Category Archives: Germ Warfare

TuesdayMar24,2020at4:40PM

March 21 -- To the Editor:

Mr. Azzi, again, please stick to taking pictures. In your most recent column, you speak of Cotton Mather, someone called Onesimus, Harvard and someone cutting something and putting a drop in. Brilliant. After bloviating and introducing a number of useless facts, you make a point by stating all the good things that immigrants do. Here we agree just as long as the immigrants are legal immigrants. Simply put, if you are not here legally you dont belong here. Common sense, no?

Next point. You go on to say that people choose to be racists, xenophobic, conspiracy theorists and a bunch of other stuff. Granted, they exist. But then you go on to call half the nation ignorant because they believe in this president. Im quite surprised that you didnt use the word "deplorable" but then you must have remembered what that word did to Hillary. Thank God. In making that statement you have now become the judge and chief hypocrite. On your golden pedestal preaching down to the masses about how morally and politically insufficient they are. Look in the mirror, Mr Azzi, you speak of yourself.

Now, onto China. Heaven forbid we accuse the Chinese of anything, right? They unleashed a plague onto the world. It came from Wuhan, China so we will, to your great dissatisfaction, call it the Chinese or Wuhan virus. Now, how do you know it didnt come out of a Chinese germ warfare lab. You dont know. I will agree it is far-fetched that George Soros was its owner. How do you know the Chinese did not unleash this virus on purpose? If they did it was flawlessly executed causing great damage to world economies while limiting damage to their own. Of course, you would call this possibility a conspiracy theorists dream. You might see the world through rose colored glasses I see it for what it is and its not pretty. Like it or not, the Chinese are our enemy and they look upon us as being their enemy. We will leave it at that.

Of course, in one of your last paragraphs you wrap it up and bring it to a head. Your Trump Derangement Syndrome shines through here. Your goal achieved. You let it be known, again, how much you disdain this president. Maybe youre trying to reap discord in U.S. society. If not, understand we are going through tough times and give the guy a break. Just think you could have Hillary, Biden or Sanders working on this puzzle. A puzzle they would certainly never solve.

Dan Hurley

Dover

See the article here:

Letter: Columnist should give the president a break - Foster's Daily Democrat

In the midst of dispersal of COVID-19 in 196 countries in the world, Islamic State (IS) has published key three posts to encourage jihadists around the world to capitalize the pandemic situation to mount attacks against the Kafirs. Such propaganda depicts that extremists should not be taken out of the security equation during the pandemic situation, in fact they can be proactive, innovative and capitalize such volatile condition to achieve their goals.

Recently, a memo has been circulated by a Homeland Security Department to the law enforcement officials across United States of America (USA) warning that violent extremists would capitalize the unstable social phenomena due to COVID-19, to attack the USA. Even if the USA security agencies have emphasized a possible attack by the jihadist only to the USA, current pro IS propaganda has threatened the entire kafirs amidst rapidly spreading COVID-19 pandemic.

On 2nd March 2020 an IS aligned group shared a post in a pro IS social media platforms highlighting the incapability of kafir states to find a significant scientific solution to COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, on 12th March 2020, a similar post was circulated in a pro IS messaging platform describing the pandemic as a divine punishment to the enemies. It also emphasized harshly affected countries such as China, Iran and Italy are respectively can be categorized as countries with atheists, Shias and crusaders/Christians. As a result, they are severely punished by god. Further, on 19th March 2020 in the editorial of Naba 226, which is a pro-IS magazine, stated that jihadists should capitalize the current pandemic situation to launch attacks against the non-believers. It also emphasized the need of the lone-wolves to mobilize and capitalize the social fear rendering in the crusader countries due to COVID-19.

However, due to the swiftly spreading COVID-19 pandemic, within a short period of time the security concerns have changed from jihadism to bio-defence. Hence, it is important to calculate the expansion and possible transformation of modes operandi in jihad activities in a COVID-19 world.

COVID-19 pandemic has depicted that world can be shut down/locked down in few minutes of time due to a germ which is not even visible to the naked eye of the humans. As of 25th March 2020, one third of the world population is under lockdown and are under strict quarantine regulations imposed by the governments. The latest addition to the lockdown list was India which is also known as the worlds largest democracy. Yet again, the Indian government had to make a choice between democracy and human right over grater good for the greater number of people in a pandemic situation. Additionally, COVID 19 has also emphasized the fact that, from minimum effort, maximum damage can be caused to countries across the planet. According to the latest statistics nearly 446,699 COVID-19 cases are reported and 19,804 deaths have been recorded.

Not only human cost is a major concern of this pandemic, but also the economic loss to the entire international political system needs to be taken into consideration. Affected countries are heavily investing on containing the pandemic and due to the lockdown the business activities have halted. This phenomena depicts a simple germ can cause vital impact to human lifestyle and to the international system which is what the jihadists are searching for. With less amount of effort, jihadists want to gain the maximum impact which has now been depicted by a virus. This hints the idea that instead of using complicated machines and bombs similar impact can be obtained by a simple method. Also, such kind of virus or a germ can be developed under minimum supervision and resources. In fact in 2018, MI5 anticipated that returned British jihadists form the IS territory were trained in developing basic bio-weapons and they have the capacity to make ricin and anthrax.

Not only that, but also COVID-19 highlighted that such kind of virus or a germ can be commuted very easily to the community with minimum notice. Also the haulier will not be caught immediately and therefore, can be transported between borders with less security precautions. Also, a virus like COVID-19 can be easily used by the lone-wolves and the results are deadly and affect a larger community by a simple action. Therefore, COVID-19 provides a manual with innovative ideas to the jihadists on how to gain maximum with minimum effort and resources.

Within such context, it is evident that jihadi groups such as IS has comprehend the importance and the effectiveness of such a pandemic. Since, many countries are now locked down due to the spread of the virus, this explains the catastrophe which can be caused by a germ. As a result, due to its effects from minimal cost of compromise, germ warfare can be used by terrorists to further achieve their goals. Hence, it is important for the countries to expand research and development to understand the nature of bio-weapons and whether there is a possibility of such strategy to be used by violent non-state actors such as ISIS and Al Qaeda.

On the other hand, with the continuation of the release of foreign fighters from the prisons in Syria, Kurdistan and Turkey, it is important to secure the boarders since they can be the haulier of such bio-weapons intentionally or unintentionally. Moreover, intelligence agencies need to work round the clock to identify jihadists with the capacity on developing such kind of bio-weapons to achieve their goals. Also, these intelligence agencies need to be educated in bio-defence and warfare since COVID-19 has depicted the need of the hour for such capacity building.

Finally, in an emergency situation like COVID-19, governments should be cautious in surrogating the security priorities and rapidly substituting jihadism with a soon mushroomed apprehension, since there will be an imbalance in tackling both old and new security concerns. Hence, jihadism will flourish in the shadow of COVID-19 without notice and can take advantage of the situation to gain the jihadi goals.

*Sinduja Umandi Wickramasinghe Jayaratne is an Intelligence Analyst in a leading security related organization and a Visiting Lecturer in Bandaranaike International Diplomatic Training Institute in Sri Lanka.

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Why The World Should Not Forget Threat Of Jihadism Amidst COVID-19 Analysis - Eurasia Review

On March 11th, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the ongoing outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) to be a global pandemic, the first since the H1N1 swine flu in 2009. Initially reported in the city of Wuhan in Central China in December, just four months later there are now over 150,000 cases in more than 130 countries which has put many on total lockdown while the world economy has been brought to a virtual standstill. While the Peoples Republic of China was the first country to report COVID-19, there has been a widespread presumption that the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) must have emerged in the capital of Hubei province that has not been held under sufficient scrutiny by Western corporate media.

The question of whether the COVID-19 coronavirus could have come from the U.S. army was controversially raised by Chinas Foreign Ministry spokesman, Liljian Zhao, who tweetedan articlefrom the Center for Research on Globalization website which subsequently went viral. Feigning concern over the spread of disinformation, Western media coverage uniformly avoided sourcing the article Zhao had shared on social media while predictably dismissing the claim as a conspiracy theory. Meanwhile, Irans Civil Defense Chief alsosaidthe coronavirus could be a biological attack on China and Iran, as the Islamic Republic has been the third-most impacted nation with more than 12,000 cases including many at the highest levels of its government with multiple senior officials infected. Contrary to such mainstream media scaremongering, it is completely reasonable and should be permitted to speculate about the origins of the virus. That Zhaos posing of the theory received such a hostile response from the U.S. establishment is telling of how delicate their propaganda echo chamber is.

