were that Putin had “interfered” in the 2016 election to malevolently install Trump in power. Today, according to recent polling, Republicans now match or surpass Democrats in their antipathy for Russia.

“Crises” such as the one currently underway are always clarifying. One thing they can do is peel back a veneer. And in the case of the GOP, when that veneer is peeled back — beneath all the bogus rhetorical conceits and phony re-branding exercises — what’s revealed is the smiling, satisfied visage of John McCain. Still getting his way in the afterlife.

April 8, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Landmines and disinformation for me, but not for thee

By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos | Responsible Statecraft | April 8, 2022

Two stories snuck below the radar this week: the U.S. admitted to deploying what up until now has been deplorable and downright wretched “disinformation” in the Ukraine crisis. Furthermore, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs boasted about the effective use of landmines against the Russians — a week after headlines conflated their use by the Russians with civilian atrocities.

First, the disinfo. This week the leading lights of our mainstream media sat on a stage and lectured Americans in front of a banner reading “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy.” They must’ve been too busy to give this stunner from NBC News the treatment it deserves:

It was an attention-grabbing assertion that made headlines around the world: U.S. officials said they had indications suggesting Russia might be preparing to use chemical agents in Ukraine.

President Joe Biden later said it publicly. But three U.S. officials told NBC News this week there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the U.S. released the information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions.

It’s one of a string of examples of the Biden administration’s breaking with recent precedent by deploying declassified intelligence as part of an information war against Russia. The administration has done so even when the intelligence wasn’t rock solid, officials said, to keep Russian President Vladimir Putin off balance. …

…“It doesn’t have to be solid intelligence when we talk about it,” a U.S. official said. “It’s more important to get out ahead of them — Putin specifically — before they do something. It’s preventative. We don’t always want to wait until the intelligence is 100 percent certainty that they are going to do something. We want to get out ahead to stop them.”

Headlined as a “break from the past” — truly? — the piece is actually a glowing tribute to the administration’s gambit to throw Putin off his game. The only break from the past here is near-past. Aside from the self-serving gasbaggery coming from the aforementioned stage at the University of Chicago this week, the mainstream media has been screeching about disinformation in a sort of trance-like mantra for more than four years. Most recently it has been used to smear critics of a more escalatory policy in Ukraine. Now, according to this NBC News report, it is:

 “the most amazing display of intelligence as an instrument of state power that I have seen or that I’ve heard of since the Cuban Missile Crisis,” said Tim Weiner, the author of a 2006 history of the CIA and 2020’s “The Folly and the Glory,” a look at the U.S.-Russia rivalry over decades. “It has certainly blunted and defused the disinformation weaponry of the Kremlin.”

Get it? The U.S. must use “good” disinformation to combat the “bad” disinformation by the Russians. Just like we engage in “good” military invasions (Iraq, Libya) to overthrow  the “bad” guys (Hussein, Qaddafi).

Which brings us to landmines. The U.S. never signed the international ban on landmines, which have a pesky habit of lying around for decades after wars and blowing civilians’ limbs off. We know this. But as always, the Americans want it both ways, pointing to their “desperate” use by bad guys, like the Russians, as akin to atrocities. Like these headlines last week, here and here.

But then it turns out the Ukrainians are using them too, but their use is “effective” and “strategic” and important to the mission. Here’s Joint Chiefs Chair, Gen. Mark Milley, testifying yesterday.

“Land mines are being effectively used by the Ukrainian forces to shape the avenues of approach by Russian armored forces, which puts them into engagement areas and makes them vulnerable to the 60,000 anti-tank weapons systems that we’re providing to the Ukrainians,” Milley said. “That’s one of the reasons why you see column after column of Russian vehicles that are destroyed.”

This reminds us of course of the incident earlier in the invasion when Linda Greenfield, our UN ambassador, tried to rip the Russians for what appeared to be cluster munitions in their convoys marching toward Kyiv. Her statement had to be edited, however, because the U.S. still has such weapons — which too leave little bomblets behind that tend to kill and main unsuspecting civilians — in its own arsenal.

Like the contradictions in Greenfield’s story, Milley’s will no doubt be met by mainstream crickets, too. These threads just don’t fit the proscribed narrative, which at its worst, promulgates a “fine for me, but not for thee” hypocrisy.

April 8, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , | Leave a comment

Obama suggests Big Tech algorithms need to be regulated over “misinformation” problem

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | April 8, 2022

Former US President Barack Obama railed against social media platforms for supposedly prompting “white supremacists, insurrectionists, misogynist behavior, bullying behavior,” accused these platforms of undermining democracy, and called for them to be regulated during Wednesday’s “Disinformation and Erosion of Democracy” conference.

At the conference, Obama described himself as “close to a First Amendment absolutist” who believes that you “deal with bad speech with good speech.”

“We don’t want to be policing… everything that’s said on the internet,” Obama added.

However, when it came to speech that Obama deems to be “misinformation” or “disinformation,” he didn’t propose more speech as a solution.

Instead, he framed the weaponization of “information, disinformation, misinformation” as one of the things that he’s “most concerned about” and something that he “underestimated the degree to which democracies were as vulnerable to.”

Obama also claimed that social media product design “monetizes anger, resentment, conflict, division, and, in some cases, makes people very vulnerable” and “can lead to violence.”

“If you are… a woman, if you are a person of color, if you are a trans person right now in certain parts of this country, what’s said matters,” Obama said. “What you now have is…these product designs that are… in a non-transparent way, that we don’t have much insight to, a series of editorial choices are essentially being made that undermine our democracy and oftentimes, when combined with any kind of ethnonationalism misogyny or racism, can be fatal.”

Additionally, the former President invoked the January 6 Capitol riot and complained that social media platforms “have some insight into what’s more likely to prompt white supremacists, insurrectionists, misogynist behavior, bullying behavior” but haven’t been forthcoming about their product designs.

Obama’s proposed solution to his complaints about misinformation and social media is to regulate social media algorithms and subject these platforms to federal inspections.

“I think it is reasonable for us as a society to have a debate and then put in place a combination of regulatory measures and industry norms that leave intact the opportunity for these platforms that make money but say to them that… there’s certain practices you engage in that… we don’t think are good for our society and we’re gonna discourage,” Obama said.

He continued by arguing that “a democracy can rightly expect” social media platforms to share their insights with the public and be subject to a level of scrutiny from federal inspectors that is similar to the safety standards and inspections imposed on producers of meat, cars, and toasters.

Interestingly, when Obama was asked to provide examples of misinformation and disinformation during the conference, his stance varied wildly depending on how these examples affected him.

He branded the first example that he provided, media speculation about his birthplace, as agenda-driven promotion of “a clearly false fact.”

Yet when he provided the second example, the media’s accusations that he’d shared false information and lied about the Affordable (sic) Care Act, Obama admitted that what he’d said was “technically” false but justified it by claiming that “the basic principle I’d laid out, I meant and was true.”

This isn’t the first time Obama has pushed for government oversight of Big Tech. In 2020, the former President called for regulations that curb “crazy lies and conspiracy theories.”

April 8, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Whoops! Federal Judge Acquits January 6 Defendant

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | April 8, 2022

In what can only come as an extreme shock to people who still view the January 6 Capitol protests as a gigantic conspiracy to violently take over the reins of the federal government, a federal judge has just acquitted New Mexico engineer Matthew Martin of all charges relating to the protests.

Acquitted! As in Not Guilty! As in walking out of the federal courtroom a free man.

Mind you, I’m not referring to a federal jury trial. For some reason, Martin chose to waive a jury trial. In a non-jury trial, the judge serves the same role as a jury. He not only determines the law of the case, he also determines whether the evidence supports a finding of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

In most instances, it is much more difficult, as a practical matter, to get an acquittal from a judge than it is to get one from a jury. That’s because federal judges ordinarily lean toward the prosecution, especially since many of them are former prosecutors.

Our American ancestors clearly understood this phenomenon, which is why they had the Bill of Rights guarantee the right of trial by jury.

Thus, to get an acquittal from a judge is considered by lawyers to be a super-big achievement.

The facts of the case were not very much in dispute. There was no question but that Martin entered the Capitol, along with lots of other protestors. He took the stand and told the judge that he figured the Capitol police were granting people permission to enter the building, a point that prosecutors challenged. Once inside, Martin did not start shooting people, setting off bombs, or committing any other violent acts that would ordinarily be associated with a violent revolution. Instead, he spent his time taking pictures with his cellphone.

According to Politico, in finding Martin not guilty, Judge Trevor McFadden called Martin’s conduct “about as minimal and not serious as I can imagine.”

Whoops! That doesn’t bode well for those people who have been claiming that the protestors were involved in a gigantic conspiracy to violently take over the federal government. Never mind that the protestors didn’t have AR-15s, bombs, or other high-power weapons that are ordinarily used in violent revolutions. In fact, the only person who was shot and killed was one of the protestors, who wasn’t even armed.

