'That's My Job' - The Murder Of Ashli Babbitt

By the logic used by the US Department of Justice to exonerate Capitol Hill Police officer Michael Byrd in the Jan. 6th shooting of Ashli Babbitt, hundreds of other protesters on that day - and in previous protests across the country last year - could have been shot and killed. Also today, interest in homeschooling is soaring. Is this the end of the state re-education camps for kids? Watch today's Liberty Report:

Read the rest of the story by clicking on the Title link, below...

from 'That's My Job' - The Murder Of Ashli Babbitt

Transitioning from Vaccine Passports to Everything Passports

Israel has gone further quicker than most governments in pushing people to take experimental coronavirus vaccines and imposing vaccine passports as a requirement for people to go about their daily activities. Last week, Israel Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz announced that holders of these vaccine passports, called green passes by the government, will be required to take yet another shot of experimental coronavirus “vaccine” — termed a booster shot — and, apparently, keep taking more booster shots and being exposed to additional side-effect risks each additional five to six months or their vaccine passports will be revoked.

If this new requirement can be imposed on people in order for them to keep their vaccine passports operating, there is no limit to the requirements that can be piled on. Israel is making the first move in transitioning from vaccine passports to everything passports.

To supposedly limit the spread of coronavirus, Israel or another government could next decide that a vaccine passport may be revoked if a person is caught not wearing a mask where required, not properly “social distancing,” gathering in a group larger than allowed, or posting on the internet or otherwise communicating ideas related to coronavirus that are deemed “misinformation.”

More broadly, to “protect public health,” vaccine passport could start being revoked because a person does not take a flu shot or whatever new shots or pills come out next — say for AIDS or Alzheimer’s prevention, fails to attend a yearly “wellness visit” with his doctor, seeks alternative treatment instead of taking prescribed pharmaceuticals, or does not make sure his children receive every recommended vaccination on time under a government schedule.

But, why must government stop at “protecting public health” as a justification for imposing new requirements for keeping vaccine passports operating, or why can’t government just announce that things that it claims protect from danger are deemed as “protecting public health?” Government can start revoking vaccine passports for people who are convicted of — or maybe just charged with — driving while intoxicated, behind on their tax or debt payments, or listed on the no-fly list.

This is just some of the low-hanging fruit for expanding requirements people must meet to be able to keep their vaccine passports operating and thus keep themselves in the new preferred caste in the developing caste system. Plenty more requirements can be added.

Further, each of a person’s actions or inactions looked at relative to vaccine passports will not need not be considered alone. Many actions and inactions could be weighed to calculate a score for each individual so that vaccine passports will be revoked if the score falls too low. Scores could also be used so a person’s vaccine passport would allow him entry some places but not others depending on score cutoffs.

In this age of computer algorithms, each person can have ten distinct scores that adjust to control the scope of his allowed actions in various circumstances. And, looking forward to a fully developed digitally connected vaccine passport having the ability to help surveille people, the scored actions and inactions will be better monitored for providing information to feed the continually adjusting determinations about revoking vaccine passports or determining where a person may legally be or what he may legally do.

Vaccine passports are a great threat to freedom in their current early iteration. If they are not eradicated early on, they threaten to become a much worse hazard over time as they transition from being vaccine passports to being everything passports.

from Transitioning from Vaccine Passports to Everything Passports

Afghanistan War (Almost) Over...Did They Die In Vain?

After 20 years and countless thousands of deaths on both sides, it is time for the most difficult questions to be asked about the US war on Afghanistan. Did they all die in vain? Also today, with this war over, the Washington war machine is cranking up more enemy narratives. And...Israel mandates new shot, Denmark ends all Covid restrictions, and a new study confirms superiority of natural immunity. Watch today's Liberty Report:



from Afghanistan War (Almost) Over...Did They Die In Vain?

Say No To Vaccine Passports

On August 10, former White House coronavirus task force senior advisor Andy Slavitt tweeted something snarky, as is his habit: “If people who go out and buy fake vaccine cards get COVID, do they expect someone to put them on a real ventilator?” One of his Twitter followers replied, “We need a way to track vaccination that isn’t on a little handwritten paper card. Something that’s very hard to falsify. You have ideas, contacts, resources I bet… Make it HAPPEN, Andy.” He responded, “Hold on for 3 ½ weeks and you will see.” That was two and a half weeks ago.

Right now, the vaccine passport system is a patchwork, with multiple official and unofficial apps. New York State and New York City each have different apps, Excelsior Pass and NYC Covid Safe. Fraud is easy in some apps; others check your claim to be vaccinated against state health records. Many people avoid apps entirely and just take a photo of their vaccination card with their smartphone or carry around a hard copy. A standardized vaccine passport app would clear up these logistical snags. It would be the green light that prompts cities and private businesses currently considering vaccine mandates to start imposing them.

The Biden administration has said repeatedly that there will not be a national vaccine mandate or a national vaccine database. Jen Psaki said in March that “development of a vaccine passport, or whatever you want to call it, will be driven by the private sector.”

Even a private sector vaccine passport should be resisted by every possible means. It is the first step on a slippery slope to a social credit system, and the only time it can be stopped is at the very beginning.

A vaccine passport system would mean, in practice, scanning a QR code any time you enter a place where proof of vaccination is required—restaurants, coffee shops, universities, concert venues, office buildings. Ideally there would also be some way of verifying that the person listed on the passport is the same person who is presenting the QR code. Right now, for example, New York City’s vaccine mandate for restaurants requires patrons present both a vaccine passport and matching ID.

There are very few places where scanning a QR code every time you enter a building is standard protocol. One of them is Xinjiang. Another is Sydney, Australia. The state of New South Wales earlier this year mandated that QR codes be posted at the entrance of every workplace, retail store, restaurant, church, hotel, salon, hospital, pub, and movie theater, plus taxis and Ubers as well as large outdoor gatherings such as weddings and funerals. Everyone coming in must scan the QR code (or sign in manually if they don’t have a smartphone); scanning again to check out is encouraged but not required. Police and private security guards have been posted at grocery store entrances to make sure the mandate is enforced. Fines are up to $5,000 for businesses and $1,000 for patrons.

Right now this system is used for contact tracing. Probably it will soon shift seamlessly into a vaccine passport. Premier Gladys Berejiklian last week teased the idea of adding vaccination status to the same official state app that manages QR code check-ins, making it an “all in one” app. This was part of her announcement that vaccinated Sydneysiders would soon be permitted “additional freedoms,” such as an extra hour of outdoor exercise.

This system of rewards and penalties is reminiscent of the Chinese social credit system, which, according to second-hand reports I have heard, some Australian bureaucrats explicitly cite in private as a model for their country to follow.

Fair use excerpt. Read the whole article here.

from Say No To Vaccine Passports

Twitter Permanently Bans Former NYT Journalist Alex Berenson

We previously discussed how Twitter’s growing censorship program has targeted former New York Times journalist and author Alex Berenson who is an outspoken critic of the government’s science and response to the pandemic. Berenson was previously suspended for merely expressing an opinion over the need for a “pause” on any federal mandates on Covid-19 as new research is studied. Twitter also suspended a journalist for posting CDC information that was deemed as critical of its own official line on vaccines. Now he is permanently suspended after his criticism the vaccine and possible side effects. Twitter has again showed that it will silence those who dare to disagree or even question its approved narrative and that of government.

On his Substack page, Berenson posted a brief messagetitled, “Goodbye Twitter.” He then posted the following as the tweet that was the final straw with Twitter.

'Don’t think of it as a vaccine,' he continued. 'Think of it – at best – as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS.'