Although the disease is widely assumed to have been first transmitted through zoonosis because the earliest grouping of cases were linked to a Wuhan seafood market trading exotic wildlife in late December, the actual first known case was traced to the beginning of the month and may not have been originally passed through an animal. Many on the political right have even suggested the coronavirus is an effect of Chinese biological warfare which unexpectedly leaked from a lab in Wuhan, a theory disseminated in the pages of propaganda rags likeThe Washington Times, a newspaper owned by the founder of the right-wing Korean Unification Church cult, Sun Myung Moon, as well asThe Epoch Timesof the similarly fascistic religious sect of Chinese expatriates, the CIA-linked Falun Gong. In spite of that, it is true that the Wuhan Institute of Virology hasclose tiesto the Galveston National Laboratory in the University of Texas, one of the Pentagons largest biological defense lab programs. Whereas no evidence exists that the Chinese government is responsible for COVID-19, nor does the PRC have a history of engaging in bio-warfare, there is an abundance of proof that the U.S. government has long been involved in the manufacturing and use of biological weapons since the Korean war.

When the accusations were first made by North Korea and China that the U.S. was using biological and germ warfare in the 19501953 Korean War, they were rejected outright by Washington as a hoax and rebuffed by the Western-biased WHO. In the decades since, the U.S. has maintained its denial while scholarly debate on the subject isdivided. However, anunredacted reportfrom 1952 from an investigation sponsored by the World Peace Council and conducted by an International Scientific Commission headed by Sir Joseph Needham, a highly reputable British biochemist of his era, was unearthed in 2018 and presents ample substantiation of the allegations, including eyewitness testimony, photographic evidence and documented confessions by American POWs. More disturbingly, the investigation indicates direct links between the U.S. biological warfare program and the germ warfare program of Unit 731, a clandestine bio and chemical warfare unit of Imperial Japan during World War II. During the Cold War, the Japanese researchers were secretly given immunity and recruited by the U.S. in exchange for their knowledge in human experimentation, along with many former Nazi scientists in Operation Paperclip.

Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army collected data not only through performing deadly experiments on humans but environmentally testing plague bombs by dropping them on Chinese cities to see whether they could start disease outbreaks. Many of these tactics were continued by the U.S. in the KoreanWar.According to Stephen Kinzer,journalist and author ofPoisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, the CIAs Project MK-ULTRA which was coordinated with the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories was:

Essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.

Frank Olson,one of the biowarfare scientists and CIA employees in the program who died under mysterious circumstances in 1953, is the subject of the Netflix docu-drama seriesWormwood,directed by Errol Morris and featuring renowned journalist Seymour Hersh, which reveals Olson may have been a potential government whistleblower on the CIAs activities and U.S. bio-war crimes. It is worth noting that the usage of such agents in the Korean War included Chinese targets, the last and only major armed conflict between the U.S. and China, so if the COVID-19 pandemic were proven to be a product of U.S. biowarfare against Beijing, it would not be the first time.

Officially, the U.S. is said to have abandoned its bioweapons program in 1969, but its installation in Fort Detrick, Maryland, has continued conducting research into deadly pathogens and viruses on the stated purpose of bio-defense, as well as fighting disease outbreaks, developing vaccines, and other public health concerns. Yet just last year, research into fatal viruses and bioweapons were suspendedamid concerns they could be accidentally be released. The last time Fort Detricks germ warfare research was suspended was in 2009 after the Pentagon found discrepancies in the inventory of its infectious agents, the same year as the last pandemic of the H1N1 swine flu outbreak.

Fort Detrick has been under tighter restrictions since the 2001 anthrax attacks were traced to Bruce Ivins, a senior biodefense researcher at the facility. The suspected perpetrator and army biologist committed suicide in 2008 after learning the FBI was going to charge him with terrorism, which if proven to be true would mean that the Pentagons own biodefense research itself had led to rather than protected the American public from bioterrorism though there is plenty of evidence suggesting Ivins was framed by the feds. As journalist Whitney Webb uncovered, the U.S. Armys Medical Research branch headquartered in Maryland hascooperatedwith the Wuhan Institute of Virology mentioned previously for decades.

Toying around with organisms that can produce disease is a regular practice for the Pentagon. In 2005, U.S. scientists announced that they had even successfullyrecreated the avian influenza flu virusin a lab which killed at least 50 million people worldwide in 1918, widely known as the Spanish flu. The name is actually a misnomer, as it was disproportionately attributed to Spain which was neutral in World War I and was not subject to the same wartime censorship of the press to upkeep morale like in Germany, the UK, France and the U.S. whose media initially underreported the pandemics effects in their respective countries. The geographic source of the Spanish flu is still the subject of much debate, but the first observation of the disease was at a U.S. military installation in Fort Riley, Kansas in 1918. Needless to say, the risks involved with resurrecting a disease that wiped out more than a quarter of the worlds population are not trivial, but this did not prevent the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology from extracting the genetic coding of the Spanish flu from the exhumed corpse of a Native Alaskan woman frozen in the ground who died of the disease in an Inuit town in 1918.

There is no direct evidence showing that the 2009 swine flu said to have originated in Mexico through zoonosis from pigs was any leak of the restored Spanish flu, but the previous swine flu outbreak of 1976 began at a U.S. army base in Fort Dix, New Jersey, just like the Spanish flu of 1918. After the Gerald R. Ford administration jumped the gun and announced a flu epidemic was pending following the death of a single soldier, a subsequent mass immunization program without proper testing for side effects was administered to a staggering 45 million people, exactly a quarter of the entire U.S. population at the time, which ended up killing more Americans than the disease itself. The scandal forever sowed the seeds of public distrust regarding inoculation after more than 450 people developed Guillain-Barr Syndrome and 25 died from the immunization before it was halted.

If such a mandatory vaccination program were to be implemented again in the U.S. for COVID-19, the government would have to reassure the public its previous negligence of such side effects would not be repeated, an unlikely scenario after the corporate breach of trust exposed on Wall Street in recent years involving large pharmaceutical firms. Regardless, Big Pharma is alreadypartnering with the U.S. army to develop a vaccine for the coronaviruswhich would have to be tested and evaluated before licensing by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and recommended for use by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), both of which partner with the WHO whose largest financial contributor is the U.S. government.

One of the WHOs other largest benefactors is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with whom it has a partnership on vaccinations. The billionaire Microsoft Corporation founder has used his enormous wealth to dodge paying taxes under the guise of philanthropy and his charitable private ventures have mostly focused on producing vaccines for developing countries and purportedly tackling global poverty, especially in Africa. On the surface this may appear to be benevolent work, but like many so-called altruistic projects it is a scheme which allows ultra-wealthy plutocrats like Gates to influence global policy and obtain political power with no accountability by investing in fixing the social problems caused by the very system which made them rich, with the expansion of neoliberalism as their real agenda. The consequences of this can be seen with charitable projects involving Gates in the Congowhich forced its local agribusiness into using GMO seeds which only benefited private companies like Monsanto.

More disturbing is that in regards to environmental concerns about man-made climate change, Gates has made public his views on curbing human population growth as a solution. At a 2010 TED Conference, Gatesstated:

First we got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. Thats headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.

To put it another way, one of the worlds wealthiest men admitted in public he believes vaccines should be used for depopulation, just as he is financially investing in both developing and delivering them to countries in the global south. The misanthropic myth of overpopulation pushed by Gates and the elite not only suggests that depopulation is a solution for slowing the warming of the climate but retains the logic of an essential component of eugenics with the implicit idea that the quality of life for the human species can be improved by discouraging human reproduction. Since developing countries have the highest child mortality rates, families are more likely to be larger because children are less likely to survive. Hence, the inherent racism and classism in such a misconception.

Given that the vast majority of carbon emissions are produced by ashort list of fossil fuel companiesand the worldslargest polluter is the U.S. military, promoting this dangerous fallacy is the perfect way for the ruling elite to shift the responsibility for climate change onto the worlds poor. Unfortunately, this dangerous falsehood has been popularized in the mainstream environmental movement and pseudo-left with examples such asBirthStrike, a group of mostly female activists protesting the lack of regulations on the ecological crisis by refusing to bear children that has been irresponsibly endorsed by popular progressive politicians such as U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). AOC is also the face of the Democratic Partys Green New Deal which has troubling ties to the United Nations Agenda 21 sustainable development program that calls for achieving a more sustainable population.

The false notion of overpopulation became a misguided cornerstone of the modern day environmental movement thanks to the publication of American scientist Paul Ehrlichs best-selling book The Population Bombin 1968,an alarmist diatribe that has in the years since become famous for its inaccurate doomsday predictions as a result of the mistaken belief which never came to fruition. Todays doom merchants regarding the climate, no doubt a serious issue, are in many respects channeling Ehrlichs false prophecies which are considered a modern rehash of the influential 18th century British economist and philosopher, Thomas Malthus. No single scholar was more loathed by Karl Marx and and the working class movement than Malthus, whose pseudo-scientific theories about demography were thought to have been intellectually defeated until they found new life in Ehrlichs eco-fascism. As much as todays population bombers like Bill Gates may shun the more explicitly racist Malthusian ideas that the global north should contain the population of developing countries, they still tacitly endorse them by arguing that the size of the population itself is a source a poverty and climate change.