Politico stated that “the verdict could be viewed as a message from McFadden to prosecutors that pursuing criminal charges against nearly every demonstrator who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6 was unwise and that resources should have been trained more intensely on those accused of violence or of conspiring to block the electoral vote count.”

Good for Judge McFadden. His verdict of acquittal goes to show why an independent judiciary is an essential part of a free society. There is no doubt that if the Justice Department, the Pentagon, or the CIA were determining Matthew Martin’s guilt, the result would have been a conviction.

April 8, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Putting Big Bad Pharma Back on Trial in the COVID-19 Era

They keep telling us to “trust the science.” But who paid for it?

Photo credit: Massimo Giachetti
By Rebecca Strong – February 16, 2022

After graduating from Columbia University with a chemical engineering degree, my grandfather went on to work for Pfizer for almost two decades, culminating his career as the company’s Global Director of New Products. I was rather proud of this fact growing up — it felt as if this father figure, who raised me for several years during my childhood, had somehow played a role in saving lives. But in recent years, my perspective on Pfizer — and other companies in its class — has shifted. Blame it on the insidious big pharma corruption laid bare by whistleblowers in recent years. Blame it on the endless string of big pharma lawsuits revealing fraud, deception, and cover-ups. Blame it on the fact that I witnessed some of their most profitable drugs ruin the lives of those I love most. All I know is, that pride I once felt has been overshadowed by a sticky skepticism I just can’t seem to shake.

In 1973, my grandpa and his colleagues celebrated as Pfizer crossed a milestone: the one-billion-dollar sales mark. These days, Pfizer rakes in $81 billion a year, making it the 28th most valuable company in the world. Johnson & Johnson ranks 15th, with $93.77 billion. To put things into perspective, that makes said companies wealthier than most countries in the world. And thanks to those astronomical profit margins, the Pharmaceuticals and Health Products industry is able to spend more on lobbying than any other industry in America.

While big pharma lobbying can take several different forms, these companies tend to target their contributions to senior legislators in Congress — you know, the ones they need to keep in their corner, because they have the power to draft healthcare laws. Pfizer has outspent its peers in six of the last eight election cycles, coughing up almost $9.7 million. During the 2016 election, pharmaceutical companies gave more than $7 million to 97 senators at an average of $75,000 per member. They also contributed $6.3 million to president Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. The question is: what did big pharma get in return?

ALEC’s Off-the-Record Sway

To truly grasp big pharma’s power, you need to understand how The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) works. ALEC, which was founded in 1973 by conservative activists working on Ronald Reagan’s campaign, is a super secretive pay-to-play operation where corporate lobbyists — including in the pharma sector — hold confidential meetings about “model” bills. A large portionof these bills is eventually approved and become law.

A rundown of ALEC’s greatest hits will tell you everything you need to know about the council’s motives and priorities. In 1995, ALEC promoted a bill that restricts consumers’ rights to sue for damages resulting from taking a particular medication. They also endorsed the Statute of Limitation Reduction Act, which put a time limit on when someone could sue after a medication-induced injury or death. Over the years, ALEC has promoted many other pharma-friendly bills that would: weaken FDA oversight of new drugs and therapies, limit FDA authority over drug advertising, and oppose regulations on financial incentives for doctors to prescribe specific drugs. But what makes these ALEC collaborations feel particularly problematic is that there’s little transparency — all of this happens behind closed doors. Congressional leaders and other committee members involved in ALEC aren’t required to publish any records of their meetings and other communications with pharma lobbyists, and the roster of ALEC members is completely confidential. All we know is that in 2020, more than two-thirds of Congress — 72 senators and 302 House of Representatives members — cashed a campaign check from a pharma company.

Big Pharma Funding Research

The public typically relies on an endorsement from government agencies to help them decide whether or not a new drug, vaccine, or medical device is safe and effective. And those agencies, like the FDA, count on clinical research. As already established, big pharma is notorious for getting its hooks into influential government officials. Here’s another sobering truth: The majority of scientific research is paid for by — wait for it — the pharmaceutical companies.

When the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published 73 studies of new drugs over the course of a single year, they found that a staggering 82% of them had been funded by the pharmaceutical company selling the product, 68% had authors who were employees of that company, and 50% had lead researchers who accepted money from a drug company. According to 2013 research conducted at the University of Arizona College of Law, even when pharma companies aren’t directly funding the research, company stockholders, consultants, directors, and officers are almost always involved in conducting them. A 2017 report by the peer-reviewed journal The BMJ also showed that about half of medical journal editors receive payments from drug companies, with the average payment per editor hovering around $28,000. But these statistics are only accurate if researchers and editors are transparent about payments from pharma. And a 2022 investigative analysis of two of the most influential medical journals found that 81% of study authors failed to disclose millions in payments from drug companies, as they’re required to do.

Unfortunately, this trend shows no sign of slowing down. The number of clinical trials funded by the pharmaceutical industry has been climbing every year since 2006, according to a John Hopkins University report, while independent studies have been harder to find. And there are some serious consequences to these conflicts of interest. Take Avandia, for instance, a diabetes drug produced by GlaxoSmithCline (GSK). Avandia was eventually linked to a dramatically increased risk of heart attacks and heart failure. And a BMJ report revealed that almost 90% of scientists who initially wrote glowing articles about Avandia had financial ties to GSK.

But here’s the unnerving part: if the pharmaceutical industry is successfully biasing the science, then that means the physicians who rely on the science are biased in their prescribing decisions.

Where the lines get really blurry is with “ghostwriting.” Big pharma execs know citizens are way more likely to trust a report written by a board-certified doctor than one of their representatives. That’s why they pay physicians to list their names as authors — even though the MDs had little to no involvement in the research, and the report was actually written by the drug company. This practice started in the ’50s and ’60s when tobacco execs were clamoring to prove that cigarettes didn’t cause cancer (spoiler alert: they do!), so they commissioned doctors to slap their name on papers undermining the risks of smoking.

It’s still a pretty common tactic today: more than one in 10 articles published in the NEJM was co-written by a ghostwriter. While a very small percentage of medical journals have clear policies against ghostwriting, it’s still technically legal —despite the fact that the consequences can be deadly.

Case in point: in the late ’90s and early 2000s, Merck paid for 73 ghostwritten articles to play up the benefits of its arthritis drug Vioxx. It was later revealed that Merck failed to report all of the heart attacks experienced by trial participants. In fact, a study published in the NEJM revealed that an estimated 160,000 Americans experienced heart attacks or strokes from taking Vioxx. That research was conducted by Dr. David Graham, Associate Director of the FDA’s Office of Drug Safety, who understandably concluded the drug was not safe. But the FDA’s Office of New Drugs, which not only was responsible for initially approving Vioxx but also regulating it, tried to sweep his findings under the rug.

“I was pressured to change my conclusions and recommendations, and basically threatened that if I did not change them, I would not be permitted to present the paper at the conference,” he wrote in his 2004 U.S. Senate testimony on Vioxx. “One Drug Safety manager recommended that I should be barred from presenting the poster at the meeting.”

Eventually, the FDA issued a public health advisory about Vioxx and Merck withdrew this product. But it was a little late for repercussions — 38,000 of those Vioxx-takers who suffered heart attacks had already died. Graham called this a “profound regulatory failure,” adding that scientific standards the FDA apply to drug safety “guarantee that unsafe and deadly drugs will remain on the U.S. market.”

This should come as no surprise, but research has also repeatedly shown that a paper written by a pharmaceutical company is more likely to emphasize the benefits of a drug, vaccine, or device while downplaying the dangers. (If you want to understand more about this practice, a former ghostwriter outlines all the ethical reasons why she quit this job in a PLOS Medicine report.) While adverse drug effects appear in 95% of clinical research, only 46% of published reports disclose them. Of course, all of this often ends up misleading doctors into thinking a drug is safer than it actually is.

Big Pharma Influence On Doctors

Pharmaceutical companies aren’t just paying medical journal editors and authors to make their products look good, either. There’s a long, sordid history of pharmaceutical companies incentivizing doctors to prescribe their products through financial rewards. For instance, Pfizer and AstraZeneca doled out a combined $100 million to doctors in 2018, with some earning anywhere from $6 million to $29 million in a year. And research has shown this strategy works: when doctors accept these gifts and payments, they’re significantly more likely to prescribe those companies’ drugs. Novartis comes to mind — the company famously spent over $100 million paying for doctors’ extravagant meals, golf outings, and more, all while also providing a generous kickback program that made them richer every time they prescribed certain blood pressure and diabetes meds.

