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Author Archives: stuartbramhall

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About stuartbramhall

Retired child and adolescent psychiatrist and American expatriate in New Zealand. In 2002, I made the difficult decision to close my 25-year Seattle practice after 15 years of covert FBI harassment. I describe the unrelenting phone harassment, illegal break-ins and six attempts on my life in my 2010 book The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee.

Liz Cheney/Jan 6 Committee falsely claimed they had ‘no evidence’ to support Trump officials’ claims White House asked for 10,000 National Guard troops

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Liz cheney

Wikimedia / public domain
Mollie Hemingway

Former Rep. Liz Cheney’s January 6 Committee suppressed evidence that President Donald Trump pushed for 10,000 National Guard troops to protect the nation’s capital, a previously hidden transcript obtained by The Federalist shows.

Cheney and her committee falsely claimed they had “no evidence” to support Trump officials’ claims the White House had communicated its desire for 10,000 National Guard troops. In fact, an early transcribed interview conducted by the committee included precisely that evidence from a key source. The interview, which Cheney attended and personally participated in, was suppressed from public release until now.

Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato’s first transcribed interview with the committee was conducted on January 28, 2022. In it, he told Cheney and her investigators that he overheard White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows push Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to request as many National Guard troops as she needed to protect the city.

He also testified President Trump had suggested 10,000 would be needed to keep the peace at the public rallies and protests scheduled for January 6, 2021. Ornato also described White House frustration with Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller’s slow deployment of assistance on the afternoon of January 6, 2021.

Not only did the committee not accurately characterize the interview, they suppressed the transcript from public review. On top of that, committee allies began publishing critical stories and even conspiracy theories about Ornato ahead of follow-up interviews with him. Ornato was a career Secret Service official who had been detailed to the security position in the White House.

Cheney frequently points skeptics of her investigation to the Government Publishing Office website that posted, she said, “transcripts, documents, exhibits & our meticulously sourced 800+ page final report.” That website provides “supporting documents” to the claims made by Cheney and fellow anti-Trump enthusiasts.

However, transcripts of fewer than half of the 1,000 interviews the committee claims it conducted are posted on that site. It is unclear how many of the hidden transcripts include exonerating information suppressed by the committee.

Those documents support the committee’s narrative rather than the truth of the events leading up to January 6, 2021, said Rep. Barry Loudermilk, chairman of the House Administration’s Subcommittee on Oversight.

“The former J6 Select Committee apparently withheld Mr. Ornato’s critical witness testimony from the American people because it contradicted their pre-determined narrative. Mr. Ornato’s testimony proves what Mr. Meadows has said all along: President Trump did in fact offer 10,000 National Guard troops to secure the U.S. Capitol, which was turned down,” said the Georgia Republican.

His subcommittee is reviewing the work of the January 6 committee, which has been accused of other unethical behavior at the expense of accuracy, as well as collusion with other Democrat efforts to prosecute political opponents.

“This is just one example of important information the former Select Committee hid from the public because it contradicted what they wanted the American people to believe,” Loudermilk said. “And this is exactly why my investigation is committed to uncovering all the facts, no matter the outcome.”

Early Corroboration For Contested Claim

A January 6 committee staffer asked Ornato, “When it comes to the National Guard statement about having 10,000 troops or any other number of troops, do you recall any discussion prior to the 6th about whether and how many National Guard troops to deploy on January 6th?”

Ornato surprised the committee by noting he did recall a conversation between Meadows and Bowser: “He was on the phone with her and wanted to make sure she had everything that she needed,” Ornato told investigators.

Ornato said White House concerns about January 6 were related to fears that left-wing groups would clash with Trump protesters and that no one in the White House anticipated a riot at the Capitol. Antifa and other left-wing groups were planning protests for the same day. Left-wing groups had been involved in violent assaults on Trump supporters following public protests.

Meadows “wanted to know if she need any more guardsmen,” Ornato testified. “And I remember the number 10,000 coming up of, you know, ‘The president wants to make sure that you have enough.’ You know, ‘He is willing to ask for 10,000.’ I remember that number. Now that you said it, it reminded me of it. And that she was all set. She had, I think it was like 350 or so for intersection control, and those types of things not in the law enforcement capacity at the time.”

Ornato was correct. Bowser declined the offer, asking only for a few hundred National Guard and requiring them to serve in a very limited capacity.

“No DCNG personnel shall be armed during this mission, and at no time, will DCNG personnel or assets be engaged in domestic surveillance, searches, or seizures of US persons,” Bowser wrote in her letter requesting the D.C. National Guard. Bowser had been a strenuous critic of Republican efforts to limit rioting from leftwing political activists in U.S. cities during 2020’s summer of violence.

Bowser’s decision to decline help from the White House did not end the Trump team’s efforts to secure troops ahead of the protest. When the D.C. mayor declined Trump’s offer of 10,000 troops, Ornato said the White House requested a “quick reaction force” out of the Defense Department in case it was needed.

“The only thing I remember with DOD and the National Guard was even though the mayor didn’t want any more National Guard in D.C., that a request was made to have kind of a, lack of better term, a quick reaction force out at Joint Base Andrews being that it was a military installation,” Ornato told investigators in the previously concealed interview. “I remember Chief Meadows talking to DOD about that, I believe. I remember Chief Meadows letting me know that, ‘Hey, there was going to be National Guard that’s going to be at Joint Base Andrews in case they’re going to need some more, we’re going to — the Mayor would need any, we’re going to make sure they’re out there.’”

Meadows was concerned that D.C. would be unprepared for the size of the crowd coming to protest the controversial 2020 election in which hundreds of laws and processes were changed to enable tens of millions of unsupervised mail-in ballots to flood the country. The January 6 Committee prevented an investigation into Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s preparation — or lack thereof — for Capitol security ahead of the event, so it is unclear if she was as concerned about keeping the peace as Meadows and the Trump White House were.

“And, again, the crowd sizes were, you know, the organizers were saying, you know, there may be 50,000 here. So that’s where it started, I think, to scare the chief a little bit of how many people were coming in for this event, and wanted to make sure that they would be able to bring in National Guard if needed for this size of this many people inside D.C.,” Ornato said.