Bill Gates has cited business tycoon John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in American history who had an even greater monopoly on the oil business as Gates had at one time on the computer industry, as an inspiration in using his wealth to invest in medical research as a focus of his philanthropy. However, Gates has something else in common with the Rockefeller family in his views on population, as the Rockefeller Foundation was the single largest donor to the American eugenics movement in the 1920s and 30s and helped establish its German branch, even subsidizing the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics that Nazi physician Josef Mengele worked in prior to his wartime experiments. Despite the fact that a line can be traced from the American eugenics movement to the Nazi regimes programs, which Nuremberg defendants even tried to use as justification for their atrocities in court, Rockefellers grandson John Rockefeller III continued the family legacy of interest in demography with the founding of the Population Council NGO which conducts research in reproductive health (sterilization) in developing countries. The Nazi government was also the first to ever pass legislation safeguarding the environment which they equated with German national identity, another unexpected intersection between brown and green politics.

In an astonishing coincidence, the Gates Foundation hosted an event just last October with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the World Economic Forum called Event 201, a pandemic simulation which gathered elite figures in government, business and health expertise to plan for the possibility of a worldwide outbreak. Gates himself has warned of pandemics for years and ominouslywrotethat the world should prepare for epidemics the way the military prepares for war. The Event 201 fictional scenario just so happened to be a coronavirus called CAPS from Brazilian pigs which infected people globally and after a year and half in the exercise causedtens of millions of deathsand set off a worldwide financial crash. Since the outset of the real COVID-19 coronavirus, Gates himself hasstepped down from Microsoftto focus on his philanthropy while his foundation isbusy working on a vaccine.

Many have observed that some characteristics of COVID-19 bear a resemblance to HIV that could not have happened organically. The recent documentaryCold Case Hammarskjld,which won an award at last years Sundance film festival,puts forth a chillingtheory that a South African white supremacist organizationdeliberately spread HIV/AIDS among black Africans through vaccines in previous decades. The film begins as an investigation of the mysterious plane crash in Northern Rhodesia which killed Swedish diplomat and United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjld in 1961. In 1998, a document authored by a shadowy paramilitary organization called the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR) was uncovered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission justice assembly in post-apartheid South Africa which indicated that Hammarskjld was the victim of an assassination. Not only do the filmmakers discover in their inquiry the distinct likelihood that the plane was shot down by a Belgian mercenary employed by SAIMR which was operating under orders from MI6 and the CIA, but the more stunning revelation is arecorded confessionfrom a former SAIMR soldier to havingdeliberately spread HIV/AIDS to black Africansthrough immunization. If what is claimed about SAIMR is true and that they were connected with Western intelligence, that the COVID-19 virus could be something deliberately spread is not outside the realm of possibility.

Maybe it will prove to be the case that the yellow presss version of the coronavirus beginning with the zoonotic transfer of the disease after the consumption of a pangolin or wild bat by a patient zero in Wuhan is accurate. Nevertheless, the pandemic should be a chilling reminder of the elites eco-fascist agenda and the continuous danger that the military-industrial complex puts the worlds population in by continuing to conduct dangerous research into deadly pathogens where the risk vastly outweighs the benefits. If the outbreak has led many to be suspicious of the official story, it is exactly because of the history of U.S. biological warfare and the elites potentially genocidal and pessimistic worldview that the only way to prevent the demise of humanity is by thinning the herd.

This article was posted on Saturday, March 21st, 2020 at 7:20pm and is filed under China, COVID-19 (coronavirus), Disinformation, Health/Medical.

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Is the Global Pandemic a Product of the Elite's Malthusian Agenda and US Bio-warfare? - Dissident Voice

Emptying out of embassy and consulates has reduced opportunities to collaborate on coronavirus fight and maintain communication channels, wrote the Wall Street Journal on Saturday, referring to one of the largest evacuations of American diplomatic personnel in peacetime.

Washington closed its consulate in disease-ravaged Wuhan in late January. Beginning early February, as coronavirus spread across China, the U.S. began withdrawing diplomats and their families from that country.

Now, the U.S. is being blamed for tensions between Washington and Beijing. U.S. Drawdown of China Diplomats Cripples Ties at Critical Moment, is the title of the Wall Street Journal article. At a time when we should be building greater collaborative mechanisms to deal with the pandemicnever mind the other big issues like climate change and tradewere rupturing them across the board, said Orville Schell to the paper. In the Journals words, Schell, director of the Asia Societys Center on U.S.-China Relations, questioned Washingtons need to call back so many diplomats.

The sharp downturn in U.S.-China ties, however, is the result of a militant communist regime needing a foreign enemy, and the large number of U.S. diplomatic personnel on Chinese soil could be aggravatingnot helpingrelations between the two states.

Old ideologies die hard, but, as can be seen from Schells comments, none more so than engagement. The unshakable notion that guided American policy since the beginning of the 1970s was that the United States had to engage communist China, to bring it into the international system so that it would have a stake in the world. As a stakeholder, Beijing would see it to be in its interest to support multilateral institutions and enforce global rules and norms.

Unfortunately, Chinas regime became more belligerent as it grew stronger and more powerful. Inside the multilaterals, for instance, it weakened these institutions. In the case of the World Health Organization, it effectively made the body an arm of the Chinese Communist Party. Engagement theory should work and sounds good to the ear, but it has failed miserably.

Beijings behavior during the ongoing coronavirus epidemic is especially troubling. For instance, the Chinese military has been engaged in provocative maneuvers, particularly against Taiwan. In a recent incident, on the 16th of this month, more than ten Chinese speedboats rammed and otherwise harassed two of Taiwans coast guard vessels, severely damaging one of them. This was the second time this month that Chinas boats intruded into Taiwans territorial waters and caused an incident.

There have also been, in recent weeks, increased sea and air patrols by China in and around Japan.

Moreover, especially since the end of the first week of last month, the foreign ministry and the Communist Partys Global Times have been engaged in an inflammatory and dangerous disinformation campaign against America.

On March 12, China stated the origin of this disease was the United States and that the U.S. Army spread the coronavirus to Wuhan. These groundless and inflammatory claims, from foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, were made alongside other hostile pronouncements from him and his boss, like one accusing U.S. officials of immoral conduct.

The following day, the State Department called in Cui Tiankai, Chinas ambassador, to protest the grossly irresponsible charges, but since then Beijing, particularly through its ambassador to South Africa and state broadcaster China Central Television, has continued the campaign. Zhao also has not stopped his disingenuous campaign.

Why is this important? Because Chinas leaders, with their absurd theories, look like they are justifying in their own minds retaliation against the U.S. Zhao on the 12th intimated germ warfare against China.

In short, this would be an excellent time to deter Beijing. Beijing, however, has not been dissuaded by ordinary diplomatic tools. Whatever the reason for the especially hostile behavior, it is hard to see how the United States, even with a full complement of diplomats in China, could have in recent weeks coaxed the Chinese regime to better behavior.

So how does America dissuade China? We have to hit Chinese leaders with something that is contrary to what they expect us to do and which dislocates them psychologically, Arthur Waldron of the University of Pennsylvania told The National Interest on Saturday.

One way to do that would be to start expelling Chinese diplomats in the United States and perhaps closing their consulates. Beijing has to understand that the god of engagement ideology, at least in the American capital, is dead.

Moreover, given Beijings new xenophobia, it would be good to repatriate even more American diplomats from China. The last thing the U.S. should do is leave potential hostages in place. Beijing has been taking innocentssome of them Americanand there is no point keeping a store of them on hand for China to grab.

Of course, tit-for-tat expulsions could leave no diplomat on station, either in China or the United States. That might be okay with Beijing, however. From 1967 to 1969, China had only one ambassador abroadin Egyptand even he was almost recalled.

A lack of contact is not necessarily a bad thing for America. Moving to no in-country diplomats certainly qualifies as Waldrons psychological dislocation. The Chinese need to know that Americans no longer think that their regime is, in the scheme of things, that important. Unfortunately, American leaders have been feeding the already inflated egos of the Chinese by appearing desperate to communicate and maintaining in their country one of the largest U.S. diplomatic missions anywhere. Reducing diplomatic personnel, therefore, could have an immediate beneficial effect.