Side note: the Open Payments portal contains a nifty little database where you can find out if any of your own doctors received money from drug companies. Knowing that my mother was put on a laundry list of meds after a near-fatal car accident, I was curious — so I did a quick search for her providers. While her PCP only banked a modest amount from Pfizer and AstraZeneca, her previous psychiatrist — who prescribed a cocktail of contraindicated medications without treating her in person — collected quadruple-digit payments from pharmaceutical companies. And her pain care specialist, who prescribed her jaw-dropping doses of opioid pain medication for more than 20 years (far longer than the 5-day safety guideline), was raking in thousands from Purdue Pharma, AKA the opioid crisis’ kingpin.

Purdue is now infamous for its wildly aggressive OxyContin campaign in the ’90s. At the time, the company billed it as a non-addictive wonder drug for pain sufferers. Internal emails show Pursue sales representatives were instructed to “sell, sell, sell” OxyContin, and the more they were able to push, the more they were rewarded with promotions and bonuses. With the stakes so high, these reps stopped at nothing to get doctors on board — even going so far as to send boxes of doughnuts spelling out “OxyContin” to unconvinced physicians. Purdue had stumbled upon the perfect system for generating tons of profit — off of other people’s pain.

Documentation later proved that not only was Purdue aware it was highly addictive and that many people were abusing it, but that they also encouraged doctors to continue prescribing increasingly higher doses of it (and sent them on lavish luxury vacations for some motivation). In testimony to Congress, Purdue exec Paul Goldenheim played dumb about OxyContin addiction and overdose rates, but emails that were later exposed showed that he requested his colleagues remove all mentions of addiction from their correspondence about the drug. Even after it was proven in court that Purdue fraudulently marketed OxyContin while concealing its addictive nature, no one from the company spent a single day behind bars. Instead, the company got a slap on the wrist and a $600 million fine for a misdemeanor, the equivalent of a speeding ticket compared to the $9 billion they made off OxyContin up until 2006. Meanwhile, thanks to Purdue’s recklessness, more than 247,000 people died from prescription opioid overdoses between 1999 and 2009. And that’s not even factoring in all the people who died of heroin overdoses once OxyContin was no longer attainable to them. The NIH reports that 80% of people who use heroin started by misusing prescription opioids.

Former sales rep Carol Panara told me in an interview that when she looks back on her time at Purdue, it all feels like a “bad dream.” Panara started working for Purdue in 2008, one year after the company pled guilty to “misbranding” charges for OxyContin. At this point, Purdue was “regrouping and expanding,” says Panara, and to that end, had developed a clever new approach for making money off OxyContin: sales reps were now targeting general practitioners and family doctors, rather than just pain management specialists. On top of that, Purdue soon introduced three new strengths for OxyContin: 15, 30, and 60 milligrams, creating smaller increments Panara believes were aimed at making doctors feel more comfortable increasing their patients’ dosages. According to Panara, there were internal company rankings for sales reps based on the number of prescriptions for each OxyContin dosing strength in their territory.

“They were sneaky about it,” she said. “Their plan was to go in and sell these doctors on the idea of starting with 10 milligrams, which is very low, knowing full well that once they get started down that path — that’s all they need. Because eventually, they’re going to build a tolerance and need a higher dose.”

Occasionally, doctors expressed concerns about a patient becoming addicted, but Purdue had already developed a way around that. Sales reps like Panara were taught to reassure those doctors that someone in pain might experience addiction-like symptoms called “pseudoaddiction,” but that didn’t mean they were truly addicted. There is no scientific evidence whatsoever to support that this concept is legit, of course. But the most disturbing part? Reps were trained to tell doctors that “pseudoaddiction” signaled the patient’s pain wasn’t being managed well enough, and the solution was simply to prescribe a higher dose of OxyContin.

Panara finally quit Purdue in 2013. One of the breaking points was when two pharmacies in her territory were robbed at gunpoint specifically for OxyContin. In 2020, Purdue pled guilty to three criminal charges in an $8.3 billion deal, but the company is now under court protection after filing for bankruptcy. Despite all the damage that’s been done, the FDA’s policies for approving opioids remain essentially unchanged.

Purdue probably wouldn’t have been able to pull this off if it weren’t for an FDA examiner named Curtis Wright, and his assistant Douglas Kramer. While Purdue was pursuing Wright’s stamp of approval on OxyContin, Wright took an outright sketchy approach to their application, instructing the company to mail documents to his home office rather than the FDA, and enlisting Purdue employees to help him review trials about the safety of the drug. The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act requires that the FDA have access to at least two randomized controlled trials before deeming a drug as safe and effective, but in the case of OxyContin, it got approved with data from just one measly two-week study — in osteoarthritis patients, no less.

When both Wright and Kramer left the FDA, they went on to work for none other than (drumroll, please) Purdue, with Wright earning three times his FDA salary. By the way — this is just one example of the FDA’s notoriously incestuous relationship with big pharma, often referred to as “the revolving door”. In fact, a 2018 Science report revealed that 11 out of 16 FDA reviewers ended up at the same companies they had been regulating products for.

While doing an independent investigation, “Empire of Pain” author and New Yorker columnist Patrick Radden Keefe tried to gain access to documentation of Wright’s communications with Purdue during the OxyContin approval process.

“The FDA came back and said, ‘Oh, it’s the weirdest thing, but we don’t have anything. It’s all either been lost or destroyed,’” Keefe told Fortune in an interview. “But it’s not just the FDA. It’s Congress, it’s the Department of Justice, it’s big parts of the medical establishment … the sheer amount of money involved, I think, has meant that a lot of the checks that should be in place in society to not just achieve justice, but also to protect us as consumers, were not there because they had been co-opted.”

Big pharma may be to blame for creating the opioids that caused this public health catastrophe, but the FDA deserves just as much scrutiny — because its countless failures also played a part in enabling it. And many of those more recent fails happened under the supervision of Dr. Janet Woodcock. Woodcock was named FDA’s acting commissioner mere hours after Joe Biden was inaugurated as president. She would have been a logical choice, being an FDA vet of 35 years, but then again it’s impossible to forget that she played a starring role in the FDA’s perpetuating the opioid epidemic. She’s also known for overruling her own scientific advisors when they vote against approving a drug. Not only did Woodcock approve OxyContin for children as young as 11 years old, but she also gave the green light to several other highly controversial extended-release opioid pain drugs without sufficient evidence of safety or efficacy. One of those was Zohydro: in 2011, the FDA’s advisory committee voted 11:2 against approving it due to safety concerns about inappropriate use, but Woodcock went ahead and pushed it through, anyway. Under Woodcock’s supervision, the FDA also approved Opana, which is twice as powerful as OxyContin — only to then beg the drug maker to take it off the market 10 years later due to “abuse and manipulation.” And then there was Dsuvia, a potent painkiller 1,000 times stronger than morphine and 10 times more powerful than fentanyl. According to a head of one of the FDA’s advisory committees, the U.S. military had helped to develop this particular drug, and Woodcock said there was “pressure from the Pentagon” to push it through approvals. The FBI, members of congress, public health advocates, and patient safety experts alike called this decision into question, pointing out that with hundreds of opioids already on the market there’s no need for another — particularly one that comes with such high risks.

Most recently, Woodcock served as the therapeutics lead for Operation Warp Speed, overseeing COVID-19 vaccine development.

To be continued…

Rebecca Strong is a Boston-based freelance health and wellness writer currently contributing to Insider, Health magazine, Healthline, Eat This Not That, and more.

April 7, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Evidence of Pandemic and Bioweapon Cover-Ups

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | April 7, 2022

As evidence of a potential bioweapons cover-up has started emerging, a company called Metabiota is gaining prominence. The links between Metabiota and several key players in the COVID pandemic and/or the Ukraine labs story are manifold, so there’s no really simple way to unravel it in a logical sequence. That said, let’s start with what Metabiota does and the connections of its founder, and expand from there.

Metabiota’s Mission

Metabiota’s mission is to make the world more resilient to epidemics by providing “data, analytics, advice and training to prepare for global health threats and mitigate their impacts.”1

Through data analysis, they help “decision makers across government and industry” to estimate and mitigate pandemic risks. But they also claim to support “sustainable development,” which seems to have little to do with pandemic risk management.

That term, “sustainable development,” is one promoted by Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF). It’s part and parcel of Schwab’s plan for a global Great Reset and transhumanist revolution (aka, the Fourth Industrial Revolution).

It’s not surprising, then, to find out that the founder of Metabiota, Nathan Wolfe, not only has close ties to the WEF, but is also a rising star there. He’s a WEF Young Global Leader graduate and was awarded the WEF’s Technology Pioneer award in 2021.

Metabiota and the Search for Pandemic Viruses

Metabiota was a core partner of a United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Pandemic Threat Program called PREDICT, which sought to identify viruses with pandemic potential.

Contractors funded through this program have included the EcoHealth Alliance, headed by Peter Daszak. The PREDICT program, directed by Dennis Carroll, appears to have served as a proof of concept for the Global Virome Project that Carroll founded.