Once the Capitol was breached, the Trump White House pushed for immediate help from Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller and grew frustrated at the slow deployment of that help, according to the testimony.

“So then I remember the chief saying, ‘Hey, I’m calling secretary of defense to get that [quick reaction force] in here,” Ornato said. Later he said, “And then I remember the chief telling Miller, ‘Get them in here, get them in here to secure the Capitol now.’”

Still later, he said, “[T]he constant was, you know, where is the National Guard? Why isn’t — you know, we’ve got to get control of this.” And again, “But, you know, [Meadows] understood the urgency, that’s for sure. And he kept, you know, getting Miller on the phone, wanting to know where they were, why aren’t they there yet.”

Days prior, Cheney had “secretly orchestrated” a pressure campaign to prevent the Defense Department from deploying resources on January 6, 2021. She organized an op-ed for the Washington Post from her father and other former secretaries of defense specifically to discourage Miller from taking action.

Ornato described Meadows’ strenuous efforts to quicken the Defense Department’s deployment of the National Guard: “Every time [Meadows] would ask, ‘What’s taking so long?’ It would be, like, you know, ‘This isn’t just start the car and we’re there. We have to muster them up, we have to’ — so it was constant excuses coming of — not excuses, but what they were actually doing to get them there. So, you know, ‘We only have so many here right now. They’re given an hour to get ready.’ So there’s, like, all these timelines that was being explained to the chief. And he relayed that, like, you know — he’s like, ‘I don’t care, just get them here,’ you know, and ‘Get them to the Capitol, not to the White House.’”

Cheney hid this testimony and instead asserted in her report that President Trump “never gave any order to deploy the National Guard on January 6th or on any other day. Nor did he instruct any Federal law enforcement agency to assist.”

Her report noted that the secretary of defense “ultimately did deploy the Guard. Although evidence identifies a likely miscommunication between members of the civilian leadership in the Department of Defense impacting the timing of deployment, the Committee has found no evidence that the Department of Defense intentionally delayed deployment of the National Guard. The Select Committee recognizes that some at the Department had genuine concerns, counseling caution, that President Trump might give an illegal order to use the military in support of his efforts to overturn the election.”

Cheney has never addressed the effects of her secretly orchestrated campaign to prevent Miller from acting ahead of the January 6, 2021 protest. A new book confirms prior reporting that Cheney secretly conspired with District Attorney Fani Willis in Fulton County’s prosecution of Republicans and that she viewed it as a “platform for her to resuscitate her political career” and would “provide a springboard for a Cheney presidential run.”

Ornato’s description of events also matched testimony offered by Kash Patel, the former chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense, in the Colorado Supreme Court hearing about Democrat efforts to limit the ability of Americans to vote for the candidate of their choice. The Colorado court, whose efforts to remove Trump from the ballot were so extreme they were overturned this week by a unanimous Supreme Court, claimed Patel’s “testimony regarding Trump authorizing” at least 10,000 National Guardsmen was “illogical” and “completely devoid of any evidence in the record.” Because Ornato’s corroborating information had been suppressed from the public record by the January 6 committee, the Colorado Supreme Court improperly dismissed evidence.

[…]

Via https://thefederalist.com/2024/03/08/exclusive-liz-cheney-january-6-committee-suppressed-exonerating-evidence-of-trumps-push-for-national-guard/

Former World Bank Economist: People Not Being Told True Cost of Net Zero

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Chris Morrison

Bankrupt, blackout Britain where the ever-expanding ranks of the poor get clobbered, open borders place intolerable burdens on public spending and services, the rich spivs get richer backing heavily-subsidised energy white elephants – and those of a certain age look back to the good old days of the 1970s. That isn’t quite how Professor Gordon Hughes spells it out in his excellent new report that crunches the energy transition numbers of the collectivist Net Zero project, but it might be considered a fair summation of reading between the lines.

The insanity of Net Zero becomes clearer by the day. The idea that hydrocarbons – a natural resource whose use from medicines to reliable energy is ubiquitous in modern industrial society – can be removed within less than 30 years is ridiculous. In his report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Professor Hughes concerns himself with the transition from hydrocarbons to ‘green’ technologies such as wind and solar. Forget all the politically-inspired low-ball figures of transition, he is suggesting. Looking at you, Climate Change Committee. It is likely that the amount of new investment needed for the transition will be a minimum of 5% of gross domestic product for the next 20 years, and might exceed 7.5%. Gordon Hughes is a former World Bank economist, and is Professor of Economics at the University of Edinburgh.

There is no chance of borrowing such an “astronomical” amount, notes Hughes, and the only viable way to raise the cash for new capital expenditure would be a two decades-long reduction in private consumption of up to 10%. “Such a shock has never occurred in the last century outside war, and even then never for more than a decade,” he notes.

Recent polling in the U.S. has shown that the desire of a majority of citizens to pay for Net Zero barely stretches to more than the ‘chump’ change in their back pockets. “Commitment to the energy transition is a classic ‘luxury belief’ held most strongly by those who are sufficiently well-off not to worry about the costs… Indeed at least some of those who promote the transition most strongly are among those who expect to gain from the business opportunities.” On this latter point, Hughes was possibly recalling the recent activities of rising media star Dale Vince (£110 million in wind subsidies to date, and counting).

Politicians sometimes blather about the pioneering role taken by European countries in Net Zero. Hughes points out that leaders in China and India are not fools. “Posturing about targets that are patently not achievable and might be economically ruinous is unlikely to convince anyone, although most will be too polite to point this out,” he observed.

Writing a foreword, Lord Frost identified a make-believe world inhabited by Net Zero proponents where it is claimed costs will magically come down, new technologies will somehow be invented and promised green growth will pay for everything. “But they never give any evidence for believing this – and, where we can check what they say, for example in the real costs of wind power, we can see that these cost reductions are simply not happening,” he said.

On the immigration front, Hughes notes a 1% increase in the British population every year. He notes that 4% of GDP must be invested every year in new (not replacement) capital per head. Of course nothing like this is being spent and capital per head is falling rapidly. “Just maintaining the amounts of capital per head will eat up an amount of investment equivalent to that required for the energy transition,” he states.