In any event, the two powers can maintain ties with zero Chinese diplomats in the U.S. and zero American ones in China. As Waldron, a China historian and holder of a chair in international relations, pointed out to me at the end of last week, All you really need is one phone line.

Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China. Follow him on Twitter @GordonGChang.

FILE PHOTO: Chinese Yuan banknotes are seen behind illuminated stock graph in this illustration taken February 10, 2020. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo.

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Donald Trump Can't Cooperate with China on Coronavirus - The National Interest

Humanity's greatest predator: A laboratory recreation of the H1N1 virus that killed untold millions in 1918.

Image: BSIP / Universal Images Group via Getty

The coronavirus is nothing next to the supremely deadly flu virus of 1918, at least not yet. But when you delve into the history of that epidemic, the main comparison with today becomes clear. It's in our "it can't happen here" attitude.

In 1918, modern medicine had made the world seem clean and safe. Scientists had discovered and defeated the bacterial pathogens behind many of history's biggest killers. We hadn't figured out what influenza was, exactly, but it was a known quantity, a seasonal annoyance, really deadly only to the elderly. Doctors weren't required to report it. There hadn't been a global flu outbreak in 25 years, not since the Russian flu of 1891. There was a war on, but the U.S. was congratulating itself on how disease-free its military camps were.

That mindset persisted even after what we now know as the H1N1 flu virus made itself known, likely starting in the U.S. Though its first wave, in the spring, was fast-moving, this flu's effects were relatively mild. Summer stopped it in its tracks.

There was no warning whatsoever that it would come roaring back in the fall, having mutated like an X-men villain into a terrifying killer of the young and healthy. It was a supervirus that seemed nothing like the flu, one that might, within hours of infection, make you collapse in the street, your lungs filling with fluids, gasping for air as your face turned purple and you slowly, literally, drowned.

Fluid on the floor: One of the few 1918 photos to show the victims, here in a makeshift volunteer Red Cross overflow hospital in Oakland.

Image: Underwood Archives / Getty Images

This is the true and still largely unknown story of the flu pandemic of 1918-19, the world's deadliest medical holocaust to date. Unknown? Well, if you're reasonably well up on your history, you probably recall a few facts.

First, that it happened, which is a step up from the 20th century, when it wasn't even taught in college. ("I took a course in virology," says New York Times science reporter and microbiology major Gina Kolata in her book Flu, "but the 1918 flu was never mentioned.") Second, that it struck at the end of World War I and was spread in part by troop movements. And third, that it killed between 50 and 100 million people or more than the combat death toll of World War I and World War II combined in little over a year.

But you probably don't know the difference between its three waves. Or that the "Spanish flu" name that clings to the pandemic is fake news; it's far more likely to have started in Kansas. Or that it killed more thirtysomethings than sixtysomethings. And while it is true that medical science and practice has advanced significantly since then, it is absolutely terrifying to discover that even though we have nailed down its DNA, we still can't figure out how, where or why that virus mutated.

The defining feature of 1918 flu history is how little we truly know and how powerless we would be, even now, to stop a successfully mutated virus like that one from killing millions. Here's what we most need to remember right now.

U.S. newspapers belatedly begin to report on the flu in November 1918 with a positive post-racial spin.

Image: Fototeca Gilardi / Getty Images

Remember this next time you hear a talking head on cable news bloviating about how the disease caused by the new coronavirus, or, officially, COVID-19, came from bat soup in China: We've had over a century to try to figure out where and how the 1918 flu started, and we're still arguing about it. But theories that it began in Vietnam or China in 1915 or 1916 lost ground in recent years to a theory that it began in...the very middle of America.

A January 1918 doctor's report to the government from Haskell County, Kansas, stands as the first testament to any unusual flu activity in the world that year. Remember, this reporting wasn't required, so it had to be a big deal. Haskell had many migratory birds and hog farms; we now know that bird and human viruses like to meet and mutate inside the cells of pigs. And Haskell men visited nearby Camp Funston, which reported the first of 24 U.S. Army outbreaks in March 1918. The doughboys then took the virus to Europe.

One place we can be sure the virus didn't come from is Spain. So why did countries around the world immediately start calling it "Spainish Flu" or "The Spanish Lady?" For the simple reason that Spain was neutral in World War I. It had no reason to censor its press, whereas newspapers in the U.S. and Europe were prevented by their governments from printing anything that might lower morale for the war effort.

That, publishers thought, included flu outbreaks. Even when U.S. newspapers started paying attention to the epidemic by listing numbers of new cases, they often put a positive or admonishing spin on their stories. "Worry is useless," advised the Philadelphia Inquirer. "Talk of cheerful things instead." One columnist in another paper took to task "nervous and excited people who think every pain is a symptom of the flu."

So irresponsible rumors crept into the gaps left by official reports, as they always do. When the deadly fall wave of mutated flu began in Boston, wild (and false) stories spread that it was a germ warfare attack by Germany. Or that agents of the Kaiser had somehow embedded the sickness in aspirin tablets, made by German company Bayer. Which was, ironically, about the only thing people could take at the time to reduce fever.

And what did Spain get for sounding the alarm and reporting accurately? It got saddled with the supposed origin and the very name of the disease for a century or more. No good deed goes unpunished.

U.S. president Woodrow Wilson arrives in Paris for peace talks, 1919. He may already have flu in this photo.

Image: HULTON archive / Getty Images

In April 1919, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson came down with the flu during its third and final wave which was deadlier than any outbreak in history except the wave that had preceded it. Wilson survived, but exhibited signs of neurological damage from the sickness and was never the same again. Unknown to anyone at the time, the flu had set Europe on course for World War II.

That's because Wilson got sick in the middle of the Versailles peace conference that officially ended World War I. Now, Wilson may have been an avowed racist, but at least he went to France planning to forge a global peace that didn't involve France trying to bankrupt Germany. Without Wilson as an effective presence, that's exactly what happened. The Versailles treaty was ridiculously punitive and, well, hello, Hitler.

Ironically, Wilson had set the wheels of his own destruction in motion. He had been responsible for many of the previous year's troop movements that spread the flu in the first place. He agreed with his generals that "the shipment of troops must not be stopped for any reason." His surgeon general said "the present generation" had been "spoiled" by excellent medical care, and shouldn't rush to their doctors with "mild cases" of flu.

Wilson was far from the only luminary to have a life-threatening flu encounter. Kaiser Wilhelm II celebrated news of the "Flanders fever," as the Germans called it, because it attacked French troops first. But flu easily crossed trench lines, and the kaiser fell sick before he was forced to abdicate. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, whose government censored flu reports, got so sick that he had to wear a respirator. This news, too, was censored.

Unnamed baseball players wearing masks while perfectly healthy, 1918.

Image: George Rinhart / Corbis via Getty Images

It's the one defining feature when you look back through 1918 archives: Everyone, it seems, wore masks. There are pictures of public officials wearing masks, barbers wearing masks, men who didn't wear masks being barred by an officious bus conductor. There are local laws about wearing masks in public, determining the exact thickness of gauze, or cheesecloth, that your mask had to be.

But then as now, the mask craze didn't do much to slow the spread of the virus. Then as now, there was little point in uninfected people wearing them. Then as now, mask use should have been confined to those who were actually sick, and to medical workers.

What might have helped? Obviously, a greater emphasis on hand hygiene. More and faster reporting of flu locations, and a more robust government response. Cutting down on those troop movements as much as possible, and on large gatherings such as the infamous Liberty Bond rally in Philadelphia that infected thousands at once. Within 72 hours, every hospital bed in the city was filled.

But humans will be humans, and they will gather together. How were authorities supposed to stop them from celebrating the end of World War I in the streets that November? What public health campaign could prevent entire villages around the world from coming out to celebrate the joyful return of their soldier boys, dooming themselves in the process? This, perhaps, is why the 1918 flu was rarely taught in schools: It had a grim inevitability to it, one that showcased how powerless we are to prevent catastrophe coming at us from all angles.

It is in these stories that we can glimpse the seeds of inevitable future pandemics. No modern medical system can withstand an influx of flu victims on the scale of 1918. If hospitals get overwhelmed, that's a force multiplier for all kinds of casualties. And unless you ban every conference and concert, or shut down every movie theater, successful viruses will do what successful viruses will do: spread faster than you can stop them.

The best we can do is not be as complacent as the people of 1918 and choose leadership that offers reality-based responses.

More:

Coronavirus and what we can learn from the 1918 flu's hidden history - Mashable

On February 8 1977, in the thronged lobby of the Avco Embassy Theatre in Los Angeles, Richard Harris threatened to kill a film critic.

More precisely, he threatened to have his new best friend, footballer and all-American hero OJ Simpson, kill the critic. He began to sweat. I kept whispering, Im gonna smash you in the mouth. And OJs gonna kill you, Harris would later tell chat show host Johnny Carson and his 19 million viewers. And he kept sweating.