According to a recent investigation by U.S. Right to Know (USRTK),2 Carroll appears to have diverted government funds from the PREDICT program while he was still running it, to fund this personal side project, which was set up with the intention to collect, identify and catalogue 1 million viruses from wildlife in an effort to predict which ones might cause a human epidemic.

Metabiota’s Funding

Metabiota receives funding from several interconnected organizations and agencies, including:3

•Pilot Growth Management, cofounded by Neil Callahan. Callahan is also a cofounder of Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners, and he sits on Metabiota’s board of advisers

•The Global Virome Project, which reportedly paid (or was planning to pay) Metabiota $341,000 to conduct a cost-benefit analysis4

•In-Q-Tel, a CIA venture capital firm that specializes in high-tech investments that support or benefit the intelligence capacity of U.S. intelligence agencies

•The U.S. Department of Defense’s Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA).5 Specifically, in 2014, DTRA awarded Metabiota $18.4 million in federal contracts for scientific and technical consulting services to the DTRA’s labs in Ukraine and Georgia6

By outsourcing work to private companies, DTRA is able to circumvent Congressional oversight. Russia is now accusing the U.S. of funding secret and illegal bioweapons research in these Ukraine labs, and claims this was the real reason behind its invasion

•Rosemont Seneca,7 an investment fund co-managed by Hunter Biden.8 If Russia’s accusations turn out to be true, this tie may prove deeply problematic for the White House, as this means the Biden family was more or less directly involved in the funding of that research

Wolfe has also received more than $20 million in research grants from Google, the NIH and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, just to name a few, and was a friend of now-deceased Jeffrey Epstein. In his 2012 book, “The Viral Storm,” Wolfe thanked friends for their support, including Epstein and Boris Nikolic. Nikolic, a biotech venture capitalist, was named “back-up executor” in Epstein’s will.9

Epstein, who besides being a convicted pedophile and accused child sex trafficker, had a robust interest in eugenics. It’s now well-known that he dreamed of creating a “superhuman” race of his own by impregnating dozens of women at a time at his New Mexico ranch.10 Epstein also managed to secure meetings with Bill Gates,11 whose family history is also marked by an interest in eugenics and population control.

Metabiota’s Founder Tied to Suspect in COVID Pandemic

In addition to having close ties to the WEF and its Great Reset agenda, Wolfe, the founder of Metabiota, has also served on the EcoHealth Alliance’s editorial board since 2004. In 2017, he even co-wrote a study on coronaviruses in bats together with EcoHealth Alliance president, Peter Daszak.

As you may recall, EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit organization focused on pandemic prevention, worked closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China, where SARS-CoV-2 is suspected of having originated.12

Daszak — who received funding for coronavirus research from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the U.S. State Department13 — subcontracted some of that work to Shi Zheng-li at the WIV. He was also the coauthor on research projects at the WIV.

Once rumors of SARS-CoV-2 being man-made first began, Daszak played a central role in the plot to obscure the lab origin by crafting a scientific statement condemning such inquiries as “conspiracy theory.”14,15 This manufactured “consensus” was then relied on by the media to counter anyone presenting theories and evidence to the contrary.

This, despite the fact that he, in 2015, warned that a global pandemic might occur from a laboratory incident — and that “the risks were greater with the sort of virus manipulation research being carried out in Wuhan”!16

In 2021, two investigations into the origins of the COVID pandemic were opened, one by the World Health Organization17 and another by The Lancet,18 and Daszak somehow managed to end up on both of these committees, despite having openly and repeatedly dismissed the possibility of the pandemic being the result of a lab leak.19

Editor’s note: The WHO reference has been scrubbed from both the agency’s website and internet archives, but several news stories like this one from NPR,20 published after the investigation was launched, are still live and accessible.

Interestingly, one of EcoHealth Alliance’s policy advisers is a former Fort Detrick commander named David Franz. Fort Detrick is the principal U.S. government-run “biodefense” facility, although Franz himself has publicly admitted that “in biology … everything is dual use — the people, the facilities and the equipment.”21

Metabiota and the DTRA

In late May 2016, Metabiota hired Andrew C. Weber,22 a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, to head up its Global Partnerships.23 Between 2009 and 2014, Weber served as assistant secretary of defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense under then-president Obama.

Weber is credited with creating the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) — a combat support agency within the U.S. DoD, specializing in countering weapons of mass destruction, including biological weapons24,25 — and as mentioned earlier, the DTRA has reportedly funded Metabiota to operate U.S.-funded biological research labs in Ukraine.

The DTRA has also issued a number of grants to the EcoHealth Alliance, totaling at least $37.5 million,26,27 including a 2017 grant for $6.5 million to “understand the risk of bat-borne zoonotic disease emergence in Western Asia.”28

According to a December 2020 report by The Defender,29 EcoHealth Alliance had tried to hide most of the Pentagon funding that it had received between 2013 and 2020, most of which came from the DTRA.

Metabiota’s Bungled Ebola Response

In 2016, CBS News published a scathing critique of Metabiota’s response to the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa.30 Metabiota had been hired by the WHO and the local government of Sierra Leone to monitor the spread of the epidemic, but according to an investigation by The Associated Press, “some of the company’s actions made an already chaotic situation worse.”

In a July 17, 2014, email obtained by AP, Dr. Eric Bertherat, medical officer at the WHO’s Department of Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response, complained about misdiagnoses and “total confusion” at the small laboratory Metabiota shared with Tulane University in Kenema, Sierra Leone.

According to Bertherat, there was “no tracking of the samples” and “absolutely no control on what is being done.” “This is a situation that WHO can no longer endorse,” he wrote. Similarly, Sylvia Blyden, special executive assistant to the president of Sierra Leone, told AP Metabiota’s response was a disaster:31

“’They messed up the entire region,’ she said. She called Metabiota’s attempt to claim credit for its Ebola work ‘an insult for the memories of thousands of Africans who have died.’”

U.S. health official Austin Demby, who evaluated Metabiota’s and Tulane’s lab work at the request of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the government of Sierra Leone, was also critical.

In one email, Demby noted used needles were left out and there was no ultraviolet light for decontamination. The space was also too small to safely process blood samples. “The cross-contamination potential is huge and quite frankly unacceptable,” he wrote.

Anja Wolz, an emergency coordinator with Doctors Without Borders, told AP she witnessed Metabiota workers entering homes of suspected Ebola patients without protective gear, and leaving high-risk areas without performing any kind of decontamination procedure. She also accused Metabiota of miscalculating the severity of the outbreak, while insisting that they had the situation under control when clearly, they didn’t.

Tulane microbiology professor Bob Garry was also critical of Metabiota’s choice to have Dr. Jean-Paul Gonzalez run the operation, as Gonzalez, in 1994, had accidentally gotten infected with a rare hemorrhagic fever while working in a Yale University lab.

He failed to notify anyone about the exposure for more than a week, a delay that put more than 100 other people at risk. Gonzalez was ordered to take a remedial safety course, but according to Garry, such carelessness was a red flag, and he didn’t think Gonzalez was the right man to teach Sierra Leoneans about Ebola.

“Do you really want the person who infected himself with hemorrhagic fever going around explaining to people how to be safe?” Garry asked in an email to a Metabiota media representative. Wolfe defended his company, saying there was no evidence they’d done anything wrong. Some of the problems he blamed on misunderstandings, and others on commercial rivalry.

Lab Accident ‘Most Likely,’ yet Least Probed Cause of COVID

In a March 28, 2022, report,32 U.S. Right to Know (USRTK) revealed the contents of a 2020 State Department memo33 obtained by the group. USRTK writes:34

“‘Origin of the outbreak: The Wuhan labs remained the most likely but least probed,’ reads the topline. The memo is written as a BLUF — ‘bottom line up front’ — a style of communication used in the military. The identity of the author or authors is unknown …

‘BLUF: There is no direct, smoking gun evidence to prove that a leak from Wuhan labs caused the pandemic, but there is circumstantial evidence to suggest such is the case,’ the memo reads. Apparently drafted in spring 2020, the memo details circumstantial evidence for the ‘lab leak’ theory — the idea that COVID-19 originated at one of the labs in Wuhan, China, the pandemic’s epicenter.

The memo raises concerns about the ‘massive amount’ of research on novel coronaviruses apparently conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the nearby Wuhan Center for Disease Control lab … The memo also flags biosafety lapses at both labs, calling the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s ‘management of deadly viruses and virus-carrying lab animals … appallingly poor and negligent.’

The memo provides an extraordinary window into behind-the-scenes concerns about a lab accident among U.S. foreign policy leaders, even as this line of inquiry was deemed a conspiracy theory by international virologists, some of whom had undisclosed conflicts of interest.

The memo also calls into question these virologists’ impartiality. Shi Zhengli, a Wuhan Institute of Virology coronavirus researcher nicknamed the ‘Bat Woman,’ has forged wide-reaching international collaborations, including with prestigious Western virologists, the memo notes.