That is an opinion that many share and one that can be debated. I do not agree with Berenson on the vaccine but I would like to hear his views and see the response to them. Like many, I do not want to simply reach corporate or government approved viewpoints. Rather than respond to Berenson with reasoned debate, people demand that he be removed from platforms to prevent others from making up their own minds.

The most chilling aspect of this story is how many on left applaud such censorship. A new poll shows roughly half of the public supporting not just corporate censorship but government censorship of anything deemed “misinformation.”

As previously discussed, the poll reflects the move among Democratic politicians for years in calling for censorship. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey appeared at a key hearing in which he followed up his apology for censoring the Hunter Biden story by pledging more censorship. One of the most chilling moments came from Delaware Senator Chris Coons who demonstrated the very essence of the “slippery slope” danger.

Dorsey: Well, misleading information, as you are aware, is a large problem. It’s hard to define it completely and cohesively. We wanted to scope our approach to start to focus on the highest severity of harm. We focused on three areas, manipulated media, which you mentioned, civic integrity around the election, specifically in public health, specifically around COVID. We wanted to make sure that our resources that we have the greatest impact on where we believe the greatest severity of harm is going to be. Our policies are living documents. They will evolve. We will add to them, but we thought it important that we focus our energies and prioritize the work as much as we could.

Coons: Well, Mr. Dorsey, I’ll close with this. I cannot think of a greater harm than climate change, which is transforming literally our planet and causing harm to our entire world. I think we’re experiencing significant harm as we speak. I recognize the pandemic and misinformation about COVID-19, manipulated media also cause harm, but I’d urge you to reconsider that because helping to disseminate climate denialism, in my view, further facilitates and accelerates one of the greatest existential threats to our world. So thank you to both of our witnesses.

Instead of then raising concerns over censoring views and comments on the basis for such an amorphous category, Coons pressed for an expansion of the categories of censored material to prevent people from sharing any views that he considers “climate denialism”

There is, of course, a wide array of views that different people or different groups would declare “harmful.” Indeed, Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal seemed to take the opposite meaning from Twitter admitting that it was wrong to censor the Biden story. Blumenthal said that he was “concerned that both of your companies are, in fact, backsliding or retrenching, that you are failing to take action against dangerous disinformation.” Accordingly, he demanded an answer to this question:

'Will you commit to the same kind of robust content modification playbook in this coming election, including fact checking, labeling, reducing the spread of misinformation, and other steps, even for politicians in the runoff elections ahead?'

“Robust content modification” has a certain Orwellian feel to it. It is not content modification. It is censorship.

This call has now been picked up by academics and members of the media. Faculty and editors are actively supporting modern versions of book-burning with blacklists and bans for those with opposing political views. Columbia Journalism School Dean Steve Coll has denounced the “weaponization” of free speech, which appears to be the use of free speech by those on the right. So the dean of one of the premier journalism schools now supports censorship.

The rise of corporate censors has combined with a heavily pro-Biden media to create the fear of a de facto state media that controls information due to a shared ideology rather than state coercion.

Once again, I resolved these questions in favor of taking the vaccine at the earliest possible date, as did my family. However, voices like Berenson’s are important to our having an informed and vigorous debate. Most importantly, Berenson has never tried to silence others. These advocates of private and government censorship are only undermining faith in vaccines with their aggressive pursuit of anyone expressing doubts or challenging policies.

Reprinted with permission from JonathanTurley.org.

from Twitter Permanently Bans Former NYT Journalist Alex Berenson

Afghanistan: A Tragically Stupid War Comes to a Tragic End

Sunday’s news reports that the Biden Administration mistakenly killed nine members of one Afghan family, including six children, in “retaliation” for last week’s suicide attack which killed 13 US servicemembers, is a sad and sick epitaph on the 20 year Afghanistan war.

Promising to “get tough” on ISIS, which suddenly re-emerged to take responsibility for the suicide attack, the most expensive military and intelligence apparatus on earth appears to have gotten it wrong. Again.

Interventionists love to pretend they care about girls and women in Afghanistan, but it is in reality a desperate attempt to continue the 20-year US occupation. If we leave, they say, girls and women will be discriminated against by the Taliban.

It’s hard to imagine a discrimination worse than being incinerated by a drone strike, but these “collateral damage” attacks over the past 20 years have killed scores of civilians. Just like on Sunday.

That’s the worst part of this whole terrible war: day-after-day for twenty years civilians were killed because of the “noble” effort to re-make Afghanistan in the image of the United States. But the media and the warmongers who call the shots in government - and the “private” military-industrial sector - could not have cared less. Who recalls a single report on how many civilians were just “collateral damage” in the futile US war?

Sadly these children killed on Sunday, two of them reportedly just two years old, have been the ones forced to pay the price for a failed and bloody US foreign policy.

Yes, the whole exit from Afghanistan has been a debacle. Biden, but especially his military planners and incompetent advisors, deserves much of what has been piled onto him this past week or so about this incompetence.

Maybe if Biden’s Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs’ Chairman had spent a bit more time planning the Afghan exit and a lot less time obsessing on how to turn the US military into a laboratory for cultural Marxism, we might have actually had a workable plan.

We know that actual experts like Col. Douglas Macgregor did have a plan to get out that would have spared innocent lives. But because this decorated US Army veteran was “tainted” by his service in the previous administration – service that was solely focused on how to get out of Afghanistan safely – he would not be consulted by the Pentagon’s “woke” top military brass.

Trump also should share some of the blame currently being showered on Biden. He wanted to get out years ago, but never had the courage to stand up to the also incompetent generals and “experts” he foolishly hired to advise him.

Similarly, many conservatives (especially neoconservatives) are desperate to attack Biden not for how he got out of Afghanistan, but for the fact that he is getting us out of Afghanistan.

That tells you all you need to know about how profitable war is to the warmongers.

I’ve always said, “we just marched in, we can just march out,” and I stand by that view. Yes, you can “just march out” of these idiotic interventions…but you do need a map!

from Afghanistan: A Tragically Stupid War Comes to a Tragic End

The US Government vs. the United States

Advocates of empire and interventionism are saying that even given the debacle in Afghanistan, America should not “retreat” from the world. Even though our nation has lost “credibility” in the world, they say, it is imperative that the United States continue to project power and influence around the world. To do otherwise, they say, would create a “vacuum” into which would flow Russia, China, Iran, the terrorists, or some other adversary, opponent, or enemy. Some of them are even bringing up the dreaded I word — isolationism! 

One big problem here is that advocates of empire and interventionism often conflate the US government and the United States. Actually, the federal government and the country are two separate and distinct entities. 

This fact is borne out by the Bill of Rights, which expressly protects the country from the federal government. If the federal government and the country were one and the same thing, the Bill of Rights would be nonsensical.

Why is it important to keep this distinction in mind? Because it holds a key to the liberty and well-being of our nation going forward in the wake of the Afghanistan debacle.

Two of the founding principles on which our nation was founded were non-interventionism and a limited-government republic. 

As John Quincy Adams pointed out in his Fourth of July Address to Congress in 1821, the US government does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. 

At the same time, the American people favored a very weak federal government — that is, one that lacked the military and financial capability of going abroad in search of monsters to destroy.

Those two concepts are what Americans should be aiming for going forward in the wake of the Afghanistan debacle — a foreign policy of non-interventionism and the restoration of a limited-government republic, one in which the federal government has very weak powers and capabilities. 

Wouldn’t this mean that America would be “isolated” from the rest of the world? 

On the contrary. Remember: the federal government and America are two separate and distinct entities.

Going forward, the American people — i.e., the country — should be liberated to interact freely with the people of the world. No more sanctions. No more embargoes. No more travel restrictions. No more trade restrictions. No more monetary restrictions. No more state-sponsored assassinations, kidnappings, and torture. No more restrictions of freedom of association with foreigners. 