Squeezing domestic consumption, in other words making the already squeezed poor even poorer by removing all their remaining luxuries in life (older cars, cheap foreign holidays, meat), is the only realistic way to fund the enormous sums required for the Net Zero energy transition. Possibly a glimmer of reality is creeping into political circles with the opposition Labour party having gone through “agonies” and ditched its £28 billion a year green deal. “Clearly, they concluded that it was impossible to sell an increase in the tax burden of that magnitude to a reluctant electorate,” he said. In fact, the sums involved in the Labour plan were only a fifth of the estimated cost of transition.

Any future Government wishing to travel the path of Net Zero must make the choices of reducing public services and mandating savage cuts in household expenditure. Needless to say, the general population is in almost total ignorance about these realities. Hughes notes that the electorate has given no indication that they are willing to bear the costs involved. “Indeed until now all they have been told is that there are few or no trade-offs required, and technology will somehow magically solve everything.”

[…]

Via https://dailysceptic.org/2024/03/06/population-is-not-being-told-the-true-cost-of-net-zero-warns-former-world-bank-economist/

Leaked files from transgender ‘experts’ show callous disregard for medical ethics 

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BIGSTOCK

Newly leaked files from within the leading global transgender healthcare body have revealed that the clinicians who shape how “gender medicine” is regulated and practiced around the world consistently violate medical ethics and informed consent.

The leaked files from the internal messaging forum of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) were published this week by the US-based think tank Environmental Progress.

WPATH is considered the leading global scientific and medical authority on “gender medicine,” and in recent decades, its “standards of care” have guided the policies and practices of governments, medical associations, public health systems and private clinics across the world.

However, Environmental Progress claims that leaked files reveal that WPATH does not meet the standards of evidence-based medicine, and members frequently discuss improvising treatments as they go along. Members are fully aware that children and adolescents cannot comprehend the lifelong consequences of “gender-affirming care,” and in some cases, due to poor health literacy, neither can their parents.

“The WPATH Files show that what is called ‘gender medicine’ is neither science nor medicine,” said Michael Shellenberger, founder of Environmental Progress. “The experiments are not randomized, double-blind, or controlled. It’s not medicine since the first rule is to do no harm. And that requires informed consent.”

Some of the discussion appears very disturbing. Members appear to ignore long-term patient outcomes despite being aware of the debilitating and potentially fatal side effects of cross-sex hormones and other treatments. Messages in the files show that patients with severe mental health issues, such as schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder, and other vulnerabilities such as homelessness, are being allowed to consent to hormonal and surgical interventions.

Members dismiss concerns about these patients and characterize efforts to protect them as unnecessary “gatekeeping.”

The leaked files provide clear evidence that doctors and therapists are aware they are offering minors life-changing treatments they cannot fully understand. WPATH members know that puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries will cause infertility and other complications, including cancer and pelvic floor dysfunction. Yet they consider life-altering medical interventions for young patients, including vaginoplasty for a 14-year-old and hormones for a developmentally delayed 13-year-old.

The WPATH Files also show how far medical experiments in gender medicine have gone, with discussions about surgeons performing “nullification” and other extreme body modification procedures to create body types that do not exist in nature.

A growing number of medical and psychiatric professionals say the promotion of pseudoscientific surgical and hormonal experiments is a global medical scandal that compares to major incidents of medical malpractice in history, such as lobotomies and ovariotomies.

A section in the report on medical ethics is particularly damning about the notion of autonomy. “In the past, the emphasis on autonomy in medical ethics was meant to act as a shield: there were things a doctor could not do to you without your consent,” says the report. “Nowadays, and especially in gender medicine, autonomy acts as a sword: in its name, there is nothing a doctor may deny you.”

The ”Trans Leaks” have not been reported yet by any major newspapers apart from The Telegraph (London) and Canada’s National Post. Dr Marci Bowers, the president of WPATH, issued a statement in which she contended that trans medicine is scientific and that sceptics aren’t:

“WPATH is and has always been a science- and evidence-based organization whose recommendations are widely endorsed by major medical organizations around the world. We are the professionals who best know the medical needs of trans and gender diverse individuals-and stand opposed to individuals who misrepresent and de-legitimize the diverse identities and complex needs of this population through scare tactics.”

The raw files have been published in a report called The WPATH Files: Pseudoscientific surgical and hormonal experiments on children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults. Journalist Mia Hughes puts the WPATH Files in the context of the best available science on gender distress.

[…]

Via https://bioedge.org/gender/transgender/leaked-files-from-transgender-experts-show-callous-disregard-for-medical-ethics/

French Revolution: Napoleon Invades Egypt

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Episode 38 Bonaparte in Egypt

Living the French Revolution and Age of Napoleon

Dr Suzanne M Desan

Film Review

Following his brilliant campaign in Italy, the Directory appointed General Napoleon Bonaparte to investigate a possible invasion of England. He decided it was more strategic to invade Egypt. According to Desan, the French first considered invading Egypt in 1763, following their defeat by the British in the Seven Years hope. Now they hoped it could replace St Domingue (which was on the verge of independence)* as source of sugar and coffee. They were already looking at building a canal at Suez between the Mediterranean and Red Sea and limiting Egypt’s role in the British trade route to India.

In May 1798, Napoleon set out with 30,000 troops, 30 ships and a 167-member scientific and artistic commission. As part of the vast Ottoman empire, Egypt was ruled by former Turkish slave soldiers from the Caucasus known as Mamluks.** Pursued by British admiral Horatio Nelson, Napoleon landed at at Aboukir Bay and led his men on a difficult 15-mile desert march to engage the somewhat smaller Mamluk army. Deploying his troops in large squares, a classic defense against a cavalry charge, Napoleon easily defeated them.

In the subsequent Battle of the Nile, Admiral Nelson used his naval fleet to surround Napoleon’s vessels in Aboukir Bay. Napoleon had no choice but to surrender after the British sank 21 French ships and killed 3,200 French sailors.