‘Suspicion lingers that Shi holds an important and powerful position in the field in China and has extensive cooperation with many [international] virologists who might be doing her a favor,’ it reads …

The memo laments that ‘the most logical place to investigate the virus origin has been completely sealed off from inquiry by the [Chinese Communist Party]’ … The memo even suggests that other hypotheses may have served as a distraction from a probe of the city’s extensive research on novel coronaviruses. ‘All other theories are likely to be a decoy to prevent an inquiry [into] the WCDC and WIV,’ it states …

The memo cites a 2015 paper35 coauthored by Shi titled ‘A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence’ that described creating a ‘chimera,’ or engineered virus, with the spike protein of a coronavirus from a Chinese horseshoe bat.

Editors at Nature Medicine added a note in March 2020 cautioning that the article was ‘being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered’ … But the memo shows that the State Department indeed considered the paper relevant to the pandemic’s origins.”

NIH Retracted Gene Sequence at WIV Researcher’s Request

While we’ve yet to obtain bulletproof evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was developed as a bioweapon, there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence that points in that direction. Disturbingly, as time goes on, more and more of this circumstantial evidence seems to highlight the United States’ involvement. If one proverbial finger is pointing at China, four others are pointing back at us.

This is profoundly bad news, but it really ought to strengthen our resolve to get to the bottom of it. None of us are safe until the mad scientists responsible for this pandemic are brought to justice. It doesn’t matter who they are. In all likelihood, we’ll find that blame cannot be pinned on a single nation. At bare minimum, the U.S. and China appear to be covering for each other.

As just one example, there are the deletions of information that have occurred both at the National Institutes of Health and the WIV, either at the other’s request, or as what appears to be a favor.

As reported by Just the News,36 NIH deleted a genetic sequencing submission of SARS-CoV-2 from its Sequence Read Archive (SRA) at the request of a researcher at the WIV. Emails37 obtained via FOIA request to the NIH by Empower Oversight show a WIV researcher who had submitted two genetic sequences to the SRA, one in March 2020, and a second in June 2020, asked to have the last one retracted.

NIH initially stated that it would be better to edit or replace the submission rather than retracting it, but the researcher insisted it be removed, which they did. To be fair, the NIH also states it has retracted at least eight SRA submissions in total, most from American researchers, at their request. However, emails also show the NIH directed reporters on how to provide more favorable and less sensationalized coverage of the deletion of the Chinese sequence. Just the News writes:38

“[Empower Oversight] says one of the most disconcerting elements of the emails is evidence showing the NIH has refused to participate in a transparent process to examine data on the deleted sequences.

‘Most importantly, why has NIH refused to examine archival copies of deleted sequences in an open scientific process to determine whether any of that information might be able to shed light on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic?’ the group asked.

However, that argument was dismissed by NIH official Steve Sherry. Although sequences are never fully deleted, according to the agency, Sherry told a researcher who asked for transparency, ‘As you know, when data sets are withdrawn from the database, that status does not permit use for further analyses.’”

WIV Deleted Mentions of US Collaborators

The WIV has also deleted information in what appears to be an effort to shield the NIH. Shortly after Fauci testified in a Senate hearing in March 2021,39 the WIV quietly deleted all mentions of its collaboration with Fauci’s NIAID, the NIH and other American research partners from its website. As reported May 15, 2021, by The National Pulse :40

“March 21st, 2021, the lab’s website listed six U.S.-based research partners: University of Alabama, University of North Texas, EcoHealth Alliance, Harvard University, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the United States, and the National Wildlife Federation.41

One day later, the page was revised to contain just two research partners — EcoHealth Alliance and the University of Alabama.42 By March 23rd, EcoHealth Alliance was the sole partner remaining.43

EcoHealth Alliance is run by long-standing Chinese Communist Party-partner Dr. Peter Daszak, who National Pulse Editor-in-Chief Raheem Kassam has repeatedly claimed will be the first ‘fall guy’ of the Wuhan lab debacle …

Beyond establishing a working relationship between the NIH and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, now-deleted posts44 from the site also detail studies bearing the hallmarks of gain-of-function research conducted with the Wuhan-based lab.”

Indeed, a now-deleted WIV web page titled “Will SARS Come Back?” stated that:45

“Prof. Zhengli Shi and Xingyi Ge from WIV, in cooperation with researchers from University of North Carolina, Harvard Medical School, Bellinzona Institute of Microbiology … examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations.

Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, the scientists generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.

The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.

Evaluation of available SARS-based immune-therapeutic and prophylactic modalities revealed poor efficacy; both monoclonal antibody and vaccine approaches failed to neutralize and protect from infection with CoVs using the novel spike protein.

On the basis of these findings, they synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo …”

The WIV’s deletions of American research partners from its website (with the exception of EcoHealth Alliance), and its deletion of the article discussing genetic research on the SARS virus only served to strengthen suspicions of a cover-up. At the time, the most surprising thing about it was that they were covering up American involvement and not just their own.

Are We the Bad Guys?

https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz/status/1496800671739174913

Alas, as noted by Maajid Nawaz,46 a former Islamist revolutionary who became an anti-extremism activist, if it turns out that the U.S. did in fact engage in illegal bioweapons development in Ukraine, it might just turn out that we’re the bad guys here. He writes, in part:47

“On the 24th February 2022, the very day of Russia’s invasion, some of us were already worried about the prospect of biological weapons laboratories existing in Ukraine …

The existence of bio-weapons labs on Ukraine’s border with Russia has since been confirmed by both Russia and the US (I say both because the Ukrainian government is essentially serving as a US proxy). The only remaining question is around what we were doing in those laboratories.

It is no longer in doubt that we funded bio-weapons research in the Wuhan lab in China, from where it is now believed that COVID most likely leaked from. So were we doing the same in Ukraine too? Russia has certainly made the allegation …

The official representative of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Major General Igor Konashenkov stated48 ‘In the course of a special military operation, the facts of an emergency cleansing by the Kiev regime of traces of a military biological program being implemented in Ukraine, funded by the US Department of Defense, were uncovered.’

With this, he released this document drop49 alleging … that these papers substantiated their case. If Russia’s allegations hold up, the US and her proxy Ukrainian regime would be in violation of the first article of the UN Convention on the Prohibition of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons.50

Russia’s announcement appears to have forced America’s hand to admit that such bio labs do indeed exist. US Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland framed this admission by stating that these labs were for defensive research only.

Under Secretary Nuland however continued to make the case that such labs would be dangerous if they fell into Russian hands, without apparently noticing the contradiction inherent in her position that such labs are only dangerous because they can be weaponized …

Matching Russian precision strikes to a map of bio lab locations inside Ukraine certainly does suggest that Putin’s ‘special military operation’ appears to be targeting some of these dangerous labs.”

Indeed, Nawaz highlights a 2021 Ukrainian petition51,52 to president Zelensky, asking for a) the immediate closure of “American bio-laboratories in the territory of Ukraine,” b) an investigation into the activities of those labs, and c) an investigation into potential Ukrainian participation in the creation of SARS-CoV-2.

In other words, at least some Ukrainians, by 2021, were wondering whether the U.S. labs in their country might have been involved in the creation of this pandemic.

Denouncements Ring Hollow

Not surprisingly, the U.S. State Department took a hard line, denouncing all allegations with the statement that “The United States does not have chemical and biological weapons labs in Ukraine.”53 In another statement,54 the State Department “clarified” that the labs were for “biodefense,” not biological weapons, thus semantically cleansing their criminal activities.

The problem with that is that there’s no hard line between biodefense and bioweapons research. As admitted by EcoHealth Alliance’s policy advisor and former Fort Detrick commander David Franz, it’s all “dual use — the people, the facilities and the equipment.”55 Biodefense implies biowarfare, as it involves the creation of more dangerous pathogens for the alleged purpose of finding treatments against them.

Bioweapons expert Francis Boyle, who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, has also pointed out that most BSL-4 labs are dual use: “They first develop the offensive biological warfare agent and then they develop the supposed vaccine.”56 And then, there’s the weapons proliferation agreement57 between the U.S. and Ukraine, signed at the end of August 2005.

Incidentally, former President Barrack Obama spearheaded the project to construct these Ukrainian labs back in 2005, when he was still a senator and, curiously, the online announcement of his involvement in this project has also been deleted from the web.58

According to this agreement, the U.S. Department of Defense will assist the Ministry of Health in Ukraine, at no cost, to prevent “proliferation of technology, pathogens and expertise” found in a number of Ukraine labs, that “could be used in the development of biological weapons.”

The Burning Question of Intent

So, the agreement itself clarifies that they’re working on pathogens that COULD be used as biological weapons, and Nuland’s stated concerns back this up. The only question remaining then is one of intention. What’s the intended use of these pathogens? Defense? Or offense? And is there really a difference?