David Sheehan was a doyen of Los Angeles film criticism. This at a time when film criticism still carried genuine clout and an unkind review could shut down a movie. Sheehan, as it happened, had taken a strong dislike to Harris and OJ Simpsons pandemic-themed new feature, The Cassandra Crossing though that hadnt put him off attending its US premiere at the Avco on Wilshire Boulevard.

Harris, who, as a producer, had a financial stake in The Cassandra Crossing, wasnt taking the negative assessment on the chin. As the booze flowed and the finger-food was wolfed down he, with new bestie OJ in tow, confronted Sheehan.

Ashen-faced, the reviewer slunk off. Smiling and possibly high-fiving Harris and OJ retired to the bar. Their work for the night was done. But for Harris the long campaign to promote The Cassandra Crossing had only started. He would spend the next several months banging a drum for a disaster thriller that was starting to look more disastrous than thrilling.

Its an incredible picture, he would humbly proclaim to Johnny Carson. David Sheehan said its the Poseidon Adventure on wheels who needs another? Well, its dynamite.

Forty-three years on, the Cassandra Crossing has aged as only a terrible Seventies movie can. And yet, with its killer virus plot, it has suddenly acquired a horribly relevancy. Four-decades old and creaky even at the time, this five-star clunker nonetheless feels rippedfrom tomorrows headlines.

As it happens the specifics of the lethal infection around which the story is built are rather glossed over. We know the lethal strain is bacterial and induces a fatal bout of pneumonia (or not, see below). And that, if it ever gets lose, it could bring civilisation to a stand-still. So much for the escapist magic of cinema.

The biggest distinction between Cassandra-virus and coronavirus is that the former is man-made. Specifically its been cooked-up by the American military at a black-ops lab at the Geneva HQ of the World Health Organisation (then the International Health Organisation). Yes, this is a film so ludicrous it starts from the premise that the pandemic escapes from the headquarters of the WHO.

The silliness is quickly ramped up. Three eco-terrorists stage a raid on the WHO, trying to steal the lethal formula and expose the USA. One is shot, another captured after contracting the virus. The third flees and hastily boards an Orient Express-style transcontinental train bound for Stockholm.

In short order hes sweating his lungs out, though he isnt in so bad a state that he cant blag his way into first class. He also manages to high-five a six-year-old and sneeze all over a pot of rice about to be served for dinner. Quicker than you can say flatten the sombrero a horrible plague has been unleashed, albeit for the moment confined to the train.

Like all awful terrible Seventies films, the Cassandra Crossing features a random assortment of household names. Harris plays world-famous neurologist Jonathan Chamberlain this being the Seventies, neurologists could still aspire to global celebrity. But whats he doing on a train from Switzerland to Sweden? Well, its obviously because hes afraid of flying.

Also bunking down in first is Chamberlains ex-wife Jennifer Rispoli. She is portrayed by Sophia Loren, significant other the Cassandra Crossings Italian mogul producer Carlo Ponti (who discovered Loren when she was a 16 year-old in a local modelling contest in Naples). They are joined by Martin Sheens Robby Navarro,a drug smuggler passing himself off as toyboy of ageing arms-dealer matriarch Nicole Dressler (Ava Gardner).

Navarro is meanwhile being pursued by OJ Simpsons Haley, a Drug Enforcement Agency official disguised as a priest (obviously). He shares a cabin with Herman Kaplan, a holocaust survivor played by famous method-acting guru Lee Strasberg. Somehow Vincent Price, William Shatner, Oliver Reed and Kenneth Williams avoided being cast in the film, though goodness knows how.

The biggest mystery is obviously the presence of the enigmatic Strasberg, who picked his parts judiciously.The Cassandra Crossing was his first movie since the Godfather Part II, for which he was nominated for best supporting actor as Jewish mobster Hyman Roth. Quite why he had signed up to this load of viral rubbish is lost in the mists of antiquity. Maybe he, like Harris, was just chasing a massive payday.

The glitzy crew was topped off by Burt Lancaster as US Colonel Stephen MacKenzie. Lancaster comes off as under-enthused to put it mildly. Yet his character is by far the most fascinating.

Post-Watergate and with the smoke still clearing from Vietnam, Americans of the period had little difficulty believing the worst of their Government. So they may not have been shocked as it is revealed that, far from trying to save the infected passengers, MacKenzies job is to ensure they are quietly made to disappear and the truth about Uncle Sams bio-weapon buried with them.

Officially, the train is being re-routed to an abandoned concentration camp in Poland. There, passengers will be assessed and put into quarantine. However, the steel arch bridge they must cross, the Kasundruv Bridge or Cassandra Crossing, is on the verge of collapse. Under the weight of the train it will surely tumble downwards (the bridge is fictional, with the Alec Eiffel-designedGarabit Viaductin the Massif Central its proxy).

Thats what MacKenzie is counting on. Unfortunately for him, Strasbergs Holocaust survivor remembers the bridge from the war and is aware how unstable it is. He tips off Harriss Doctor Chamberlain.

This prompts Chamberlain and the other a-listers to stage a fightback against the US soldiers sent aboard in their protective suits and masks to lock down the train. Meanwhile it emerges that the lethal infection isnt quite so lethal the infected come down with a terrible flu but quickly recover, suffering nothing other than a huge appetite.

Cue clunky action scenes, model-railway level special effects and a stonkingly unsatisfying denouement. As the train chugs towards the crossing, Strasbergs Herman Kaplan makes his way to the front and blows himself up.

This blindsides the Americans (apparently content to hurtle to their deaths) and gives Harris and the gang an opportunity to hit the emergency brakes. Half the train still goes over in a sequence that resembles an outtake from Gerry Andersons Thunderbirds. But not the half containing our heroes.

Yet if clearly dreadful at every level Harris clearly didnt even go to the trouble of visiting the barbers before arriving on set at Romes Cinecitt Studios the Cassandra Crossing is nonetheless fantastically watchable. And not just because of coronavirus. Harris, who took the part after Peter OToole turned it down, radiates feckless charisma. He really is just here for the paycheque and visibly struggling to take it seriously.

Then you have OJ, still lining out for the Buffalo Bills in the NFL and summoning all the nuance of a running back breaking a tackle at full pelt. And he is, incredibly, sharing the screen with acting doyen Strasberg. Its like having Claude Monet present a make-and-do art segment on Rainbow, with George and Zippy helping out.

I watch OJ with great fascination, Strasberg would say. He has something which you dont only get from training or from work. He has a marvellous personal quality that comes over and is very wonderful.

Being captain of the football team is like being a director, OJ ventured from the set. Im just trying my best to be as fine an actor as I can be. Im trying to learn about the profession. And, especially when Im with Lee Strasberg, I have an awful lot to learn.

The Cassandra Crossing arrived at the tail-end of the disaster movie craze. As David Sheehan had picked up on in the review that so incensed Richard Harris, the Poseidon Adventure was a clear reference point.

As was the Towering Inferno. This was acknowledged by script writer Tom Mankiewicz (Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun). Hired by Ponti to give the screenplay a last-minute polish, he immediately dubbed the project the Towering Germ.

Sophia and Carlo asked me to do a major rewrite on a film they were making, Mankiewiczwould explain in his autobiography .

The Cassandra Crossing co-starred Richard Harris, Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. It was at the height of the disaster movie craze. In this case hundreds of European passengers were trapped and sealed inside a train filled with a deadly virus intended for biological warfare. Privately, I called it the Towering Germ.

Yet this apparently typical Hollywood film was anything but. The Cassandra Crossing was a British-Italian joint venture. In his memoirs, producer and impresario Lew Grade remembers Ponti coming to see him in London with a new project. Grades first and only question was: how much?

Ponti may have struck Grade as stressed. The producer, part of a movement of Italian filmmakers who wanted to build their own Hollywood at the sprawling Cinecitt complex, had recently survived a kidnapping attempt. He had been driving on the Appian Way in Rome when a car pulled alongside and riddled his with bullets.

It was among hundreds of planned abductions during Italys notorious years of lead when left and right-wing terrorists tried to overturn the social order. There was to be a second failed kidnapping 12 months later. And a year after that Ponti would be arrested and later convicted of currency smuggling.

Details of the charges are lost to antiquity. But it must have had something to do with the Cassandra Crossing, as Harris and Gardner were also accused of illegally exporting from Italy currency and art works worth $10 million (the charges against the stars were later dropped).

By that point, everyone involved may have wished they could forget the Cassandra Crossing. Though it performed respectably in Europe and in the Far East, in America it was chewed up and spat out.