Despite his naval defeat, Napoleon continued to occupy Egypt, embarked on a total overhaul of the Egyptian government. Assisting its intellectual elites and Muslim and Coptic Christian leaders in setting up new republican councils (called divans), he tore down buildings to widen roads, set up hospitals, printing presses and communal ovens and reformed taxation and the Egyptian judicial system. He also used his 167 European scholars to set up the Institute of Egypt, to indoctrinate Egyptians in European liberalism. During his occupation one of his soldiers discovered an ancient basalt slab inscribed in Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphics which came to be known as the Rosetta Stone.

In October 1798, the people of Alexandria revolted against Napoleon’s new taxes and he suppressed the insurrection by firing on the civilian population with hi canons.

In 1799, he marched his troop east towards Syria, hoping to launch a preemptive strike on the Ottoman troops. When the city of Jaffa (in modern day Israel) refused to surrender, he also bombarded them with canon fire and executed 2500 prisoners of war.

Leaving his officers and the bulk of his troops to govern Egypt, he returned to France to be welcomed as a great hero. He used his uncanny skill at self-promotion to conceal what actually happened in Egypt, with his numerous publications about Egyptian culture leading to the first wave of European Egyptomania.

In 1801, a British/Ottoman coalition would drive the last of Napoleon’s troops out of Egypt.

*See The French Revolution Leads to Revolution in Haiti

**See Mongol Invasion of the Islamic World

CIA Acknowledges Role in 2014 Ukraine Coup

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A house with flags in the snow Description automatically generated
A home, flying Ukrainian and American flags, close to the Russian border. [Source: nytimes.com]

By John Kiriakou

The New York Times on February 25 published an explosive story of what purports to be the history of the CIA in Ukraine from the Maidan coup of 2014 to the present. The story, “The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin,” written by Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz, is one of initial distrust, but a mutual fear and hatred of Russia that progresses to a relationship so close that Ukraine is now one of the CIA’s closest intelligence partners in the world.

At the same time, the Times’s publication of the piece, which relied on more than 200 interviews in Ukraine, the U.S., and “several other European countries,” raises several questions: Why did the CIA not object to the article’s publication, especially coming in one of the Agency’s preferred outlets? When the CIA approaches a newspaper to complain about the classified information it contains, the piece is almost always killed or severely edited. Newspaper publishers are patriots, after all. Right? Was the article published because the CIA wanted the news out there? Perhaps more importantly, was the point of the article to influence the congressional budget deliberations on aid to Ukraine? After all, was the article really just meant to brag about how great the CIA is? Or was it to warn congressional appropriators, “Look how much we’ve accomplished to confront the Russian bear. You wouldn’t really let it all go to waste, would you?”

The Times’s article has all the hallmarks of a deep, inside look at a sensitive—possibly classified—subject. It goes in depth into one of the Intelligence Community’s Holy of Holies, an intelligence liaison relationship. But in the end, it really is not. It does not tell us anything that every American has not already assumed. Maybe we had not had it spelled out in print before, but we all believed that the CIA was helping Ukraine fight the Russians.

We had already seen reporting that the CIA had “boots on the ground” in Ukraine and that the U.S. government was training Ukrainian special forces and Ukrainian pilots, and was running a shadow war with the Ukrainian intelligence services that involved targeted assassinations, so there is nothing new there.

The article does go a little further in detail from past reports although, again, without providing anything that might endanger sources and methods. For example, we have learned that:

  • There is a CIA listening post in the forest along the Russian border, one of 12 “secret” bases the U.S. maintains there. One or more of these posts helped to allegedly prove Russia’s involvement in the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, although a lot of publicly available evidence suggests that Russia could not have been behind this. The CIA appears to have coyly slipped in disinformation about the Malaysia Airlines flight in this article to remind the Times’s readership about how evil the Russians supposedly are.
  • Ukrainian intelligence officials helped the Americans “go after” the Russian operatives “who meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” I have a news flash for The New York Times: The Mueller report found that there was no meaningful Russian meddling in the 2016 election. And what does “go after” mean?
  • The close ties between Ukrainian intelligence officials and the CIA following the February 2014 Maidan coup were apparent in that the incoming CIA station chief to Kyiv, after a long day of meetings at Langley in the winter of 2015, took General Valeriy Kondratiuk, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, to a Washington Capitals hockey game where they sat in a luxury box and loudly booed Alex Ovechkin, the team’s star player from Russia.
  • Beginning in 2016, the CIA trained an “elite Ukrainian commando force known as Unit 2245, which captured Russian drones and communications gear so that CIA technicians could reverse-engineer them and crack Moscow’s encryption systems.”[1] This is exactly what the CIA is supposed to do. Honestly, if the CIA had not been doing this, I would have suggested a class action lawsuit for the American people to get their tax money back.
  • Ukraine has turned into an intelligence-gathering hub that has intercepted more Russian communications than the CIA station in Kyiv could initially handle. Again, I would expect nothing less. After all, that is where the war is. So of course communications will be intercepted there. As to the CIA station being overwhelmed, the Times never tells us if that is because the station was a one-man operation at the time or whether it had thousands of employees and was still overwhelmed. It is all about scale.
  • CIA-trained commandos participated in clandestine sabotage missions into Crimea and assassination and terrorist acts, like detonation of a car bomb in the vehicle of Donetsk People’s Republic commander Arsen Pavlov (aka Motorola) in 2016. The commandos handed out commemorative patches to those involved in Pavlov’s murder, one stitched with the British term for an elevator. The article accepts the CIA’s claim that it opposed the commission of these violent acts and was infuriated by assassinations.
  • CIA Director William Burns made a secret visit to Kyiv recently, his 10th to the region since the Russian invasion in February 2022; CIA officers deployed to Ukrainian military bases reviewed lists of potential Russian targets that the Ukrainians were preparing to strike, comparing the information that the Ukrainians had with U.S. intelligence; and the CIA helped to thwart an assassination plot against Zelensky. In the latter case, the CIA could be making this up to try to make itself look good.
  • Lest you think that the CIA and the U.S. government were on the offense in Ukraine, the article makes clear that “Mr. Putin and his advisers misread a critical dynamic. The CIA didn’t push its way into Ukraine. U.S. officials were often reluctant to fully engage, fearing that Ukrainian officials could not be trusted, and worrying about provoking the Kremlin.”