As noted by Nawaz, the U.S. clinging to the defense of “biodefense” and anti-bioweapons proliferation is “the equivalent of denying that Einstein’s discovery of splitting the atom to generate energy is not also something that could be used to make nuclear weapons. After the COVID outbreak, the notion that bio labs can be weaponized should simply be presumed as a rule.”

Also, consider the network of players reviewed earlier. The Ukrainian-American collaboration to study pathogens capable of weaponization is run by the DTRA, which funds Metabiota, which is run by a WEF leader with close personal ties to the one person — Daszak — suspected of being a key player in the creation of SARS-CoV-2, a go-between of the NIH and the WIV, and a central force in the cover-up of the lab leak theory.

Interestingly, Metabiota is also financially backed by Hunter Biden’s investment company, and let’s not forget that young Biden also collected a six-figure salary from a Ukrainian gas company for doing literally nothing, other than supplying his “powerful name.”59

Circumstantial or not, it just doesn’t look good. And, by now, it should be crystal clear that any lab doing defensive work is equally capable of churning out offensive weapons. Debating that point is just silly, as it all boils down to semantics.

According to Bulgarian journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, Metabiota is a key player in the Ukrainian labs. David Horowitz, a political writer, has noted that Metabiota is “a company that tracks the trajectory of outbreaks and sells pandemic insurance, but also seems to have its hand in the actual labs that … might be the source of some of these outbreaks.”60

In other words, could it be that Metabiota has been producing biological agents under diplomatic cover and then selling pandemic insurance and pandemic trackers to “help countries get ahead of what they are putting out”?61

Nawaz asks, “was ensuring that a ‘next pandemic’ doesn’t occur by taking out these bio labs, what Putin had in mind by his phrase ‘special military operation’?”62 At this point, it seems a valid question.

Sources and References

April 7, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

US withdraws from cybersecurity dialogue – Russia

Samizdat – April 7, 2022

The United States has unilaterally closed communication channels with Russia regarding cybersecurity, Russian Security Council Deputy Secretary Oleg Khramov has said.

The two nations previously exchanged lists of critical internet infrastructure under the auspices of the Russian Security Council and the US National Security Council, after Moscow sent Washington proposals aimed at taking joint measures to protect both countries’ critical infrastructure from cyberattacks.

“The White House has now notified us that it is unilaterally withdrawing from the negotiation process and closing the communication channel,” Khramov announced.

Russia and the US previously agreed that it was “critically important” for the two countries to work together and “combine our efforts to fight cybercrime instead of barking at one another like dogs,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said after his summit with US President Joe Biden last summer.

Khramov claims that US Cyber Command is being actively pumped up with taxpayer dollars and intends to launch a preemptive cyberattack against Russia.

Washington previously accused Moscow of planning cyberattacks against the US out of “revenge” for the West’s sanctions; however, Khramov said Russia’s doctrine prevents it from carrying out these attacks, and that it is in fact the US that has forward “cyberbases” in countries such as Germany and the Baltic states, where he said there are hundreds of professional hackers working for the US.

Khramov also quoted a statement from the chief of the US Central Security Service, who stated that the US must “defend forward” and take the cyberspace war to the adversary, as is the case with traditional warfare, adding that “Persistent engagement of our adversaries in cyberspace cannot be successful if our actions are limited to DOD networks.”

April 7, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Interpreting The US’ Threat Of “Significant & Long-Term Consequences” For India

By Andrew Korybko | One World Press | April 7, 2022

Director of the White House National Economic Council Brian Deese told reporters on Wednesday that there will be “significant and long-term consequences” if his country assesses that India has engaged in a so-called “more explicit strategic alignment” with Russia. New Delhi has thus far impressively practiced a policy of principled neutrality towards Moscow’s ongoing special military operation in Ukraine and the New Cold War more broadly between the US on one hand and Russia and China on the other. This South Asian state is the world’s largest and most important non-aligned country that’s setting a proud example for the rest of its Global South peers. The US is afraid that countless more countries will follow India’s lead by continuing to bravely defy Washington’s unilateral hegemonic pressure to sanction Russia.

Deese’s remarks represent the most ominous American threat to India yet since ties between these two Great Powers became complicated from summer 2020 onwards into the present day. Considering the context of the rolling “South Asian Spring” regime change scenario that the US simultaneously activated against Pakistan and Sri Lanka over the weekend, his statement adds credence to suspicions that India is actually the ultimate target of this campaign. It’s unclear what “significant and long-term consequences” will befall Indian-American relations, but it certainly seems like their ties will at the very least continue deteriorating if the US continues aggressively pressuring India to sacrifice its objective national interests for its supposed partner’s sake.

The sudden onset of regional stability along India’s periphery is intended to destabilize that country itself, both immediately and over time. In the event that the Pakistan and/or Sri Lanka’s multipolar governments are replaced by American puppets, then US bases might pop up in those neighboring countries. The so-called “anti-Indian hawks” in Islamabad’s “establishment” might become emboldened to violate the year-long ceasefire with New Delhi in order to punish that country by proxy at Washington’s behest for its policy of principled neutrality. With respect to Colombo, a US naval base could threaten India’s Sea Lines Of Communication (SLOC). Washington might even use the island as a base to encourage separatist movements in Southern India.

To be absolutely clear, India is not engaging in a so-called “explicit strategic alignment” with Russia, it’s simply advancing its objective national interests by remaining neutral in the Ukrainian Conflict and refusing to sacrifice its own for America’s sake. By default, however, the zero-sum unipolar hegemonic perspective embraced by US strategists influences them to regard this balanced policy as supposedly “taking Russia’s side” in the New Cold War. This false assessment is then in turn incorporated into its policy formulation towards that country, thus resulting in Deese’s ominous threat. Given the US’ decades-long track record of betraying former partners in the worst ways possible by orchestrating regime changes and even waging Hybrid Wars against them, India should be very concerned by what he just said.

America seems to be preparing for a fundamental change in its relationship with India, which will certainly affect the balance of interests in Eurasia. Thus far, New Delhi has been doing its utmost to retain that balance between itself, Russia, and China, ergo its policy of principled neutrality in order to ensure that Moscow doesn’t become disproportionately dependent on Beijing in response to the US-led West’s unprecedented pressure campaign. Nevertheless, India also hoped to retain excellent relations with the US at the same time in order to further synchronize the geo-economic aspects of their respective Indo-Pacific strategies. This grand strategic balancing act is now at risk of becoming unbalanced if the US unilaterally decides to worsen relations with India.

The form that this could take remains unclear, but the reader should remember that an intensification of information warfare against India as well as potential economic warfare and possibly even other more dangerous forms of Hybrid Warfare can’t be discounted due to the US’ track record. Security threats will spike in the event that the Pakistani and/or Sri Lankan governments are overthrown throughout the course of the ongoing “South Asian Spring” regime change campaign that the US has unleashed throughout the region. With these forecasts in mind, it’s of the highest importance that the South Asian states seriously consider reviving the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in order to advance “regional solutions for regional problems” and thus thwart the US’ plots.

Andrew Korybko is an American political analyst.

April 7, 2022 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , , | Leave a comment

UN suspends Russia from Human Rights Council

Samizdat | April 7, 2022

The United Nations’ General Assembly voted on Thursday to suspend Russia from the UN Human Rights Council. The US-proposed resolution received 93 votes, with 24 countries opposed and 58 abstaining.

China, a fellow permanent Security Council member, was a prominent “no” vote. Among the abstentions, the most prominent were India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.

US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield had called for Russia to be expelled from the 47-nation body on Monday, calling its participation a “farce,” after videos and photos from the town near Kiev showed dead bodies of what appeared to be civilians. Ukraine and the US accused Russia of a massacre, which Moscow has vehemently denied.

“We believe that the members of the Russian forces committed war crimes in Ukraine, and we believe that Russia needs to be held accountable,” Thomas-Greenfield said Monday.

When Moscow called for an emergency Security Council session on the investigation of the alleged atrocities, the UK – currently presiding – refused. The US and its allies instead chose to ratchet up sanctions against Russia, based entirely on Ukrainian allegations as the presumption of Russian guilt.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba cheered Thursday’s vote. “War criminals have no place in UN bodies aimed at protecting human rights. Grateful to all member states which supported the relevant UNGA resolution and chose the right side of history,” he tweeted.

Moscow has said that attempts to expel Russia from the Human Rights Council are political and undertaken by countries who seek to continue “the politics of neo-colonialism of human rights” in international relations.

Gennady Gatilov, Russia’s ambassador to the UN mission in Geneva, called the US resolution “unfounded and purely emotional bravado that looks good on camera — just how the US likes it,” and accused Washington of “exploiting” the Ukrainian crisis for its own benefit.

April 7, 2022 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

US War Crimes Since World War 2

Samizdat | April 7, 2022

Speaking before the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed Russia was responsible for “the most terrible war crimes in the world” since World War II amid its ongoing special operation in Ukraine, and demanded Russia’s expulsion from UN bodies.