In other words, the federal government sector would be prohibited from intervening in the world with invasions, occupations, wars of aggression, coups, sanctions, embargoes, foreign aid, alliances with foreign regimes, and foreign military bases.

On the other hand, the private sector — the country — America — the American people — would be unleashed to travel, trade, spend money, engage in cultural exchanges, and associate with others. 

In this way, the nation would become stronger, freer, and more prosperous while the governmental sector would become weaker — i.e., limited to protecting the United States from a foreign invasion, much like Switzerland’s government is.

Foreigners love Americans, especially our money. They just hate the US government, with justification. Restoring liberty, prosperity, and harmony to our land necessarily entails recognizing that the federal government and our nation are two separate and distinct entities, the first of which needs to be weakened and restrained while the second of which needs to be unleashed and freed.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

from The US Government vs. the United States

Natural Immunity for the Win

The question I get more than any other:

"I had Covid. I had an antibody test to prove it. Am I protected (and do I need to get the vaccine)?"

Let me start with the usual disclaimer: THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE. I AM NOT A PHYSICIAN.

But the answer is now increasingly clear: natural immunity from Covid following infection and recovery is HIGHLY protective against future Covid infections. Rates of reinfection are very low.

Perhaps natural immunity eventually wanes, but we don’t know when. In fact, a little-noticed paper from June suggests it may actually strengthen for at least a year - and provide plenty of protection from Delta and other variants.

I am not going into the problems with vaccine-generated protection today or with our political unwillingness to recognize natural immunity. (Remember, GOOD NEWS - we could all use it).

Let’s just look instead at why natural immunity works so well.

You immune response comes in two forms: “humoral” and “cellular.”

When you are infected with Sars-Cov-2, your body’s “B-cells” - part of the immune system - quickly pour out “antibodies.” These antibodies attack the viral particles circulating in your blood and other fluids, hoping to keep the virus from entering your cells and replicating itself.

This is humoral immunity. Your B-cells make antibodies in many different shapes. Some are better at sticking to the virus. Scientists call these “neutralizing” antibodies because they neutralize the “antigen,” the foreign body attacking you, keeping it from entering your cells.

Amazingly, your B-cells quickly figure out which antibodies neutralize most effectively and make more of them, while cutting back on those that don’t work.

At the same time, another part of the immune system - killer or CD8 T-cells - attacks cells that the virus has already infected. You destroy your own cells to prevent the virus from using them to make more copies of itself. This is cellular immunity.

For a few days after you are infected, your immune system is in a race with the virus. If you win the race, defeat the virus, and recover - as the vast majority of people infected with Sars-Cov-2 do - within a week or two you should have no measurable levels of virus in your body.

Fair Use Excerpt. Read the rest here.

from Natural Immunity for the Win

Here Come the Terrorists. Again

President Joe Biden is being praised in some circles because he finally ended the war in Afghanistan that in all likelihood should never have begun. President George W. Bush initiated the conflict on a series of lies about 9/11 and the Taliban role in that attack and what followed. After bringing about regime change, he decided to remake the country into a western style democracy. President Barack Obama subsequently allowed a “surge” which actually increased the militarization of the conflict and made things worse. The joint effort produced no free elections but delivered instead tens of thousands of deaths and a huge hole in the US Treasury.

Bush and Obama were followed by President Donald Trump who actually promised to end the war but lacked the conviction and political support to do so, handing the problem over to Biden, who has bungled the end game but finally done the right thing by ending the fiasco. Biden also has been right to accede to a withdrawal of the last US combat troops from Iraq by year’s end, a move that will considerably ease tension with the Baghdad government, which has been calling for such a move since last January.

But America’s war on those parts of the world that resist following its self-defined leadership is not about to go away. An interesting recent article in the foreign policy establishment The Hill written by a former senior CIA operations and staff officer Douglas London sees an Orwellian unending war against major adversaries Russia and China. Derived from his own experience, he concludes that sustained and enhanced clandestine actions should now replace conventional military forces confrontation, which has been somewhat outdated as an option due to the development of relatively cheap missile technologies that have undermined classic conventional weapons.

Some of the clandestine activity he appears to recommend would undoubtedly fall under cover of classic espionage “plausible denial,” i.e. that the White House could disavow any knowledge of what had occurred, but sabotage and cyber-attacks, particularly if implemented aggressively, would quickly be recognized for what they are and would invite commensurate or even disproportionate retaliation. This would amount to an all-out semi-covert war against powerful adversaries which could easily escalate into a shooting war.

The London article is an interesting insight into the thinking of those in both the Democratic and Republican parties who continue to argue that the United States is threatened by largely asymmetrical warfare being conducted by what are regarded as “autocratic” regimes in Moscow and Beijing as well as by non-governmental terrorist groups that is seeking to undermine confidence in US policymakers, the “democratic” government system and the stability of its other institutions.

That the White House is listening to at least some of the complaints coming from the neoconservatives and neoliberals calling for more “democracy promotion” and “regime change” would appear to be the case as there have been renewed calls for greater engagement in various fora, to include NATO leadership now urging the alliance to stand up to Russian “aggression.” The US has meanwhile also called on “friends” in the Middle East to block any attemptsby China to establish “military bases” in that region, with the State Department arguing that “The current assessment is that China has a global strategy of pursuing military installations all over, including in the Middle East.” The United States, by one estimate, has nearly 1100 military bases worldwide while China has only one in Djibouti.

Admittedly this time, the US will have to go about its usual school bully behavior without much in the way of allies. The Europeans will not show up as they are disgusted with American vacillation and inability to anticipate obvious developments, as was the case in Afghanistan. Israel and Saudi Arabia will likely line up, or pretend to, while also continuing their collaboration with radical groups that Washington would prefer to avoid.

To be sure there are many in Washington who would be quite happy to continue the US naval build up in the South China Sea while also sending ships to the Black Sea to cruise defiantly off the Russian coast. And then there is also Iran and its ally Syria, both of which continue to be targets of opportunity for sabotage, covert action and the Israeli Air Force, which last week again attacked Syria after penetrating Lebanese air space. So there are always wars and rumors of wars available, which is precisely what the US military-industrial-congressional complex wants to sustain. And in so doing they know that they will have the mainstream media on board, which has the same objective.

But still, it is important to have a plausible threatening enemy, and China is still somewhat over the horizon in that context. So, you turn to the one-size-fits-all option, which is “international terrorism,” preferably Islamic, to continue to empower the central government and fatten one’s friends in the national security industry. And it doesn’t hurt along the way to label some domestic opponents in the same fashion to guarantee one’s political supremacy for the foreseeable future. It’s a win-win.

So, the Biden Administration is either inadvertently or by design setting up the next chapter in its “America goes to war” narrative even as it has not yet figured out how to extricate the soldiers it has sent to assist in the evacuation of Kabul and who are now potential hostages at the airport surrounded by heavily armed Taliban.

But key figures in the Administration and elsewhere inside and outside the government are already looking beyond that, arguing that the new Afghan state will become a terrorist haven and those radicals will look to the United States for a target, as al-Qaeda reportedly did. Jamil Jaffer, founder and executive director of the National Security Institute at George Mason University argues that “There’s no question that the return of the Taliban opens up space in this new Islamic emirate for al Qaeda to return, rebuild a base, and for other groups associated or previously associated with al Qaeda, like ISIS, to return to the region. Jihadi fighters of all stripes will now once again make Afghanistan their home, as they did in the lead-up to 9/11.”