It is at this point in the article that the Times reveals what I believe to be the buried lead:

“Now these intelligence networks are more important than ever, as Russia is on the offensive and Ukraine is more dependent on sabotage and long-range missile strikes that require spies far behind enemy lines. And they are increasingly at risk: “If Republicans in Congress end military funding to Kyiv, the CIA may have to scale back.” (Emphasis added.)

The authors go on to write that “the question that some Ukrainian intelligence officers are now asking their American counterparts—as Republicans in the House weigh whether to cut off billions of dollars in aid—is whether the C.I.A. will abandon them. ‘It happened in Afghanistan before and now it’s going to happen in Ukraine,’ a senior Ukrainian officer said.”

These comments make clear that the CIA leaked the story to the Times as part of a political scheme to try to sustain military aid to Ukraine and boost congressional funding for the CIA.

The article seeks to convey the impression that the CIA is needed now more than ever to prevent Ukraine from becoming another Afghanistan—or Vietnam, where the Ford administration was also accused of abandoning a U.S. ally, and allowing, in that case, the communists to take over.

[…]

Via https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/02/28/cia-spills-the-beans-about-deep-involvement-in-ukraine-part-of-ploy-to-undercut-republican-congressional-opposition-to-war/

55 Years Ago, the FBI Murdered Black Panther Party Leader Fred Hampton in a “Northern Lynching.”

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A person speaking into microphones Description automatically generated
Fred Hampton on October 29, 1969, five weeks before he was lynched by the Chicago Police Department. [Source: harvardpolitics.com]

By Jeremy Kuzmarov

Fred Hampton was the charismatic leader of the Black Panther Party in Chicago in the late 1960s who, by the age of 21, had already developed a reputation as a brilliant orator and courageous social justice activist.

[…]

On December 4, 1969, Hampton was murdered as he slept in his home on Chicago’s Southwest Side in what was described by an elderly woman as a “northern lynching.” Shortly before dawn, 14 armed police officers, ostensibly serving a search warrant, shot nearly 100 rounds of ammunition into his apartment, killing Hampton and 22-year-old Mark Clark, and wounding several other young members of the Black Panther Party.

After the shooting, Chicago Police Sergeant Daniel Groth claimed that a female Panther, Brenda Harris, fired her shotgun at police when they entered Hampton’s apartment. He said of the raid that “there must have been six or seven of them firing. The firing must have gone on ten, twelve minutes. If two hundred shots were exchanged, that was nothing.”

Deputy Police Superintendent Merlin Nygren supported Groth’s account, stating that “Miss Harris touched off the gun battle by firing at the police with a shotgun.”[2]

Cook County (Illinois) District Attorney Edward Hanrahan, who had campaigned on a platform of a war on gangs, also backed up Groth’s contentions, pointing to weapons seized from Hampton’s home in a press conference, which he said indicated that the police had taken them from there.

Groth’s claim that Harris had fired at him from the southeast corner of the living room was logistically impossible because of where the walls in the apartment were located.

Detective Edward Carmody, who claimed a man later identified as Hampton had fired at him with a shotgun from the rear bedroom, admitted eventually that he never saw Hampton fire at him. Carmody denied shooting anyone, but the firearms report, mysteriously never produced for the federal grand jury, indicated he had critically wounded someone, and it is believed that he is the one to have shot Hampton in the head twice.[3]

The day after the shooting, the Chicago Daily News published a front-page banner headline, “Panther Chief, Aide Killed in Gun Battle with Police,” which was followed by two subheads with articles describing two different versions of events: one subhead containing the police/Hanrahan version of events, was titled “Six Injured in Shootout.” The other, containing information from Bobby Rush, was, “Police ‘Murdered’ Hampton—Panther, We Can Prove It.”[4]

When John Kifner, the Chicago correspondent for The New York Times, went to the apartment, he was told by a young man in a Panther-style black leather jacket that “the pigs say that a girl fired a shotgun at them and they started shooting. Now you can see, ain’t no bulllet holes around the door,” adding “no shooting coming out; all the shooting’s coming in.”[5]

Harold Bell, a Panther who survived the police assault said that the apartment raid seemed similar to military operations he had witnessed in Vietnam because the police raiders moved to a series of vantage points under covering fire, quickly gaining control of the apartment, with no cross-fire.

Almost 100 bullet holes were lodged in the east walls of the apartment where police had fired. The FBI’s most senior firearms inspector, Robert Zimmer, concluded that the firing had all been done by police in one direction, except for one bullet fired by Mark Clark after he had been shot by police and fatally wounded.[6]

Bobby Rush said “Hampton was murdered while he slept in a bed. We can prove that. He couldn’t fire because he was asleep.” He never woke up because he had been drugged with barbiturates.

A National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Commission of Inquiry confirmed that the police fired all but one shot and that Hampton was shot by an officer who could see his prostrate body lying on the bed, indicating that he had been summarily executed.

Attorney Jeffrey Haas, whose People’s Law Office (PLO) filed a civil rights lawsuit against Hanrahan and the Chicago police on behalf of surviving family members, wrote in his 2010 book The Assassination of Fred Hampton that the crime scene indicated that Fred’s executioners wanted to show off their “kill” to the other raiders as one might show off the carcass of a slain deer.[7]

[…]

Black Judas

Known for his flashy clothes, street swagger and big ride, William O’Neal was an FBI informant who infiltrated Hampton’s inner circle as his chief of security and provided floor plans of Hampton’s apartment to the Chicago police as they planned the murderous raid.

O’Neal also reportedly was the one to drug Hampton with barbiturates so he would not wake up during the police raid.

[…]

According to Haas, O’Neal had run a criminal enterprise and became an FBI informant in 1968 when he and a former Chicago vice detective, Stanley Robinson, had been detained in the kidnapping and murder of several drug dealers and after being implicated in an auto theft ring. In exchange for his testimony, O’Neal had his charges dropped and became an informant.

When O’Neal was arrested for driving a stolen car, he flashed phony FBI identification—a federal crime—though the case disappeared.[8]

O’Neal testified at a deposition that he joined the Panthers in 1968 at the request of FBI Agent Roy Mitchell and was paid $100 per week.[9]

O’Neal’s official job was making sure the Panthers had their weapons in working order and ferreting out informants. To better accomplish the latter, he developed an electric chair that could electrocute people, which was used as a deterrent.