Zelensky was specifically referring to film footage shown to the council of dozens of dead bodies in Bucha, a suburb of Kiev, which the Ukrainian government has claimed were executed by Russian forces before they withdrew from the city last week.

The Russian Defense Ministry has dismissed the claims as a provocation, noting that Ukrainian artillery had previously bombarded the town and that Ukrainian police conducted an operation in Bucha to “clear the area of saboteurs and accomplices of Russian troops” prior to news emerging of the alleged massacre, both of which could also be responsible for the deaths.

Regardless, the claim that the Bucha incident represents the worst war crime since the total war that ended in 1945 is clear hyperbole, especially considering the incessant war-making of Ukraine’s patron, the United States.

To help jog the memory of the Ukrainian president, we have compiled a few examples of US war crimes since 1945 that have not been investigated as crimes.

No Gun Ri Massacre, July 1950

Early in the Korean War, US soldiers from the 7th Cavalry Regiment attacked a large group of South Korean refugees at a railroad bridge near the village of No Gun Ri. According to the No Gun Ri Peace Foundation, between 250 and 300 people were killed, mostly women and children.

The massacre was covered up until 1999, when an Associated Press report revealed it to the world, citing US and North Korean documentation of the killings that showed US troops had orders to fire on all refugees, as they believed North Korean infiltrators might be among them.

The group massacred at No Gun Ri were by no means the only ones killed by US troops, either, as accusations of more than 200 separate incidents emerged when an investigative committee was launched in South Korea in 2008.

The US investigation led to then-US President Bill Clinton issuing a statement of regret, but Washington rejected an outright apology or the possibility of compensation for the survivors. South Korean investigators called the US probe a “whitewash.”

Operation Speedy Express, December 1968 – May 1969

The US Army’s 9th Infantry Division was responsible for “pacifying” a large part of the Mekong River Delta in order to reduce Vietnamese National Liberation Front operations near the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon (today Ho Chi Minh City).

During the six-month operation, the US troops carried out indiscriminate massacres of Vietnamese villages, using air assaults and nighttime riverine attacks to kill as many people as possible. Commanders in the field were reportedly given orders not to return until killing an acceptable number of people, and so-called “free-fire zones” resulted in massive civilian deaths.

An internal probe by the US Army Inspector General found the operation created between 5,000 and 7,000 civilian casualties, and that another 10,899 fighters had been killed. However, the distinction between fighters and civilians was often inflated in the fighters’ favor during the Vietnam War, in order to make US commanders look more effective.

Highway of Death, February 1991

In the final days of Operation Desert Storm, US aircraft annihilated as many as 2,000 vehicles on Highway 80, which runs north out of Kuwait City toward Basra, Iraq. A mix of civilians fleeing the war and Iraqi military units withdrawing from military operations were bombed during two days of airstrikes from February 25 to 27. As the fleeing soldiers were outside of combat, they were not legitimate military targets, according to former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark.

Estimates of the deaths vary wildly, from 200 to more than 1,000. In addition, American eyewitnesses reported that a US armored unit had opened fire on a group of 350 disarmed Iraqi soldiers who had surrendered after fleeing the carnage, killing an unknown number of them.

Bombing of Albanian Refugees at Koriša, May 1999

On May 14, 1999, US aircraft bombed a group of several hundred Albanian refugees near Koriša, Kosovo, who had been hiding in the hills for weeks. According to Yugoslav authorities, 87 refugees were killed in the strike. The US claimed they were being used as human shields by the Yugoslavs, but provided no evidence to back up its claim.

Second Battle of Fallujah, November 2004

The US Marine Corps, in conjunction with Special Operations forces, US air forces, and the British “Black Watch” battalion, launched a massive assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in November 2004 that destroyed almost the entire city. The stated objective was to weaken the Iraqi insurgency against the US-UK occupation, but the heavy use of artillery, airstrikes, and chemical weapons such as white phosphorus and incendiary bombs, and depleted uranium, resulted in massive civilian deaths.

The Red Cross estimated that 800 civilians were killed in the battle, while Iraqi NGOs and medical workers estimated between 4,000 and 6,000 people were killed, mostly civilians, which the Guardian noted was a higher death rate than the British cities of Coventry and London faced during The Blitz bombing campaign by Germany in 1940.

Bombing of Kunduz Hospital, October 2015

On October 3, 2015, a US Air Force AC-130U gunship circled the Kunduz Trauma Center in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz, bombarding it with artillery and machine-gun fire for 30 minutes. The hospital was operated by Medecins Sans Frontieres, who denied US claims that Taliban fighters were hiding in the facility. Forty-two people were killed in the assault and another 33 went missing, including both MSF staff and patients.

The Pentagon initially tried to cover up the strike, claiming there might have been some incidental collateral damage due to nearby fighting. However, after it emerged that the strike had been directly ordered by US commanders, then-US President Barack Obama apologized for the strike and paid the families of victims $6,000 each. MSF accused the US of admitting to a war crime by attempting to justify the attack by claiming Taliban fighters were inside.

Bombing of al-Aghawat al-Jadidah, March 2017

It’s estimated that 40,000 civilians were killed during the nine-month siege of Mosul, Iraq, by Iraqi forces and the US-led anti-Daesh coalition, in large part due to the unrelenting artillery bombardment of the city. However, one particular incident stands out: a US airstrike on March 17, 2017, in the al-Aghawat al-Jadidah neighborhood in western Mosul.

The US admitted a week after the attack that it had targeted “the location corresponding to allegations of civilian casualties.” Amnesty International reported that as many as 150 civilians were killed in the attack after having been told not to flee the city by US officials, although Iraqi reports say more than 300 were killed.

Siege of Raqqa, June – October 2017

As the battle for Mosul was drawing to a close, the siege of Daesh’s de facto capital of Raqqa, Syria, began. US Marine Corps artillery pounded the city nonstop, firing 35,000 rounds in five months – more than were used in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Twice during the bombardment, US M777 155 mm howitzers burned through their cannon barrels – an extremely rare feat, notes the Marine Corps Times.

At the same time, US air forces dropped some 20,000 munitions across Iraq and Syria, most of which also fell on Raqqa. Investigations by Amnesty International and Airwars found that the total number of civilians killed in Raqqa was more than 1,600.

April 7, 2022 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Russia responds to Human Rights council expulsion threat

Samizdat | April 7, 2022

The possible suspension of Russia from the UN Human Rights Council threatens to destroy “the basement of current multilateral system,” First Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Dmitry Polyanskiy said ahead of Thursday’s vote by the organisation’s General Assembly (UNGA) on the matter.

Polyanskiy wrote on Telegram that this is a “premeditated tactical move” which, in his opinion, has nothing to do either Russia’s attack on Ukraine nor with alleged human rights violations by Moscow, as these claims “are far from being verified and proven.” However, he warned, the motion, if accepted, “risks devastating consequences for the UN System.”

“Russia plays an important ballancing role, its removal from HRC will deprive developing countries of a vocal and powerful defender. That’s why Western countries are keen to do it and strike the ballance [sic] in their favor,” the official explained.

In Polyanskiy’s words, the West is trying “to undermine UN institutions behind the smokescreen of punishing Russia.” “By doing so they risk to destroy the basement of current multilateral system which emerged after WW2 and has been saving the world from WW3,” he underlined.

He also pointed out to the fact that in 2018, during Donald Trump’s presidency, the US withdrew from the council and “consistently belittled its role.”

Therefore, Polyanskiy argues, Washington “can’t be considered a champion of the body.

“And knowing the bleak US human rights record and the shameful practice [of] blackmailing [the] ICC (International Criminal Court ) for trying to make US soldiers accountable for their heinous crimes abroad, Washington is the last one to be moralizing others on Human Rights,” he wrote.

Moscow’s diplomat expressed hope that during the upcoming “extremely hypocritical” show Russia’s colleagues from, what he called, the “remaining independent countries” would remember about all these facts.

The move to expel Russia from the council came shortly after Kiev published images of dead bodies in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, northwest of the capital and called them evidence of genocide perpetrated by Russian troops. Moscow denied the allegations and said the Ukrainian government was manipulating public opinion with staged scenes.

The resolution which was endorsed by Western nations before any independent investigation could take place, expresses “grave concern at the ongoing human rights and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, particularly at the reports of violations and abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law by the Russian Federation, including gross and systematic violations and abuses of human rights.”

To suspend a state from the UN Human Rights Council a two-thirds majority vote by the 193-member General Assembly is needed. Russia’s envoy to the UN Vassily Nebenzia during a UN Security Council meeting on Tuesday called the suggestion to kick Russia out from the council “unbelievable” and expressed hope that “UN colleagues will not allow themselves to be manipulated and will not play along with Washington in its extremely dangerous undertaking.”

The Kremlin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, in his turn, said that the work of the council and UN institutions is “unthinkable without the participation of Russia.”