Indeed, some of those “experts” are seeing the twenty years spent in Afghanistan as a plus as it kept in check those extremists who might have been inclined to act in Europe and the US. That of course ignores the continued existence of many other unsettled parts of the world where terrorists of various kinds have been able to flourish successfully without feeling any need to bomb New York. Senators Lindsey Graham and Mark Warner have warned of a likely resurgence in terrorism, as have both General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Graham laments that “The likelihood of an attack coming from Afghanistan now is through the roof.” The Department of Homeland Security has also done its bit, warning that possible Afghanistan-derived attacks from Islamic extremists on or near the 20thanniversary of the 9/11 event “could serve as a catalyst for acts of targeted violence.”

Anyway, you look at it, terrorism with be the national security flavor du jour over the next year or more. The only real question is, “Will it be domestic or foreign?” Either way the seemingly endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will be history but the search for new enemies will continue no matter who is president or which party dominates congress.

Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation.

from Here Come the Terrorists. Again

Apparent Delusional Talk from Cop Who Says He Shot Ashli Babbitt: ‘I Know That Day I Saved Countless Lives’

“I know that day I saved countless lives,” United States Capitol Police cop Michael Byrd is quoted in a Thursday NBC News article as saying in regard to his actions on January 6 in resisting people who entered the Capitol, including Ashli Babbitt who Byrd says he shot through a doorway. That seems like delusional talk. The people who entered the Capitol that day, many allowed to do so by members of the Capitol Police, did not go on a killing spree. They were not even armed. Some people...

Read the full report by clicking the title, below...

from http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2021/august/27/apparent-delusional-talk-from-cop-who-says-he-shot-ashli-babbitt-i-know-that-day-i-saved-countless-lives/

'Who Watches the Watchmen?' Infowars Case Raises Difficult Question For Both The Biden Administration and The Media

“Who watches the watchmen”? That question from a federal judge this week came in a confrontation with the Justice Department over its targeting or charging journalists. At issue is the prosecution of a controversial host of a far-right website called Infowars. Owen Shroyer was charged with trespass and disorderly conduct during the Jan. 6th riot. However, Shroyer claims to have been present as a journalist while the Justice Department insists that he is an activist. When US Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui asked for the basis of that distinction, the Biden Administration refused. The conflict exposes the problem with new regulations protecting journalists without clearly defining who is a journalist.

Recently, news reports of the Biden Administration targeting journalists in criminal investigations led to congressional hearings and a new policy that Attorney General Merrick Garland promised would protect the journalists in the future. I testified before the House Judiciary Committee on how this was just the latest in such controversies extending from the Clinton to the Biden Administrations. As I wrote on these pages at the time, the most glaring flaw is the continued failure to define who is a journalist. Without such a definition, the new reform is as worthless as the long litany of prior reforms.

Shroyer was arrested on charges of trespassing and disorderly conduct on the Capitol grounds. Prosecutors also alleged that he violated an agreement not to engage in such conduct after he was removed from a 2019 impeachment hearing for heckling a Democratic lawmaker. Shroyer was openly advocating for the protest and the underlying view that the election was stolen. He marched with a crowd toward the Capitol shouting, “We aren’t going to accept it!” However, he insists that he entered the Capitol to report on the events for Infowars.

Under the Justice Department guidelines, the attorney general must approve the investigation or charging of a member of the news media with a crime. That led Judge Faruqui to ask the obvious question of whether the guidelines were followed or whether the Biden Administration simply refused to recognize Shroyer’s claim of journalistic status. The judge noted that “The events of January 6th were an attack on the foundation of our democracy. But this does not relieve the Department of Justice from following its own guidelines, written to preserve the very same democracy.”

The Justice Department however simply defied the court and said the regulations were “scrupulously followed,” but refused to explain how the guidelines were satisfied. John Crabb, head of the Criminal Division of the US attorney’s office in D.C., wrote “[s]uch inquiries could risk impeding frank and thoughtful internal deliberations within the Department about how best to ensure compliance with these enhanced protections for Members of the News Media.”

Faruqi was not satisfied by such refusals and noted “the Department of Justice appears to believe that it is the sole enforcer of its regulations. That leaves the court to wonder who watches the watchmen.”

The court’s inquiry highlighted the fact that the earlier pledge is worthless without some ability to review such decisions and, most importantly, some definition of those protected by it.

It is not just the Justice Department that is discomforted by the question. The media itself is equally uneasy. As with the status of Julian Assange, the media would prefer not to address the distinction between Shroyer and other advocates in the media.

Newspapers like the New York Times have rallied around journalists like Nikole Hanna-Jones who have declared “all journalism is advocacy.” She is now going to teach journalism at Howard University and other academics are encouraging the abandonment of traditional views of objectively and neutrality in the media. Stanford journalism professor, Ted Glasser, insisted that journalism needed to “free itself from this notion of objectivity to develop a sense of social justice.” He rejected the notion that the journalism is based on objectivity and said that he views “journalists as activists because journalism at its best — and indeed history at its best — is all about morality.” Thus, “journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.”

Once you discard objectivity, the rest is easy. Schroyer was an “overt and candid advocate” but he was not deemed an “advocate for social justice.” Thus, advocacy on sites like Infowars or Fox News is not real journalism, because it is false or “disinformation” while advocacy on sites like the Daily Kos or CNN is based on truth.

Reporters not only now define what is true but can actively protest against those with opposing views. Recently, National Public Radio made it official and said that, for the first time, its journalists will be allowed to actively participate in protests. However, NPR will pick the causes that journalists can openly join. The rule allows reporters to become protesters for causes that support “the freedom and dignity of human beings, the rights of a free and independent press, the right to thrive in society without facing discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, disability, or religion.” Two examples of worthy causes offered by NPR are Black Lives Matter protests and Gay pride protests. It is doubtful that NPR would view pro-life or pro-police protests to fit that vague definition. Like the Justice Department, it reserves to itself to state which causes are worthy and which are unworthy.

Advocacy in the media is now rampant. Indeed, the White House regularly promotes the views of media figures like MSNBC’s Joy Reid and the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin who have been long criticized for their blind advocacy of pro-Democratic and anti-Republican causes. They would likely be protected under the Justice Department rules. Even when they are proven false in their assertions, they are treated as media advocates for the truth.

Advocacy reporting is the new touchstone of the journalistically woke . . . unless, that advocacy is for conservative causes or groups. I do not agree with Shroyer any more than I agree with Reid. However, they are both engaged in what is now celebrated as advocacy journalism. It is bad enough to witness the demise of traditional journalism but the Shroyer case may foreshadow an even worse future where only certain forms of advocacy will be allowed. As with NPR, what is being advocated will determine who is still a journalist. That will bring the movement of advocacy journalism to its inevitable end, leaving only advocacy in the wake of journalism.

Reprinted with permission from JonathanTurley.org.

from 'Who Watches the Watchmen?' Infowars Case Raises Difficult Question For Both The Biden Administration and The Media

Absolute Power Is No Covid Safety Net

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, lockdown champions have perennially invoked “science and data” to sanctify any mandate politicians impose. Hard facts have recently shown that neither vaccines nor face masks provide surefire protection against the virus. But no amount of evidence has yet shaken faith in the magic of absolute power.

Covid policies are increasingly degenerating to the equivalent of sacrificing virgins to appease angry viral gods. New Zealand on Tuesday imposed a nationwide lockdown in response to a single Covid case in the capital city. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern ordered her captive citizenry: “Do not congregate, don’t talk to your neighbors. Please keep to your bubble.” Arden asserted that “complying with these rules, making sure we do all we can to stamp it out, still remains the best strategy in the world right now.” Ardern did not deign to explain why almost no place else in the world, including places with vastly more Covid cases, sought to outlaw everyday conversations.