Robert Bruce, a former Panther friend of O’Neal described how O’Neal was always urging him and others to commit robberies and burglaries: “to go into the streets and get money to live” is what O’Neal called it.[10] This was part of O’Neal’s function as an agent-provocateur who advocated for a militaristic line and encouraged the Panthers to carry out criminal acts so they could be arrested and look bad before the public.

Roy Mitchell testified that he obtained a floor plan from O’Neal of the Panther office in June 1968 which led to the December 4 raid.

Prior to the raid, Mitchell had kept his superiors—Robert Pipes, head of the FBI’s racial matters squad, and Marlin Johnson, FBI Special Agent in Charge of the Chicago FBI office—informed about Hampton and the Panthers through conversations and memos.

[…]

Rather than directly murdering Hampton, the FBI preferred the raid to be undertaken by Hanrahan’s office and Chicago PD. Hampton was directly referred to in COINTELPRO documents unearthed at the 1975/1976 Church Committee hearings, which show that Fred was targeted by the FBI under this program.

Who Was Fred Hampton?

Born on the southwestern side of Chicago in August 1948 to parents who lived next door to Mamie Till—Emmett Till[12]’s mother—Hampton read Black authors like Malcolm X. and W.E.B Du Bois at a young age and came to identify with socialist struggles in the Third World.

As a high school student, Hampton led the NAACP’s youth wing in Chicago, spearheaded local campaigns against segregation and police brutality, and set up a Black cultural center in Maywood with a Black history section.

Reverend Tom Strieter said that Fred was a master orator even at that age, noting that “his rhetoric was stunning as he confronted his white audience with a picture of America’s unjust society that most had never imagined before.”

When Hampton turned 18 years old in 1966, he refused to register for the draft in protest of the Vietnam War, declaring that he was not just for peace in Vietnam but victory in Vietnam for the Vietnamese.[13]

At the time Hampton was working in a corn production plant to earn money for college. The president of the company described Fred as “very dynamic, quick witted and much less focused on himself than on the world around him. He was always trying to bring Black people together.” He remembers Fred saying “if you walk through life and don’t help anybody, you haven’t had much of a life.”[14]

When Fred gave a rousing speech at a civil rights protest hosted by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he was arrested and charged with “mob action” even though the people listening to him were inside a hall when any violence took place. That is when he was first put on the FBI’s Key Agitator Index, a list of activists that Hoover ordered FBI agents to monitor closely.[15]

The monitoring increased when Fred joined the Black Panther Chicago chapter where he worked in the Panther breakfast program that provided free breakfasts to kids so they could learn better.

Having read Mao and Che, Hampton advanced a class analysis that argued that revolution was a class struggle by the oppressed classes against the oppressor.

Critical of Black nationalists (whom he called “dashiki nationalists”), Fred was a voice of moderation within the Black Panther Party, banning a cartoon coloring book that depicted Panthers attacking the police, and ordering the dismantling of O’Neal’s electric chair.[16]

A strong proponent of educating ghetto youth, Hampton spoke about forming coalitions with other groups, including the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Young Lords under the leadership of Cha-Cha Jimenez. He was encouraging of women, helping to give them leadership positions in the Panthers and refraining from sexist comments or unwanted sexual advances.[17]

Black Panther Party leader Elaine Brown said people had wanted Fred to become a national spokesman for the Black Panther Party as “he could say what everyone else did, but say it better. He had the ability to move people, whether college students or welfare women, better than anyone I ever heard.”[18]

In 1969, Hampton met and worked out a treaty with David Barksdale, the leader of the Black Disciples, a major Black gang, that allowed the Panthers to organize and recruit in areas controlled by the Disciples, and met with leadership of the Blackstone Rangers, including Jeff Fort, in an effort to further quell gang violence and get gang members to join the Panthers.

Killing a Revolutionary But Not the Revolution

[…]

Unfortunately, Fred’s death in reality accelerated the death of the Black Panther Party, which was too weak and internally fractured to withstand the repression that it faced.

Bobby Rush stated that “Fred’s death played a tremendous role in destroying the party. After that night, the party slowly declined and members left one by one.”[20]

The implications of this decline were severe both locally and nationally.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Chicago’s West Side deteriorated into a haven of drugs and gangs. Fred’s inspiring leadership and ability to reach kids and get them involved in supporting and building their communities, not preying on them, was sorely missed.

The absence of a strong left-wing movement in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s further paved the way for the conservative revolution, which resulted in skyrocketing inequality levels, declining social services, runaway militarism and the mass incarceration of Blacks.

Hampton was instrumental, nevertheless, in helping to build a diverse political coalition that led to the 1983 election of Chicago’s first African-American mayor, Harold Washington, a strong progressive, and which diversified Chicago city politics.

Edward Hanrahan, on the other hand, was defeated in the Attorney General’s race in 1972, having been widely discredited because of his role in Hampton’s murder. (Voters placed stickers with the term “convict” over “reelect” on Hanrahan billboards.)

Today, a statue of Hampton stands next to a pool named in his honor in his home community of Maywood, where he continues to inspire people to stand up for social justice causes.

[…]

Fred’s only son, Fred Hampton, Jr., has helped advance his father’s legacy through political activism as chairman of the Prisoners of Conscience Committee (POCC) and the Black Panther Party Cubs (BPPC), made up of descendants of Black Panthers.

[…]

Via https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/02/29/fifty-five-years-ago-the-fbi-murdered-black-panther-party-leader-fred-hampton-in-a-northern-lynching/

50% of Employers Already Use AI to Track Employees’ Emotions

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AI background image with worried looking woman

 By Nazanin Andalibi, Ph.D.

Emotion artificial intelligence uses biological signals such as vocal tone, facial expressions and data from wearable devices as well as text and how people use their computers, promising to detect and predict how someone is feeling.

It is used in contexts both mundane, like entertainment, and high stakes, like the workplace, hiring and healthcare.

A wide range of industries already use emotion artificial intelligence (AI) including call centers, finance, banking, nursing and caregiving.