This was nothing less than a Hollywood conspiracy, believed its Greco-Italian director George Pan Cosmatos. He railed against the vested interests he felt were trying to sink the Cassandra Crossing, whilst promoting it in Chicago.

I hate people who hate my movie, said Cosmatos, later to direct Rambo: First Blood Part II and decently-regarded Wyatt Earp Western, Tombstone. I love my film. If people say they dont like it, its like saying my baby is no goodPeople dont like the fact we didnt film the movie in Hollywood.

The only person who seems to have fond memories is Martin Sheen. Perhaps he looks back on the Cassandra Crossing as the calm before the storm. It was while shooting in Rome that he received a call from Francis Ford Coppola to join him in the Philippines for the straightforward new Vietnam movie he was shooting called Apocalypse Now. What could possibly go wrong?

The Cassandra Crossing may not have been one of the best movies ever made but it was the most fun Id ever had on a set and one of the most talented casts Ive worked with, Sheen wrote in his autobiography. In addition to Ava and OJ there were also Richard Harris, Burt Lancaster, Lee Strasberg and, in the role of the heroine, Carlo Pontis wife the legendary Sophia Loren. The kids would come on the set and not recognise anyone except OJ, who was still playing football for the Buffalo Bills at the time .

Romes Cinecitt Studios lived up to its name. he continued. While we were doing the Cassandra Crossing, Federico Fellini was a few sound stages over shooting Casanova with Donald Sutherland in the lead role. Emilio [EstevezSheens son] would meet me for lunch at the commissary and Sutherland would be there outfitted in a long powdered wig and the ruffles and buckles of an 18th-century Venetian dandy [Casanova would go on to win the Oscar for best best costume design].

Max von Sydow would show up in a military uniform shooting The Desert of the Tartars and wed sit with Sophia Loren in full makeup and OJ Simpson wearing the black and white Roman collar. Just eating lunch at Cinecitt was like being inside a Fellini film.

Read more here:

Sophia Loren and OJ Simpson catch the plague: is The Cassandra Crossing the stupidest pandemic movie ever made? - Telegraph.co.uk

My friends, we are at war. Of the many weapons used against us, germ or biological warfare are real.

Sun Tzu, in "The Art of War," said, "All warfare is based on deception."

It is a well known fact that most of the countries of the world have biological warfare research laboratories. The current Wuhan coronavirus outbreak can be traced back to agents of the Chinese Biological Warfare Program who stole this virus from a Canadian Lab. Other Chinese agents were caught smuggling viruses from Harvard University. Dr. Charles Lieber, age 60, chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, was charged by the U.S.Department of Justice for making false statements. He was also being paid by the Chinese government.

In a recent interview by Geopolitics & Empire, Dr. Francis Boyle, who is a professor of international law and who drafted the "Biological Weapons Act of 1989," says, The 2019 Wuhan coronavirus is a biological warfare weapon, and that the Wuhan Bio Safety Lab-4 appears to be the source." He went on to say,"The World Health Organization approved and is aware of its purposes."

A worldwide virus pandemic would greatly reduce the earth's population. What a coincidence. It just so happens that the first commandment of the Georgia Guidestones is to maintain humanity under 500,000,000, in perpetual balance with nature. Along with the loss of lives, we could expect martial law with limited criticism of the state, a limit to our travel and loss of freedom to assembly.

Please don't take my word for it. Check it out for yourself.

For a deeper understanding and to verify the visit:

1. NaturalNews.com

2. GreatGameIndia.com

3. Geopolitics&Empire.com

4. NeedtoKnow.news

5. The Georgia Guidestones

Andy Windham

Wagener

More:

Letter: Biological warfare is real | Opinions and Editorials - Aiken Standard

Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being Ive ever known in my life.

from The Manchurian Candidate (1959), by Richard Condon

When you think about it, after 9/11, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush did Americans a favor by taking off the gloves, so that we could wring our hands to the toll for freedom in the upcoming dark battle against Terror and Reality-based thinking. Dont ask for whom the bell tolls, we thought, it tolls for Us. The torture trills and flourishes that followed, poor Abu rolling over in his shallow Ghraib, and the mad scientists brought in to offer up new, frightful concepts in torture, such as waterboarding, were the American equivalent of Chinese drip-drip-driven insanity, but, in our shock and aweful style, we wrung out the entire black cloud the whole inshallalah on one tormented terrorist after another.

We video-taped the enhanced interrogations techniques (EIT), but later destroyed the tapes, much to Congresss quiet chagrin, because they would have shown that the methods were excessive and the results meaningless. Later, much later, in 2014, Senator Diane Feinsteins intelligence committee found that EIT were ineffective and consequently illegal. (See the Senates The Report and the recent film, for more details on the committee findings, and CIA head John Brennans illegal attempts to quash the report by spying on the Senate.) In effect, her committee found, we tortured some terrorists who provided no valuable information, and tortured many, many others who turned out to be not terrorists at all. We rang dem bells some more.

The only CIA officer who ever went to jail for revealing the excesses of EIT, John Kirikaou, admitted, in a 2007 interview (pages 15-18 especially) with ABCs Brian Ross, that enhanced interrogation amounted to torture, and that he and colleagues thought it necessary at the time, and that it worked, leading, he said, to countless heads-up details that led to Jack Bauer-like last minute interventions in new al Qaeda plots. It almost sounded like an apologists gambit.

Kirikaou went to jail, became dubbed a whistleblower (by the likes of Glenn Greenwald), and was in jail when the Torture Report came out and contradicted his assertions about the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation. (Hed known about its ineffectiveness a year or so before his 2007 ABC News interview. In February 2015, he told Amy Goodman, It wasnt until something like 2005 or 2006 that we realized that that just simply wasnt truehe wasnt producing any informationand that these techniques were horrific. So, he knew a year or so before the Ross interview). Despite this apparent contradiction, and its implications, the MSM were supportive of his conversation starter about EIT especially waterboarding.

Reading Stephen Kinzers new book, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, you could find yourself believing that there were parallel Americas. The list of grisly murders, lethal cover-ups, assassination mindedness, and graphic details of super-enhanced interrogation techniques that made up the CIAs approach to handling the Fifties demonstrate unequivocally that the gloves were off way before Dick Cheney publicly stated the Bush administrations intended approach to those that done us harm on 9/11. If anything, Kinzer shows in Poisoner in Chief, that, by comparison, Cheney may have put the gloves back on to fight al Qaeda. The stuff Kinzer details about CIA operations, especially in the Sydney Gottlieb era, is so depraved you wonder if youve been conned by Bush and company.

Americans have been in a cold war with Russians since 1949, the year they successfully exploded an atom bomb of their own and the nuclear arms race began. It has been a relationship powered by fear, paranoia, and not a little madness, as America sees her ambition to be an empire partially checked by Russia and her potent missiles. If Kinzers read of the Fifties was accurate, it was an era marked, for Americans (and maybe the Soviets) by the terror of instant nuclear annihilation. There were fall-out shelters, procedures for hiding under your desk, and the occasional TV and radio transmission interruptions by the Emergency Broadcast System (EBS). Kinzer repeatedly emphasizes that this fear of annihilation was so often proffered as the motivation for the actions early covert operators.

George Orwells 1948 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was not only a look to the future but a pulse-taking of his zeit geist. The Spanish Civil War and the Great Depression sandwiched between two world wars crushed the spirits of millions. The kind of nihilistic impulses described by Erich Fromm in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness or even in The Waste Land poetry of T.S. Eliot seemed manifest everywhere. Ideologies duked it out: Capitalism, Communism, and Fascism. Out of one nation fearing anothers impulses, weapons of mass destruction had evolved from brute force to chemical weapons to biological weapons to LSD and other psychoactives to nuclear weapons. This is what was on the minds of writers, politicians, soldiers, and the CIA, back in the day.

So when the Soviets exploded their first atomic weapon in 1949 and then followed that up with the launch of Sputnik in 1957, American spies felt that they were dealing with a race against time. They started gathering German scientists, Nazi eugenecists, Japanese torturers, and others of twisted scientific persuasion who could lead military programs especially in mind control. Kinzer cites CIA director Allen Dulles mission statement as the basis for what the agency did:

By the early 1950s he had concluded that mind control could be the decisive weapon of the coming ageAny nation that discovered ways to manipulate the human psyche, he believed, could rule the world.

The CIA has always wanted to rule the world in the name of national security.

Operation Paperclip was the means by which totally unpalatable scientists mostly from Nazi Germany were allowed to escape post-war justice at Nuremberg, in order to help the Cold War effort against the Soviets. So, what was supposed to be a patriotic fervor to keep Mama America safe for baking apple pies, soon led to the recruitment of war criminals.