In Australia, the military is patrolling city streets to enforce the latest lockdown. Daniel Andrews, the Premier of the state of Victoria, recently decreed: “There will be no removal of masks to consume alcohol outdoors.” One Aussie lamented, “My business has been forcibly closed. Everyone has been sent home without pay. We are banned from leaving our homes except for the 5 reasons given by the Government.”

There is no “science” to justify prohibiting Australians from going more than 2 miles from their home. But New Zealand and Australia presume that no one will be safe unless government officials have jurisdiction over every breath that citizens take.

In the United States, many of the same pundits and activists who howled about the evils of “microaggressions” are now cheering for the government to forcibly inject everyone with a Covid vaccine. Biden publicly declared that he is checking to see if he has the power to force everyone to get injected.

Biden endorsed the vaccination passports that some cities have already imposed. Radio host Grant Stinchfield commented, in Los Angeles “you can [defecate] on the street, shoot drugs in crack tent on the sidewalk and even steal anything less then (sic) 900 bucks but now you have to show papers to get in a restaurant or gym!?!?” New York City’s passport regime effectively bans the majority of blacks from many activities of daily life, since they have a much lower vaccination rate than other groups. 

Far greater restrictions may be on the horizon. The Associated Press reported that the Biden administration is considering “mandating vaccines for interstate travel” but is delaying any such decree until “Americans were ready for the strong-arming from the federal government.” A top former Homeland Security official has called for placing anyone who is not fully vaccinated on the No Fly list, thereby expanding the list to scores of millions of people and creating new havoc for air travel. Biden administration officials have offered no evidence that such restrictions would end the pandemic but it would permit the president to demonstrate the same machismo that President Nixon showed with his illegal invasion of Cambodia in 1970.

Politicians’ anti-Covid recommendations increasingly resemble frightened soldiers shooting at any noise they hear in the dark. NIH Director Francis Collins recently condemned the “epidemic of misinformation, disinformation, distrust that is tearing us apart.” But much of the misinformation has stemmed directly from the Biden administration’s flip-flops and fearmongering. On August 3, Collins announced during a CNN interview that “parents of unvaccinated kids should… wear masks” in their own homes. He conceded: “I know that’s uncomfortable, I know it seems weird, but it is the best way to protect your kids.” A few hours later, Collins recanted on Twitter, perhaps after other political appointees persuaded him to stop sounding like a blithering idiot.

Covid misinformation started at the top. In a CNN Town Hall last month, Biden declared, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” Biden administration officials kept reciting the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” refrain long after it became clear that vaccines were rapidly failing to prevent the spread of Covid. On August 8, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky finally admitted: “What [COVID vaccines] can’t do any more is prevent transmission.” Helluva asterisk. Prior to that, the Biden administration even refused to disclose the number of “breakthrough” infections that had occurred among White House staff. Prof. Eric Topol complained that the CDC’s false statements on Covid risks was a “blatant failure putting millions of vaccinated Americans at unnecessary risk for breakthrough infections.”

On Thursday, a front page Washington Post article castigated the CDC for withholding Covid information from the public, noting that its “overly rosy assessments of the vaccines’ effectiveness against delta may have lulled Americans into a false sense of security.” Tom Frieden, former CDC director under Obama, suggested that the long delays in disclosure led some people to “wonder if the CDC is hiding results.” CDC Director Walensky responded to the debacle by promising “to develop a new forecasting and outbreak analytics center to analyze data in real time,” the Post reported. The CDC apparently did not previously consider it worthwhile to spend any of its $8 billion annual budget on such a project.  

The Biden administration has sought to blame the resurgence of Covid on scofflaws who did not submit to every revised command. The Official Enemies List has expanded from those not wearing a mask to those resisting getting vaccinated, and it will soon include those who balk at getting a third (and fourth? fifth?) injection.

The biggest expansion of the Enemies List occurred on August 13, when the Department of Homeland Security issued a terrorist alert, warning law enforcement agencies that “anti-government/anti-authority violent extremists could exploit… potential re-establishment of public health restrictions across the United States as a rationale to conduct attacks.” Anyone who loudly objects to being locked back under house arrest will be the moral equivalent of the Taliban, or maybe Hezbollah. Previous federal driftnets for potential troublemakers expanded far beyond individuals who threatened violence. The feds may already be compiling vast lists of Covid critics that could come in handy at some future point.

But at least government officials now recognize the real enemy. Covid Czar Tony Fauci recently declared, “I know people must like to have their individual freedom… but I think that we’re in such a serious situation now, that… mandates should be done.” Fauci predicts that once the FDA rushes its formal approval of the Covid vaccines, there will be far more mandates imposed on Americans.  The fact that the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine has fallen to 42% is irrelevant. A vaccine isn’t a failure as long as the government can force everyone to get additional injections.

The primary “evidence” for most Covid policies is the job title of the government official issuing the decree. As University of California San Francisco professor of medicine Vinay Prasad wrote last month, “When it comes to non-pharmacologic interventions such as mandatory business closures, mask mandates, and countless other interventions, the shocking conclusion of the last 18 months is this: We have learned next to nothing.” Prasad slammed his colleagues for failing to do reliable research on key issues of the pandemic: “Anyone who considers themselves a scientist should be embarrassed by our collective failure to generate knowledge, and this failure is once again looming large.”

For bureaucrats and politicians, gaining power and compelling submission are victory enough, even when their policies fail to vanquish a virus. Citizens are obliged to assume “government knows best, even when it knows little or nothing.” People won’t get infected as long as they are groveling to federal commands, right? Unfortunately, the government has no liability for the injections it approves or the freedoms it destroys.

Faith in absolute power is not “science” – regardless of how many scientists pledge allegiance to Washington in return for federal funding. As historian John M. Barry, author of The Great Influenza, observed, “When you mix politics and science, you get politics.” There is no safety in submission to damn fools, regardless of their pompous titles.

Reprinted with permission from American Institute for Economic Research.

from Absolute Power Is No Covid Safety Net

Mainstream Media Increasingly Questioning Official Covid Narrative

For several days mainstream media outlets have been reporting stories on the Covid narrative that they would not have touched just months ago. Early treatment to avoid hospitalization? Rapidly fading efficacy of the shot? Serious doubts on the wisdom of a "booster" regime? All of this had been until very recently considered anathema to the MSM. So what's changing and why? Also today, an update and reflection on breaking news from Afghanistan. Watch today's Liberty Report:



from Mainstream Media Increasingly Questioning Official Covid Narrative

An Old Soldier’s Denial on Afghanistan

In a letter to the Los Angeles Times regarding the Afghanistan debacle, Stephen Sloane, a retired captain in the US Navy who served in the Vietnam War, is a perfect demonstration of how so many people, especially in the military, live lives of denial when it comes to foreign interventionism.

Addressing Marines who served in Afghanistan who are now frustrated and angry over the result in Afghanistan, Sloane tells them that there is no disgrace in defeat because US soldiers “took an oath to the Constitution.” He says, “Loyalty to that oath has helped preserve the right of Americans and others to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for more than 200 years.” He points not only to “the failed effort to keep Afghanistan out of the hands of the Taliban” but also to “the failed effort to keep Vietnam free from communism.”

That’s just sheer nonsense. 

Loyalty to the president

While US soldiers technically take an oath to support and defend the Constitution, as a practical matter their oath is to serve the president and unconditionally obey his orders. Since the president is democratically elected, in their minds they are supporting and defending the Constitution when they dutifully and loyally obey the commands of their commander in chief.

The two examples that Sloane cities — Vietnam and Afghanistan — are perfect examples of this phenomenon. 

The Constitution requires a declaration of war from Congress before the president can legally wage war. No declaration, no waging of war. Everyone agrees that that is what the Constitution says. The Framers did not want the president to be deciding whether the nation goes to war. They chose to have Congress make that decision.