Over 50% of large employers in the U.S. use emotion AI aiming to infer employees’ internal states, a practice that grew during the COVID-19 pandemic.

For example, call centers monitor what their operators say and their tone of voice.

Scholars have raised concerns about emotion AI’s scientific validity and its reliance on contested theories about emotion.

They have also highlighted emotion AI’s potential for invading privacy and exhibiting racial, gender and disability bias.

Some employers use the technology as though it were flawless, while some scholars seek to reduce its bias and improve its validity, discredit it altogether or suggest banning emotion AI, at least until more is known about its implications.

I study the social implications of technology. I believe that it is crucial to examine emotion AI’s implications for people subjected to it, such as workers — especially those marginalized by their race, gender or disability status.

Workers’ concerns

To understand where emotion AI used in the workplace is going, my colleague Karen Boyd and I set out to examine inventors’ conceptions of emotion AI in the workplace.

We analyzed patent applications that proposed emotion AI technologies for the workplace.

Purported benefits claimed by patent applicants included assessing and supporting employee well-being, ensuring workplace safety, increasing productivity and aiding in decision-making, such as making promotions, firing employees and assigning tasks.

We wondered what workers think about these technologies. Would they also perceive these benefits? For example, would workers find it beneficial for employers to provide well-being support to them?

My collaborators Shanley Corvite, Kat Roemmich, Tillie Ilana Rosenberg and I conducted a survey partly representative of the U.S. population and partly oversampled for people of color, trans and nonbinary people and people living with mental illness.

These groups may be more likely to experience harm from emotion AI. Our study had 289 participants from the representative sample and 106 participants from the oversample.

We found that 32% of respondents reported experiencing or expecting no benefit to them from emotion AI use, whether current or anticipated, in their workplace.

While some workers noted potential benefits of emotion AI use in the workplace like increased well-being support and workplace safety, mirroring benefits claimed in patent applications, all also expressed concerns.

They were concerned about harm to their well-being and privacy, harm to their work performance and employment status, and bias and mental health stigma against them.

For example, 51% of participants expressed privacy concerns, 36% noted the potential for incorrect inferences employers would accept at face value and 33% expressed concern that emotion AI-generated inferences could be used to make unjust employment decisions.

Participants’ voices

One participant who had multiple health conditions said: “The awareness that I am being analyzed would ironically have a negative effect on my mental health.”

This means that despite emotion AI’s claimed goals to infer and improve workers’ well-being in the workplace, its use can lead to the opposite effect: well-being diminished due to a loss of privacy.

Indeed, other work by my colleagues Roemmich, Florian Schaub and I suggests that emotion AI-induced privacy loss can span a range of privacy harms, including psychological, autonomy, economic, relationship, physical and discrimination.

On concerns that emotional surveillance could jeopardize their job, a participant with a diagnosed mental health condition said:

“They could decide that I am no longer a good fit at work and fire me. Decide I’m not capable enough and not give a raise, or think I’m not working enough.”

Participants in the study also mentioned the potential for exacerbated power imbalances and said they were afraid of the dynamic they would have with employers if emotion AI were integrated into their workplace, pointing to how emotion AI use could potentially intensify already existing tensions in the employer-worker relationship.

For instance, a respondent said:

“The amount of control that employers already have over employees suggests there would be few checks on how this information would be used. Any ‘consent’ [by] employees is largely illusory in this context.”

Lastly, participants noted potential harms, such as emotion AI’s technical inaccuracies potentially creating false impressions about workers and emotion AI creating and perpetuating bias and stigma against workers.

In describing these concerns, participants highlighted their fear of employers relying on inaccurate and biased emotion AI systems, particularly against people of color, women and trans individuals.

For example, one participant said:

“Who is deciding what expressions ‘look violent,’ and how can one determine people as a threat just from the look on their face? A system can read faces, sure, but not minds. I just cannot see how this could actually be anything but destructive to minorities in the workplace.”

Participants noted that they would either refuse to work at a place that uses emotion AI — an option not available to many — or engage in behaviors to make emotion AI read them favorably to protect their privacy.

One participant said: “I would exert a massive amount of energy masking even when alone in my office, which would make me very distracted and unproductive,” pointing to how emotion AI use would impose additional emotional labor on workers.

Worth the harm?

These findings indicate that emotion AI exacerbates existing challenges experienced by workers in the workplace, despite proponents claiming emotion AI helps solve these problems.

If emotion AI does work as claimed and measures what it claims to measure, and even if bias issues are addressed in the future, there are still harms experienced by workers, such as the additional emotional labor and loss of privacy.

If these technologies do not measure what they claim or are biased, then people are at the mercy of algorithms deemed to be valid and reliable when they are not.

Workers would still need to expend the effort to try to reduce the chances of being misread by the algorithm or to engage in emotional displays that would read favorably to the algorithm.

Either way, these systems function as panopticon-like technologies, creating privacy harms and feelings of being watched.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/employers-artificial-intelligence-track-employees-emotions/

Feds Colluded With Big Banks to Spy on Americans’ Financial Transactions

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By Brenda Baletti

The federal government conducted “broad” surveillance of the private financial transactions of millions of Americans “without legal process” in the wake of events that took place on Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol, according to a report issued Wednesday by the U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

The report details how government officials asked major banks to search financial transactions for key terms, like “Trump” and “MAGA.” It also suggested they identify transactions related to firearms or sporting goods stores, such as Cabela’s, Bass Pro Shop and Dick’s Sporting Goods.

“Americans doing nothing other than shopping or exercising their Second Amendment rights were being tracked by financial institutions and federal law enforcement,” according to the report.

The “financial surveillance was not predicated on any specific evidence of particularized criminal conduct and, even worse, it keyed on terms and specific transactions that concerned core political and religious expression protected by the Constitution,” the report said.

Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom,” said the searches violated fundamental constitutional rights.

Rectenwald told The Defender:

“The willing cooperation of these financial institutions, without due legal process, demonstrates that these otherwise non-state actors are acting as what I have called ‘governmentalities,’ or apparatuses of the state. They are not merely private companies, per se. They are state assets colluding with the government in a system that can best be described as fascism.”