Moscow attacked its neighbor in late February, following Ukraine’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements signed in 2014, and Russia’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The German and French brokered protocols had been designed to regularize the status of those regions within the Ukrainian state.

Russia has now demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two republics by force.

April 7, 2022 Posted by | Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

Bucha, Budapest and the Multiplying Problems of Real War Criminals

By Tom Luongo | Gold Goats N’ Guns | April 5, 2022

Fungal President Joe Biden openly declared Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal” in a recent outburst while speaking at NATO. He’s repeated this in the wake of the initial images coming out of the town of Bucha, Ukraine where an alleged massacre of civilians by Russian soldiers took place.

Like many incidents similar to this in the past it is hard to take any of these claims of blame seriously. The US and UK have staged many a ‘false flag’ operation in the past at convenient times to gin up diplomatic outrage to advance a particular political agenda.

That agenda is always to justify more war to deal with the villain du jour. Today it’s Putin. In the past it’s been Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic or Bashar al-Assad. The playbook is always the same. Shocking images and film of honest-to-god atrocities against civilians and an endless back and forth of accusations and suppression of real information about the event.

Sadly, that becomes the focus not the fact that civilians were murdered for political gains.

Bucha seems to fit this pattern quite well, if more crudely implemented than events like this in the past.

The censorship is nearly total to support the ‘current thing,’ in this case Bucha. But it is no different than the campaigns against certain medications to fight COVID-19.

When it comes to foreign policy objectives, there is always a common denominator in these events to frame that villain and Putin, in particular, as some evil madman… British intelligence.

From the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, to the downing of MH-17 over Ukraine, to the ammonia gas attack in Douma, at the center of these allegations is always some arm of the Brits.

All the roads to RussiaGate lead through Ukraine and British Intelligence. At some point you just have to face the face of the agitator. Every one of those stories have logical inconsistencies wide enough to drive a column of tanks through.

These are painstakingly worked through by investigative journalists pushed to the fringe by the technocrats’ willing partners in Silicon Valley to minimize their influence over the narrative.

That, in itself, should be considered prima facia evidence of malfeasance but sadly it isn’t.

From the moment Russia’s troops crossed the border into Ukraine on February 24th there has been a clear strategy by the Russian Ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs to head off potential false flags publicly before they could be pulled off.

The Russian Foreign Ministry singled out the UK for its histrionics saying if they wanted to lead the charge, they’ll get the worst treatment.

With the pullout of Russian troops from around Kiev however, they have little control over the preparing of the stage. You believe what you want to believe about Bucha, I don’t care.

Given the track record of Russia’s accusers here I’m taking the position that these allegations have to be incontrovertibly proven publicly for me to believe a word of them. Here’s one version of the story (warning: very graphic).

That is how low the credibility of the sources on this are. The UK government has been, along with Biden’s Dept. of State and National Security Council, the most belligerent in their response to Russia’s military operation. Their history and naked hatred of all things Russian stretches back multiple centuries.

In short, they have motive, means and opportunity to stage a false flag to push public sentiment further towards NATO’s intervention into Ukraine officially, therefore a false flag is the most likely scenario.

Complaints about how Russia waged the initial part of this war have centered on their unwillingness (but not opposition) to target civilians. Kiev could have easily been taken if the Russians wanted to commit massive atrocities against civilians.

They did not do so. That flies in the face of what’s being alleged about Bucha. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen the way it is being alleged, but the burden of proof lies with the accuser (Ukraine) and their allies (The US and UK).

And the main amplifier of this story, the UK, blocked not one but two proposals by the Russian Federation to investigate what happened in Bucha. We can’t have that, there’s a war to escalate.

Remember this story is only possible because the Russians first got repulsed from taking Kiev and then pulled back from the areas surrounding it. They are redeploying forces and regrouping for a major push against Ukrainian forces trapped in the eastern part of Ukraine.

That operation will likely wipe out what’s left of the UAF troops there and push the next phase of this war on the ground to its natural state of equilibrium for the next few months.

There are so many people whose crimes in Ukraine would be exposed by a Russian win there that it is truly existential to keep that from happening. It goes deeper than even the ideology of the West which needs to subjugate Russia if the Davos plan for global governance is going to have any hope of succeeding.

This is also personal for everyone from Joe Biden himself to hundreds, if not thousands of people complicit in the various schemes, plots and crimes committed in the petrie dish of corruption they’ve staged their attacks on common decency from.

So, when I say they have motive, means and opportunity, I mean it. These are the same people who impeached Donald Trump over a phone call. Of course they will say the quiet parts out loud about what they want to do to Putin for screwing up their grand plans.

This brings me back to my article from the other day handicapping the Hungarian elections. Because Hungary is now in a very strong position I posited they’d be in if Viktor Orban won the election, which he did, emphatically. And that means the EU is in a very precarious position to continue supporting an anti-Russia policy stance.

With a fiscally, monetarily (they are not on the euro) and energy independent Hungary there is little argument for them staying in the EU if Brussels is going to treat them as second class members. Orban and his government have been resolute in their refusal to get involved in the Russia/Ukraine conflict even though there has been serious pressure applied by NATO.

In anticipation of any resistance to the EU’s new set of draconian and frankly insane sanctions on Russia the European Commission wasted no time in announcing they are beginning ‘rule of law’ procedures against Hungary to cut them out of any monetary distributions within the bloc.

The European Commission will soon trigger a powerful new mechanism to cut funding to Hungary for eroding the bloc’s rule-of-law standards, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Tuesday.

The announcement comes two days after Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán won a fourth consecutive term in an election that international observers said was marred by an uneven playing field benefiting the ruling Fidesz party…

… Von der Leyen said her team informed Hungary of its decision on Tuesday after reviewing Budapest’s responses to an informal letter the Commission sent last November asking for information on its rule-of-law concerns.

“We’ve carefully assessed the result of these questions,” von der Leyen said, speaking to the European Parliament. “Our conclusion is we have to move on [to] the next step.”

There’s nothing ‘careful’ about the EU’s assessment here. Hungary and Poland were forced to accept these new rules in a major political battle with the EU in 2021 over their Green New Deal. He wasn’t in a strong enough position to stop this and it meant then we would wind up here today if he won re-election.

The EC’s formal charges against Hungary over their furry law is just like other such moves, namely against Poland for its hated Supreme Court recall law. They are forcing the ultimate choice on Hungary because all the EU really has is Article 7 censure and expulsion from the Union as a threat.

The amount of money they are holding as a carrot to Orban in COVID relief funds is just 30 pieces of silver and he knows it.

So, if you play this out to the end, this is where Orban has to go. He must force the EU to do what Mark Rutte said last month, kick them out or back down.

Today the European Commission is staring at the real threat: that Hungary has no intention of going along with the new sanctions and Orban actually welcomes Von der Leyen’s move to censure and cut off Hungary’s funds from the EU budget.

They will be a country that now pays in but gets nothing in return other than the stick.

But as long as they are a member of the European Commission they can and will veto anything else Von der Leyen cooks up to punish Russia with as a political cudgel to beat vulnerable EU members into going along with.

The EC thinks they will be making an example of Hungary but what they will really be doing is giving Orban an even stronger hand to play on the European Council. Now he can stay in Budapest and tell Hungarians that the EU no longer works for Hungarians and they would be better off free from their yoke.

Hung-exit, anyone?

Elections have consequences when you don’t control the outcome of them. This is why the neocons and war criminals like Hillary Clinton, Lindsey Graham and Joe Biden are all screaming that something or someone has to do something to stop Putin whose operation in Ukraine still has the potential to expose everything.

It’s why Bucha was so haphazardly staged and ham-fistedly packaged up to us.

The blow out results in Hungary on Sunday were a major blow to EU confidence and solidarity. Twelve years of calling Orban a Nazi while supporting real 4th generation Nazis in Ukraine landed with a whimper.

Von der Leyen is a certifiable idiot for invoking the ‘rule of law’ weapon against Orban here using the alleged events at Bucha. She’s using it as an excuse to purposefully destroy the European economy per the directive of her Davos handlers. Their calculus is simple, burn the entire global economy down to punish Putin, Xi and everyone else not down with the Comintern.

It exposes the EU’s complicity in the war on Russia as willing partners with the US and UK because if they wanted to continue virtue signaling they would propose crazy new sanctions and let Hungary veto them.

But now we can only conclude this is exactly what they wanted.

That puts things into stark relief as we look ahead to the increasingly likely probability that French President Emmanuel Macron loses to Marine LePen in France who would be in a far stronger position to break up EU solidarity, freezing it politically at a time when Europe’s financial vulnerability has never been higher.

Meanwhile Putin keeps saying “Got Gold or Rubles?” and Orban is preparing a cold dish of political revenge on the nastiest people in Europe. When this mouse roars, they may finally have to listen.

April 6, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , , , | Leave a comment