It is undisputed that there was never a congressional declaration of war against North Vietnam or Afghanistan. Given such, no president had the legal authority to order US troops to invade and occupy either country.

Nonetheless, such orders were issued. At that point, US soldiers had a choice: either support and defend the Constitution by disobeying those illegal orders to invade and occupy or faithfully and loyally obey the president and, in the process, violate the Constitution.

US soldiers chose to obey the president. They always do. They just rationalize their decision by convincing themselves that by obeying the president, they are supporting and defending the Constitution.

Interventionism destroys freedom

Second, the interventions in Vietnam and Afghanistan did nothing to preserve “the right of Americans and others to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” They did the exact opposite. Sloane is living in la la land. 

For one thing, the war in Vietnam involved conscription of Americans. That means that the US government seized 2.2 million American men and forced them to leave their families and their jobs to travel thousands of miles away from American shores to kill or be killed in the name of “freedom.” Those who refused to “serve” were severely punished, including with incarceration. I would love to know how Sloane reconciles that with his concept of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Moreover, countless Vietnamese people died or were injured or maimed as a result of the illegal US invasion of their country. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, they didn’t get to exercise their rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” given that they were dead, injured, or maimed.

Moreover, think of the destruction of civil liberties and privacy here at home at the hands of the FBI and the CIA. COINTELPRO, the infamous federal program to spy on and destroy opponents of the war comes to mind. So does the killing of antiwar protestors at Kent State University at the hands of US soldiers. Where do those things fit into Sloane’s concept of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”?

Accompanying the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan were the USA PATRIOT Act, the infamous telecom scandals, and the NSA spying on Americans. 

And let’s certainly not forget the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s infamous torture and prison camp in Cuba, which is based on indefinite detention, denial of due process, denial of speedy trial, denial of effective assistance of counsel, denial of the right to confront adverse witnesses, and the use of evidence and confessions acquired by torture.

Correct me if I’m wrong but aren’t all those rights part of the Bill of Rights? And isn’t the Bill of Rights part of the Constitution? How does Sloane reconcile those violations of the Constitution with the soldier’s oath to support and defend the Constitution? 

Our founding principles

Our American ancestors were steadfastly opposed to what they called “standing armies.” The main reason for their opposition was that they were convinced that a large military establishment consisting of soldiers who loyally and faithfully obeyed the orders of the ruler constituted the greatest threat to their freedom and well-being.

In his Fourth of July address in 1821, John Quincy Adams described America’s founding foreign policy. He said that America does not go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” He said that if America were ever to abandon this foreign policy of non-intervention, America would acquire the traits of dictatorship, which, of course, can pose a grave threat to“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

President Eisenhower, who had served as commander of Allied Forces in World War II, emphasized in his Farewell Address In 1961 the grave threat that the “military-industrial complex” poses to America’s freedom and democratic processes.

Sloane has it all wrong. The US soldiers who died in Vietnam and Afghanistan didn’t die for the Constitution or so that Americans and others could exercise their rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Instead, the sad truth is that they died for nothing, as they loyally followed orders to kill or be killed. The same holds true for those who came back maimed and traumatized, which has led many of them to take their own lives after returning home.

The sooner Americans come to accept what the abandonment of America’s founding principles has done to our nation, the sooner we will be able to get America back on the right track.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

from An Old Soldier’s Denial on Afghanistan

15 Studies That Indicate Natural Immunity From Prior Infection is More Robust Than the COVID Vaccines

It's the 800-pound gorilla in the pandemic. The debate over forced vaccination with an ever-waning vaccine is cresting right around the time when the debate should be moot for a lot of people. Among the most fraudulent messages of the CDC's campaign of deceit is to force the vaccine on those with prior infection, who have a greater degree of protection against all versions of the virus than those with any of the vaccines. It's time to set the record straight once and for all that natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is broader, more durable, and longer-lasting than any of the shots on the market today. Our policies must reflect that reality.

It should be noted that this exercise is not even necessary now that our own government concedes that immunity from the vaccines, particularly the Pfizer shot, wanes each month. With the Mayo Clinic researchers suggesting, based on old data that likely got even worse since, that Pfizer's efficacy against infection is only 42%, there is no reason to even attempt to compare this degree of immunity to the near-perfect immunity of prior infection, even against Delta. It should be obvious to any intellectually honest person that an unvaccinated individual with prior infection is exponentially safer to be around than someone who had the vaccines but not prior infection.

Remember, a significant portion of the population already got infected, and when the latest Delta wave is over in the South, the region will likely reach clear supermajorities of the population with immunity, as was found in India following the circulation of this very contagious strain of the virus.

Now consider the fact that studies have shown those with prior infection are associated with 4.4x increased odds of clinically significant side effects following mRNA vaccination. Thus, it is as scandalous as it is unnecessary to vaccinate those with prior infection, even if one supports vaccination for those without prior immunity. But as you can imagine, that would take a massive share of the market off the table from the greedy hands of Big Pharma.

To that end, it's important to clarify once and for all, based on the current academic literature, that yes, people with prior infection are indeed immune, more so than those with vaccines. Here is just a small list of some of the more recent studies, which demonstrate the effectiveness of natural immunity — even from mild infection — much later into the pandemic than the study window of the vaccines:

1) New York University, May 3, 2021

The authors studied the contrast between vaccine immunity and immunity from prior infection as it relates to stimulating the innate T-cell immunity, which is more durable than adaptive immunity through antibodies alone. They concluded, "In COVID-19 patients, immune responses were characterized by a highly augmented interferon response which was largely absent in vaccine recipients. Increased interferon signaling likely contributed to the observed dramatic upregulation of cytotoxic genes in the peripheral T cells and innate-like lymphocytes in patients but not in immunized subjects."

The study further notes: "Analysis of B and T cell receptor repertoires revealed that while the majority of clonal B and T cells in COVID-19 patients were effector cells, in vaccine recipients clonally expanded cells were primarily circulating memory cells." What this means in plain English is that effector cells trigger an innate response that is quicker and more durable, whereas memory response requires an adaptive mode that is slower to respond. Natural immunity conveys much more innate immunity, while the vaccine mainly stimulates adaptive immunity.

2) Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, May 24, 2021, published in Nature

The media scared people last year into thinking that if antibody levels wane, it means their immunity is weakening, as we are indeed seeing with the vaccines today. But as Nature wrote, "People who recover [even] from mild COVID-19 have bone-marrow cells that can churn out antibodies for decades." Thus, aside from the robust T-cell memory that is likely lacking from most or all vaccinated individuals, prior infection creates memory B cells that "patrol the blood for reinfection, while bone marrow plasma cells (BMPCs) hide away in bones, trickling out antibodies for decades" as needed.

It's therefore not surprising that early on in the pandemic, an in-vitro study in Singapore found the immunity against SARS-CoV-2 to last even 17 years later from SARS-1-infected patients who never even had COVID-19.

3) Cleveland Clinic, June 19, 2021

In a study of 1,359 previously infected health care workers in the Cleveland Clinic system, not a single one of them was reinfected 10 months into the pandemic, despite some of these individuals being around COVID-positive patients more than the regular population.

4) Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle/Emory University, Washington, July 14, 2021, published in Cell Medicine

The study found that most recovered patients produced durable antibodies, memory B cells, and durable polyfunctional CD4 and CD8 T cells, which target multiple parts of the virus. "Taken together, these results suggest that broad and effective immunity may persist long-term in recovered COVID-19 patients," concluded the authors. In other words, unlike with the vaccines, no boosters are required to assist natural immunity.