Most prominently, from Nazi Germany, came Kurt Blome, who had been director of the Nazi biological warfare program. Kinzer writes,

They had learned how long it takes for human beings to die after exposure to various germs and chemicals,and which toxins kill most efficiently. Just as intriguing, they had fed mescaline and other psychoactive drugs to concentration camp [especially Dachau] in experiments aimed at finding ways to control minds or shatter the human psyche.

He fit right in with Dulless vision. Their thinking was, writes Kinzer, instead of hanging Blome, lets hire him.

But the most important decision Dulles made regarding his desire to find a way to reach his Mission Accomplished goal was to hire Sydney Gottlieb to run his research and development umbrella program in mind control. As head of the Technical Services Staff headquartered at Fort Detrick in Maryland, Gottlieb coordinated the hundreds of myriad sub-projects and experiments that made up the notorious MK-ULTRA program. Though many twisted details would eventually be disseminated about the doings of these experiments, Gottlieb himself was regarded as a quiet and unassuming man. Kinzer describes him: [He was] a psychic voyager, far from anyones stereotype of the career civil servant. His home was an eco-lodge in the woods with outdoor toilets and a vegetable garden. He meditated, wrote poetry, and raised goats.

Nevertheless, one of the first things that Gottlieb did was to not only hire Nazi scientists, but head East, to Japan, to confer (and hire) General Shiro Ishii, a possibly criminally insane Japanese army surgeon who had headed Unit 731, a horror camp in Manchuria, where Ishii went to work on internees. Kinzer describes prisoners

slowly roasted by electricityhung upside downlocked into high-pressure chambers until their eyes popped out; spun in centrifuges infected with anthrax, syphilis, plague, cholera, and other diseases; forcibly impregnated to provide infants for vivisection; bound to stakes to be incinerated by soldiers testing flamethrowers; and slowly frozen to observe the progress of hypothermia.

Blome and Ishii were model types of the vision the CIA sought in order to gain an edge on similar Russian experimenters looking to create Manchurian candidates.

Black sites, East and West, were set up, where expendables were brought to be mercilessly and brutally tortured, sometimes in such ways that they could not be identified as humans any more. These sites were intentionally beyond US accountability, not set up to interrogate terrorists but to experiment on the mind. Such experiments were not carried out only overseas, but, also, stateside people were unknowing participants in CIA miscreance.

Project Bluebird, for instance, called for an experiment on everyone in San Francisco. Kinzer describes how a psychiatric team performed Operation Sea Spray:

scientists from Camp Detrick directed the spraying of a bacterium called Serratia marcescens into the coastal mist. According to samples taken afterward at forty-three sites, the spraying reached all of San Franciscos 800,000 residents and also affected people in Oakland, Berkeley, Sausalito,and five other cities.

Scores of people had to seek help at a hospital, a few people died from toxic reactions, but these psychiatric scientists proved that the Bay Area was vulnerable to germ warfare. Just in case anyone was wondering.

Gottlieb kept adding shadier characters to perform more and more outrageous tasks, in his effort to nail down how humans tick, deep down inside. But nobody was shadier than ex-cop George Hunter White, who, writes KInzer, stood out even in the dazzling MK-ULTRA cast of obsessed chemists, coldhearted spymasters, grim torturers, hypnotists, electroshockers, and Nazi doctors. Gottlieb had him open up a safe house in Greenwich Village where he lured unsuspecting expendables and others to parties where they could be doused with LSD for study (think: the psychedelic scene from Midnight Cowboy). In 1949, he arrested Billie Holiday for opium possession, which she claimed was planted and which put her through an ordeal that Kinzer says led to her decline toward early death. He later worked for Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Later, White was transferred back to his hometown of San Francisco, where he expanded on his doings in Greenwich Village, starting up a safe house that added the full gamut of sex acts to LSD studies, including Operation Midnight Climax. He leaned toward fascist leathers and stilettos, and provided prostitutes with get out of jail free assurances for assisting in the experiments. There were kundalini-driven orgies, whips and chains, acid trips, and gentle Gottieb with Whites wife, humping her brains out, while he recovered from tripping.

Gottlieb was originally employed as a master chemist. But the mild-mannered meditator also had a covert killer side to him. Kinzer describes the Poisoner-in-Chiefs hand in the assassination of world leaders. Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai escaped one of Gottliebs plots with a last minute change of plans. Gottlieb was put in charge of killing Cuban leader Fidel Castro with poison, both directly (cigars) and indirectly (causing his beard to fall out so hes lose face with his people). He was involved in the takedown of Congo Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, personally concocting a poison that if it didnt kill Lumumba outright, writes Kinzer, would leave him so so disfigured that he couldnt possibly be a leader (again with the losing face theme).

And the craziest characters kept joining his subprojects. At McGill University in Montreal, Dr. James Hebb studied the isolation technique [that] could break any man, no matter how intelligent or strong-willed. In another subproject he brought Ira Feldman, a master of old-fashioned interrogation techniques who observed, If it was a girl, you put her tits in a drawer and slammed the drawer [and if] it was a guy, you took his cock and you hit it with a hammer. And they would talk to you. Now, with these drugs, you could get information without having to abuse people.

In New York, John Mulholland, a professional magician whod worked with Houdini, joined MK-Ultra subproject 4, taught sleight of hand and misdirection to the CIA, and even developed a manual for them, The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception. The crazies and subprojects of MK-ULTRA just kept piling up. Under Subprojects 9 and 26, Gottlieb studied ways that various depressant drugs can shake a persons psycheSubproject 28 was to test depressants ..Subproject 47 would screen and evaluate hallucinogens, Subproject 124 tested whether inhaling carbon dioxide could lead people into a trance-like state, and Subproject 140 tested the psychoactive effects of thyroid-related hormones.

It wasnt until Dr. Harold Wollf came along in 1954 that CIA methods took a turn toward the ways and means we wring our hands over today. Wolff shared Dulless fascination with the idea of mind control, writes Kinzer. Wollf headed up the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. He proposed placing subjects in inescapable situations that eroded their psyches to the point where, desperate to escape,

doctors could create psychological reactions within them.to test special methods of interrogation, including threats, coercion, imprisonment, isolation, deprivation, humiliation, torture, brainwashing, black psychiatry,hypnosis, and combinations of these with or without chemical agents.

Hello, Gitmo. Hello, Abu Ghraib.

Gottliebs reputation for dark arts intrigues was at its height when in 1953 CIA operative, Frank Olson, suffering from acute anxiety and having reportedly confided to a colleague that hed made a big mistake being part of MK-ULTRA, either fell or dove from the 10th floor of the Statler Hotel in New York. MK-ULTRA almost went down with Olson. Was he heave-hoed out the window or did he somehow stumble through closed curtain and plate glass? It was a mystery that investigative journalist Sy Hersh looked into and opined that, based upon uncorroborated information hes been made privy to, Olson was murdered. A whole 2017 six-part Netflix series Wormwood was produced and does an excellent job of recreating the vibe of the 50s and the somewhat hallucinogenic event.

In the end, as unfriendly changes and unwanted scrutiny took place at the CIA in the wake of changing times, Gottlieb retired. And he and his wife travelled by freighter to India where they volunteered at a lepers colony. Did he spend much time in retirement recalling his Jewish roots? Thinking, there but for the grace of God (his name suggests love of God) might my Hunagrian Jewish parents have gone and me with them into some death camp, where I might have been done by Nazis in ways very similar to the methods I employed? He was essentially a Holocaust Denying Jew. Netanyahu would have called him a self-loathing Jew, then hired to mow lawns in new ways on the West Bank, returning at night to his kibbutz.

So, whats the future of mind control? Kinzer doesnt speculate much. But its clear, without a lot of thinking, that the more we humans become addicted to the honey of the Internets hive mindedness, we become more vulnerable. Edward Snowden has already warned about the mere collection of dossiers (Permanent Records) on every person connected. But there is also the risk of contagions brought on by manipulations of algorithms and newsfeeds. Think of the online white blood cell mobbing of Joseph Kony back in 2012 that created a fever to capture the black cancer, only for the fervor to die suddenly, when it was discovered he hadnt been in the country of capture for years.

Gottlieb is said to have abandoned his pursuit of the Grail for mind control in the end. But there is no question that the dark Quest to control minds is still active, as there are still Rove-Cheney-Bush type people out there who believe, as Allen Dull did, that Any nation that discovered ways to manipulate the human psychecould rule the world.

We are in the middle of a new brain warfare, as Kinzer puts it, without knowing it, because these manipulations and brain hacks are kept from us. As Kinzer suggests,

The target of this warfare is the minds of men on a collective and on an individual basis. Its aim is to condition the mind so that it no longer reacts on a free will or rational basis, but a response to impulses implanted from outside it is proving malleable in the hands of sinister men.

We are the black sites of future interrogations, by machine-like men, who, if they have their way, will not be out make AI androids of the future more human, but humans more machine-like. It might be as simple as a gizmo implanted in the brain to take the free will away and leave us open to the programming of remote sinister forces.

Think about it.

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The Fall or Dive of Sydney Gottlieb and Company - CounterPunch

NEW YORK The trailer for the new James Bond movie No Time To Die has been released.

And it seems timely to ask: Which is the best 007 film?

The odds are on Goldfinger, a 1964 entry that set the big-screen Bond pattern for outsized plots, lavish sets, beautiful women, clever gadgets and frequent laughs.

But among Bond purists, the winner is the often overlooked On Her Majesty's Secret Service, released 50 years ago this month.

OHMSS, as it is commonly known among hardcore fans, starred George Lazenby, a first-time actor, in his only appearance as 007.

Every other Bond actor, in an official franchise overseen by Eon Productions, has played the role at least twice.

What sets OHMSS apart, too, is its faithfulness to the original Ian Fleming novel, virtual absence of fancy gadgets and emotional depth.

Bond falls in love and marries, only to see his bride, Teresa Draco (played by Diana Rigg), murdered by organisation Spectre.

Not widely appreciated at first, OHMSS has won increasing respect over five decades.

Devotees hail its action-packed direction by Peter Hunt, smart script by Richard Maibaum, music - both dynamic and romantic - by John Barry and a mastermind criminal scheme involving brainwashed young women unwittingly conducting germ warfare.

"Shot to shot, this movie is beautiful in a way none of the other Bond films is," director Steven Soderbergh blogged in 2013. Moreover, it is "the only Bond film with a female character that isn't a cartoon".

In The Complete James Bond Movie Encyclopedia, author Steven Jay Rubin called it "a truly epic James Bond film with a story to match".

Yet, to general film fans, OHMSS is an outlier, even an aberration.

Much of the explanation lies with the casting of Lazenby, an Australian actor. A former model and car salesman, he assumed the role that Sean Connery made famous after the first five Bond movies.

Connery quit the part after You Only Live Twice in 1967. But he returned after OHMSS for Diamonds Are Forever in 1971 - and for the non-Eon production Never Say Never Again in 1983.

Indeed, there was so much uncertainty about how to present Lazenby to a curious and even sceptical public that in some advertisements, his face was deliberately obscured. Maibaum even suggested a scene in which 007 has cosmetic surgery to confuse his enemies.

"I'm told that mine was the biggest screen test in history," Lazenby, 80, said in a telephone interview from his home in Santa Monica, California.

"I think there were 800 applicants and 300 screen tests. They tested me for four months. They tested me every which way - fights, horseback-riding and swimming."

Lazenby had big shoes to fill and some critics thought he filled them well enough. Other voices were harsher. His "acting is non-committal to the point of being minus", wrote The New York Post.

Hunt chose Rigg, who had recently come off The Avengers, as the chief Bond Girl.

"I know why he called me," Rigg said in a telephone interview.

"George was an inexperienced actor, so they decided to pair him with an experienced actress. I hope I did help him. For someone who had never done a movie before, he was quite good."

But the production was fraught with on-set troubles. "Hunt never spoke to me again after the first day of shooting," Lazenby recalled. "He wouldn't even talk to me after the movie."

Hunt, who died in 2002, said his hands-off approach was deliberate. "I wanted that feeling of isolation," he told Rubin. "That is Bond. He's a loner. George wasn't experienced enough to interpret this feeling of utter emptiness."

It has been widely reported that OHMSS was a box-office failure, largely because of Lazenby's performance. The movie did substantially underperform You Only Live Twice.

But OHMSS was still one of the highest-grossing films of the year.

Bond producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli were prepared to sign Lazenby to a multi-picture contract.

Instead, even before the movie was released, Lazenby announced he would not resume the role.

It has been said he was advised to drop it by Mr Ronan O'Rahilly, who created offshore station Radio Caroline.

The anti-establishment Mr O'Rahilly apparently convinced Lazenby that Bond was an anachronism who would not survive in the age of Woodstock and Easy Rider.

"I'm glad I didn't do another one," Lazenby said. "I didn't want to be known as Bond. The only time I had regrets was when I was broke."

In the 50 years since his brief moment in the Bond sun, he has continued to act, but only in minor roles.

Rigg said: "I could never understand why George behaved as he did because he was given such a glorious opportunity and he threw it all away. I'm sorry for him, if you want to know. At some stage, it just went to his head."

Lazenby and Rigg said they have not kept in touch. "I don't think one way or the other about Diana," Lazenby said.

Rigg said: "Oh goodness, no, he wouldn't come near me."

NYTIMES

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The best Bond movie of all time, Entertainment News & Top Stories - The Straits Times

At 60 Rogers Street in Manchester, the Granite Pathways clubhouse for adults sits on the second floor of an oddly-shaped building full of sharp edges. A person can approach on foot from the intersection of Lincoln and Valley streets to pass the police station and the citys water treatment plant. The building is on the right side of Hayward Street near a road barrier that prevents through traffic disrupting plant operations. They are open Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Up a single flight of stairs, the clubhouse can be found behind a large white door. Once inside, an expansive area opens up to a front desk, a computer room, a series of tables, a kitchenette unit, and two refrigerators. Almost immediately upon entering, a new person will be greeted with smiles by any number of friendly female staff. During lunchtime, an aroma of delicious, often improvised, food wafts through the air. Convivial conversation is almost always occurring at any time of the day.

The term clubhouse was coined in 1948 when a group of men recently discharged from a mental health facility in New York decided to help each other get back on their feet and integrate into society. When they proved effective at doing so, the men from New York decided to expand their model in a more organized way. Thus, the Pathways Clubhouse system was born.

With over 200 similar facilities all over the world and two in New Hampshire, Pathways seeks to help unemployed and underemployed people find the motivation to work and advance themselves once again. They do this by utilizing Dr. Albert Banduras Self-Efficacy Theory. The theory, in a nutshell, states the more a person does any activity, the more competent they will become doing it . Practice not only makes perfect, it makes confidence as well.

The basis of Granite Pathways is to improve each persons mental health, first and foremost, by having each member leave their diagnosis at the door. No matter what struggles a person may have had before coming in, once they come in, they are treated like any other person as though nothing was wrong with them to begin with. Members must be clean and dry; sobriety is required for anyone who participates. The staff act as recovery coaches to support individual well-being.

Ann Strachan, the Mental Health Director for Granite Pathways, explains that the clubhouses ultimate goal is to help people with co-occurring disorders achieve the best quality of life possible. She was there to start a clubhouse in Portsmouth in 2014; shes held her current position since 2016. She comes across as an intelligent, resourceful, and capable woman. When she arrives at the Manchester clubhouse, her indefatigable presence provides enrichment and edification to all who come into contact with her.

The Manchester clubhouse previously operated out of Brookside Congregational Church at 2013 Elm Street for a period of five years. At the end of five years, they could not secure funding to move to a new location despite serving 275 people at one time. Until May of 2019, a clubhouse in Manchester did not exist. Granite Pathways, a subsidiary of Fedcap, was able to open in Manchester once more under as part of the $45 million State Opioid Response Grant, and they administer the Doorways in Manchester and Nashua.

The clubhouse in Portsmouth intends to apply for accreditation in 2020, which will allow them to bill Medicaid for services rendered. If they are approved, members will be able to fill out papers describing which activities they participated in and which they didnt. Every activity is voluntary. Membership is free.

Activities are divided into work units. Members volunteer to perform various duties through the day. These include: making lunch, working at the reception desk, cleaning (which is colloquially called germ warfare), running meetings, and working on their computer skills. In the afternoon, an acupuncturist will sometimes come to provide ear acupuncture. This is has been clinically proven to relieve anxiety.

The clubhouse also provides free wi-fi as well as help with employment services. People with co-occurring disorders often live on low income through Social Security, or no income at all. Helping members get back to work is intended to facilitate personal independence and autonomy.

Each month, a meeting is held in the clubhouse to determine how everything is done. During this time, specific issues can be brought up for consideration. Members are encouraged to participate. Decisions are made by consensus. Each members ideas are taken into account. Policies are shaped by what people want and dont want. These are often what to serve for lunch, what snacks to stock, what events might be of interest.

Taken as a whole, the Granite Pathways clubhouse is a safe, nurturing environment in which people can become their best selves. Members who come in are well-fed. Their voices are heard, their concerns addressed. They arent treated as people with disabilities or illnesses. For a short time twice a week, theyre just people. There is, it turns out, emotional abundance to be found in routine simplicity.

Winter Trabex is a freelance writer from Manchester.

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The calming and productive environment of Granite Pathways clubhouse - Manchester Ink Link