5) University of California, Irvine, July 21, 2021

The authors conclude: "Natural infection induced expansion of larger CD8 T cell clones occupied distinct clusters, likely due to the recognition of a broader set of viral epitopes presented by the virus not seen in the mRNA vaccine" (emphasis added).

6) University of California, San Francisco, May 12, 2021

Conclusion: "In infection-naïve individuals, the second dose boosted the quantity but not quality of the T cell response, while in convalescents the second dose helped neither. Spike-specific T cells from convalescent vaccinees differed strikingly from those of infection-naïve vaccinees, with phenotypic features suggesting superior long-term persistence and ability to home to the respiratory tract including the nasopharynx."

Given that we know the virus spreads through the nasopharynx, the fact that natural infection conveys much stronger mucosal immunity makes it clear that the previously infected are much safer to be around than infection-naive people with the vaccine. The fact that this study artfully couched the choices between vaccinated naive people and vaccinated recovered rather than just plain recovered doesn't change the fact that it's the prior infection, not the vaccine, conveying mucosal immunity. In fact, studies now show that infected vaccinated people contain just as much viral load in their nasopharynx as those unvaccinated, a clearly unmistakable conclusion from the virus spreading wildly in many areas with nearly every adult vaccinated.

7) Israeli researchers, August 22, 2021

Aside from more robust T cell and memory B cell immunity, which is more important than antibody levels, Israeli researchers found that antibodies wane slower among those with prior infection. "In vaccinated subjects, antibody titers decreased by up to 40% each subsequent month while in convalescents they decreased by less than 5% per month."

Fair use excerpt. Read the whole article here.

from 15 Studies That Indicate Natural Immunity From Prior Infection is More Robust Than the COVID Vaccines

'I Was Living Like Scarface': The Ludicrous Costs of the War in Afghanistan Revealed in New Documents, Testimonies

The conflict in Afghanistan — for the US at least — appears to be over. Essentially admitting defeat, American planes are beating a hasty and ignominious retreat from Kabul, with images of the withdrawal bearing a striking resemblance to those from the fall of Saigon 46 years previously.

As the Taliban complete their takeover, many Americans are wondering what it was all about. For what, and on what, did the United States spend more than $2 trillion? A newly published study from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) — a US government body — lays bare the waste and corruption of the whole affair, drawing parallels with famous satires such as “Catch 22” and “M*A*S*H*.” Uncompromising in its frankness, the 124-page report outlines the incompetence, venality and dark absurdity of the whole endeavor. “When you look at how much we spent and what we got for it, it’s mind boggling,” one senior Department of Defense administrator admitted to SIGAR in 2015.

Congress founded SIGAR in 2008 to provide neutral and objective oversight into the US’ handling of Afghan reconstruction programs. The new report is the latest — and perhaps most critical — of 13 yearly offerings analyzing US efforts in the country.

Bad metrics

At no point did the US truly control all of Afghanistan. But officials in Washington wanted to see quantifiable results. In a region where American troops were barely able to leave their bases without being attacked, “cash spent” became one of the few concrete metrics commanders could report back with any accuracy. As the report concluded:

Perversely, because it was the easiest thing to monitor, the amount of money spent by a program often became the most important measure of success. A USAID official told SIGAR, ‘The Hill was always asking, ‘Did you spend the money?’…I didn’t hear many questions about what the effects were.

Program budgets were massively expanded, often over the objections of USAID and others on the ground, who argued that inundating the country with dollars was not truly winning hearts and minds, and was a wasteful and ineffective strategy.

There was no incentive to report on financial excesses, fraud or abuse, and barely any oversight over where the money was actually going. Contractors, NGOs and others who were aboard the seemingly endless gravy train also kept quiet as they stuffed their pockets with billions of dollars of public money.

MintPress spoke to a person who had been a central part of this bizarre story. Matthew Hoh was a captain in the US Marine Corps and an official with both the Department of Defense and the State Department, spending almost 12 years in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2009, he resigned from his position in the State Department in Zabul Province, Afghanistan, over US policy in the country. “The way to prove that you were doing your job was by spending money,” Hoh told MintPress, continuing:

Money being spent on an institutional level was a metric of success. Somehow in the minds of the US political leaders, in Iraq and Afghanistan, dollars spent equated to things being constructed and effective counterinsurgency [against the Taliban]…But the Taliban themselves were taking the money! The Taliban guys were doing the construction work. It was absolutely nuts!”

Funding the enemy

By this time, the US had effectively lost control of Afghanistan. One officer told Hoh that he controlled only the area “as far as my machine guns reach and the Taliban control everything else.” If that was the case, why didn’t the Taliban overrun any of the network of small US bases throughout the country? One reason was that they were afraid of US airpower. But an equally important factor, Hoh claimed, was that NATO outposts were handing out millions of dollars in cash to local firms and groups as part of their mission — enormous sums in a country where the majority live on less than $2 per day. “The Taliban were making a ton of money off these outposts,” Hoh exclaimed, “and everyone knew exactly where the money was going!”

While this might sound far-fetched to a lay person, the notion that the US was directly paying off the Taliban has been an established fact for over a decade, the latest SIGAR report noting that Washington has been “buying” the insurgents’ cooperation, making the Taliban “unofficial subcontractors to the US government.”

“We’re talking about a fountain of money that the Taliban were happy to take. Whether they took it directly or it was the Taliban commander’s cousin that was the contractor, it doesn’t matter. The absurdity of all this — and everyone knew it was going on!” Hoh exclaimed.

Flooding Afghanistan with cash

In an attempt to win hearts and minds, US forces began spending vast sums of money on reconstruction and social projects. Yet the money spent was far more than Afghanistan could productively absorb and it continued to grow to the point where American agencies had no way of effectively disbursing and overseeing it. This cash-in-hand system also created widespread networks of corruption that sustained huge numbers of people, including many in Washington.

As the SIGAR study explained, the assumption underpinning the whole strategy was that ordinary Afghans were the source of the corruption and that increased spending would reduce the fraud over time. Only after years of this strategy did the US realize it was the enormous cash injection itself that was causing the problems. But, “rather than revisit their assumptions when progress proved elusive, US officials concluded that it would be better to power through the shortcut by adding even more money” — a decision that might lead some to question the officials’ motives.

Flooding the country with cash produced a myriad of unforeseen negative economic consequences, making some places resemble gold-rush towns. Such was the speed and ambition of reconstruction efforts in Helmand Province, for instance, that local teachers quit their jobs to become day laborers for better wages, leaving children in the lurch.

Hoh, who had been sent to Iraq to perform essentially the same function, had never seen anything like it. “Holy cow, I was living like Scarface… I was paying out anywhere between $300-400,000 per week to $5 million per week at times. All in cash,” he said.

I had $50 million in cash. The most I ever had at one point was $24 million on hand, in $100 bills, sitting in safes in my bedroom. And there was hardly any oversight whatsoever. Once we signed that money out of the vault in Baghdad, it was up to me how to document that money was spent and where the money went…I had no requirement. Literally. I am not joking. No guidance and no requirement to provide documentation about where that money went.”

No oversight

Because US forces could not travel freely in Afghanistan, rarely venturing far beyond their bases, they were largely forced to take Afghan contractors at their word. This resulted in corner-cutting and shoddy workmanship becoming the norm, as Afghans had no incentive to produce quality work. SIGAR noted one particularly embarrassing instance where the US paid $2.4 million for a new compound that it could never use, as it was built outside the security perimeter of the base for which it was commissioned.

Making money off American ignorance became a relatively sophisticated operation, with one Kandahar-based organization even providing contractors with doctored images of fake projects, replete with fraudulent geotags embedded in the digital photographs, helping local businesses swindle USAID. As former Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker told SIGAR, “The ultimate point of failure for our efforts wasn’t an insurgency. It was the weight of endemic corruption.”

Poppy fiasco

The heroin trade exploded under the US watch. In 2001 — the year of the invasion — Afghanistan produced just 185 tons of the drug. However, that number ballooned to over 9,000 tons by 2017, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The boom turned Afghanistan into the world’s first true narco-state, according to Professor Alfred McCoy, author of “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade.”

The trade implicated almost everybody in power, including Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s brother Ahmed Wali, among the biggest and most notorious drug kingpins in the south of the country.

Attempts to crush opium production often backfired comically. Local farmers were given cash not to plant poppies. But frequently, they would simply take the money and plant the crop elsewhere, unbeknownst to the Americans. Thus, they were simultaneously getting paid to plant and paid not to plant.

The US also often paid huge sums of money to Afghan warlords to destroy poppy fields. However, local bosses — who grew the crop themselves — would simply destroy their rivals’ fields and collect the money, leaving themselves both enriched and in a dominant position to further control the trade in their area.

One notable example of this is local strongman Gul Agha Sherzai, who eradicated his competitors’ crops in Nangarhar Province (while quietly leaving his own in Kandahar Province untouched). But all the US saw was a local politician seemingly committed to stamping out the illegal drug trade. They therefore showered him with money and other privileges. “We literally gave the guy $10 million in cash for rubbing out his competition,” Hoh said. “If you were going to write a movie about this, they’d say ‘This is too far fetched. No one is going to believe this. Nothing is this insane or stupid.’ But that is the way it is.”

At war with the truth

Truth, the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus noted, is always the first casualty in war. And Afghanistan is a prime example of this phenomenon. The release of the Afghanistan Papers in 2019 showed that there had been a years-long drive to deliberately deceive the public about the conflict, with officials consistently sharing over-optimistic figures and assessments they knew to be untrue, all in an effort to keep the occupation going.

The SIGAR report details how “[e]normous pressure to demonstrate progress to the Congress and the American and Afghan people distorted accountability systems into spin machines,” condemning the “utterly dishonest” handling of the war, and concluding that “[t]here was little appetite for honest assessments of what worked and what did not.” “The American people have been lied to,” concluded John Sopko, the special inspector general at SIGAR.

Has the US made things better?

Images of desperate people fleeing the Taliban’s seemingly unstoppable advance have flooded Western TV networks and social media news feeds, with well-paid pundits hand-wringing about how such a retreat must never happen again, that we are abandoning our allies, and how all our good work across the country will quickly be undone.

However, it is important to soberly assess the condition Afghanistan is being left in. While things were far from fine before the US-led invasion, polls conducted by American organizations show Afghanistan to be the saddest place on earth. Zero percent of respondents claimed that they are “thriving” as opposed to 85 percent who said they were “suffering,” when asked by Gallup in 2019. And while war has been good business for some, President Ashraf Ghani — who fled the country as soon as the American troops left — recently admitted that 90% of the population was living on less than $2 per day.

On the Afghanistan Papers, MintPress News contributor and founder of anti-war group CODEPINK Medea Benjamin wrote:

The debacle in Afghanistan is only one case in a fundamentally flawed US policy with worldwide consequences. New quasi-governments installed by US ‘regime change’ in country after country have proven more corrupt, less legitimate and less able to control their nation’s territory than the ones the US has destroyed.

Before the rise of the Taliban (who, incidentally, derived much of their power from US money and arms flowing to the anti-Soviet Mujahideen), half of Afghan university students were women, as were 40% of the country’s doctors, 70% of its teachers and 30% of its civil servants.

For all the talk of the advancement in women’s rights and education in the country, today, in half of Afghanistan’s provinces, fewer than 20% of teachers are female (and in many, that number is less than 10%). Only 37% of girls can even read (as opposed to 66% of boys), according to Human Rights Watch.

Fear of personal safety in the country has increased virtually every year in Afghanistan since 2005, reaching all-time highs today. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their lives and 5.9 million people have fled their homes. In 2018 alone, Afghans submitted 1.17 million complaints to the International Criminal Court, detailing accounts of atrocities from all groups, including US forces.

Killing and making a killing

Thus, it is painfully clear that there are many losers in this conflict. But there were also clear winners. Even losing wars make money, and much of that money went to private or semi-private companies that populate the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Hoh stated that there was corruption and stealing among American officials as well as Afghan. Deals were not documented, often completed upon a handshake alone, and there is often no paper trail to explain where all this money went. “But a lot of this was just legal,” he said, noting that 40% of the “aid” money earmarked for Iraq and Afghanistan never even left the United States, going towards management and consultancy fees for the prime contractor.

One of these groups is Creative Associates International, a for-profit NGO that received $449 million worth of contracts in Afghanistan, including one to rebuild the country’s education system around a privatized model. Creative Associates redesigned the Afghan curriculum, purging any mention of the past few decades of the country’s history (including the Taliban) from textbooks. “You can’t buy that kind of thought control — unless you have a few hundred million,” wrote one American educator.

Weapons companies have also made a killing supplying the US and its allies with the arms necessary to sustain a 20-year campaign. As Jon Schwarz of The Intercept noted, defense stocks have outperformed the market by 58% over the past two decades. A prime example of this is Lockheed Martin. $10,000 of that company’s stock bought in September 2001 would now be worth more than $133,000. Lockheed Martin itself today receives more in federal contracts than all weapons manufacturers put together did 20 years ago.

Hoh sardonically noted that “the one place that reconstruction was successful was in Northern Virginia.” The rest of America might be struggling, but Raytheon Acres is flourishing.

Why we fight

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the United States and its allies originally entered Afghanistan to capture Osama Bin Laden, for whom the Taliban were said to have previously provided sanctuary. Underreported at the time was that the Taliban offered to hand him over to a third country if the US would provide evidence connecting him to the terrorist attacks.

The US’ mission slowly changed from stamping out al-Qaeda to opposing the Taliban, to the point that, when Bin Laden was killed in 2011 (in Pakistan), there was little talk of pulling the US out of Afghanistan. Highlighting the phenomenon of mission creep is the fact that in the first draft of the US’ 2009 military strategy for Afghanistan document, there is no mention of al-Qaeda, because NATO believed the group was “no longer a problem.”

While President Joe Biden has been praised and condemned in equal measure for his decision to remove troops from the country, he was at pains to make clear that this was not a renunciation of violence, saying:

Today a terrorist threat has metastasized well beyond Afghanistan. Al-Shabab in Somalia, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Nusra in Syria, ISIS attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and establishing affiliates in multiple countries in Africa and Asia. These threats warrant our attention and our resources.”

“We’ve developed counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on the direct threats to the United States in the region, and act quickly and decisively if needed,” he added.

Therefore, it is clear that the White House has not learned the lessons that anti-war activists hoped they had. With Washington also increasingly setting its sights on China and Russia, the exorbitant costs in Afghanistan might seem cheap in comparison to any future wars dwarfing this one in scale.

Reprinted with permission from MintPressNews.

from 'I Was Living Like Scarface': The Ludicrous Costs of the War in Afghanistan Revealed in New Documents, Testimonies

CDC: Vaccine Efficacy Tanking. So Now What?

Bloomberg is reporting that the CDC now says the formerly 90 percent plus efficacy of the covid shots is now down to 66 percent efficacy. What does that tanking efficacy mean as we see increasing demands for vaccine passports and other restrictions? Also...Fauci is NOW saying that early treatments, particularly monoclonal antibodies, for covid can cut hospitalizations by 85 percent. Florida Governor DeSantis was attacked for saying the same thing last week. And...Afghanistan update: who really won? Watch today's Liberty Report:



from CDC: Vaccine Efficacy Tanking. So Now What?