According to the report, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and the FBI held backchannel discussions with some of the largest financial institutions in the U.S. They asked them to voluntarily share people’s private financial information, without a subpoena.

The institutions included Barclays, U.S. Bank, Charles Schwab, HSBC, Bank of America, PayPal, Wells Fargo, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and others.

The report also detailed how law enforcement and approximately 650 high-grossing companies and financial institutions shared non-public intelligence documents through a web portal run by a public-private partnership called the Domestic Security Alliance Council.

The FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ran the portal, which was accessible only to members of the private-public partnership.

Through this portal, the government shared reports with financial institutions about people who allegedly fit the profile of “domestic violent extremists” and who may be “emboldened” in the wake of Jan. 6 — focusing on people holding certain viewpoints.

One report shared in the portal noted that “those Americans who expressed opposition to firearm regulations, open borders, COVID-19 lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and the ‘deep state’ may be potential domestic terrorists.”

“These illegal searches suggest that the criminal justice agencies have been turned into weapons for the persecution of political opposition,” Rectenwald said.

Labeling dissenters as domestic violent extremists is “the most egregious example of government overreach” highlighted in the report, said Tim Hinchliffe, editor of The Sociable.

“It basically means that if you question anything the government says or does, you may be marked as a potential domestic terrorist, which opens the door for the government to pry even deeper into your life and violate your freedoms,” he added.

Hinchliffe told The Defender:

“Today, they’re going after Americans who oppose open borders, lockdowns, vaccine mandates, etc., but who will they go after tomorrow? Will they go after people who express opposition to U.S. funding in Ukraine? What about opposition to sending troops on the ground? Who will become the next domestic terrorist based on which side they support in the Middle East?”

W. Scott McCollough, former Texas assistant attorney general, told The Defender it was important to realize this is not a partisan issue.

“The story is that we — the people — are in an abusive relationship with our government because the government thinks that everybody is a threat or can be a threat at some point. Everybody,” he said.

“A particular subset of people who are thought to be right-wing, conservative or whatever have been deemed to be the enemy today,” he said. “But that could change tomorrow,” and the same thing could happen to “people who thought they were immune.”

Year-long investigation continues with hearing today

In February 2023, retired FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst George Hill testified that following the events at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Bank of America voluntarily shared a list of the names of all people who used Bank of America credit or debit cards in the Washington, D.C., area between Jan. 5 and Jan. 7, 2021, with the FBI.

The list also included anyone who had ever used one of Bank of America’s cards to purchase a firearm.

Two other FBI agents, former Special Agent-in-Charge of the Boston Field Office Joseph Bonavolonta and Steven Jensen, the then-section chief of the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Operations Section, corroborated Hill’s testimony, according to the report.

The committee requested documents from other national financial institutions about similar practices. In the process, they discovered that FinCEN and the FBI had discussions with multiple financial institutions, not only Bank of America.

As part of the investigation, Ohio congressman and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan in January sent a letter to Noah Bishoff, the former FinCEN director.

The letter made public the congressional findings that FinCEN had distributed materials — obtained by the committee — to financial institutions outlining the “typologies” of various persons of interest and providing financial institutions with suggested search terms and “Merchant Category Codes” for identifying transactions on behalf of federal law enforcement.

In addition to the document that recommended using search terms like “Trump” and “MAGA” to search Zelle payment messages, Jordan wrote, the FinCEN also warned institutions of “‘extremism’ indicators,” such as transportation charges “for travel to areas with no apparent purchase” or “subscriptions to other media containing extremist views.”

The interim staff report issued Wednesday described the findings of the ongoing investigation.

According to the report, the emergence of digital banking has resulted in “an unprecedented amount of private data entrusted to financial institutions, potentially revealing all sorts of sensitive information about a customer.”

That data is an important resource for law enforcement, the report stated, However, the availability of such information “must be weighed against the privacy interests of Americans.”

In this case, the report said, the investigation predicated on the events of Jan. 6, 2021, “devolved into a fishing expedition for Americans’ financial data.”

McCollough said the legal questions about government access to financial data had to be placed into historical context.

Following a 1976 Supreme Court decision, United States v. Miller, which held that customers of financial institutions have no reasonable expectation of privacy, Congress enacted the Right to Financial Privacy Act in 1978, which provided strong privacy protection.

That protection included a requirement to notify people whose bank records were being sought and allow them to contest the search.

However, McCollough said, the Patriot Act undid a lot of those protections.

“What it has left is an expansive, backdoor information-sharing regime led by the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agencies and their partners in the financial sector,” the report said.

Today’s hearing examined how the federal government and major financial institutions conduct surveillance of Americans’ private financial data.

Evidence that even if behaviors aren’t illegal, they can still be punished

Journalist and lead investigator of the “Twitter Files” Matt Taibbi wrote on his Substack in February, when news of Jordan’s letter broke, “If banks and the Treasury are playing the same domestic spy game that Twitter and Facebook have been playing with the FBI, tales like the frozen finances of protesting Canadian truckers won’t be novelties for long.”

Taibbi added:

“As is the case with speech, where huge populations have learned to internalize censorship rules almost overnight, we may soon have to learn the hard way that even though some behaviors aren’t illegal, they can still be punished with great effectiveness, in a Terminator-like world where computers won’t miss anything that moves.”

McCollough said the broader problem is the gathering and retention and availability of this information. “People need to understand that all of their data has already been seized. We are now just talking about on what terms does it get searched.”

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/big-bank-feds-track-americans-financial-transactions-cbdc/

Rand Paul’s Bill Would Require NIH Scientists To Disclose Royalties They Receive From Drug Companies

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Sen. Rand Paul | Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA/Newscom

Reason

Over the past decade, scientists working at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have earned an estimated $400 million in royalties from third-party companies for medical treatments and innovations they’ve helped produce. The NIH often provides grants to these same companies and produces research on their products. Despite that, the agency has resisted disclosing how much its scientists are getting paid and by whom.

A bill moving its way through Congress would change that.

On Wednesday, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee passed the Royalty Transparency Act of 2024 by a 12–0 vote.

The legislation would require that royalties received by federal government employees be included in their financial disclosures and that those disclosures be made available online for the general public to view.

“This is just basic 101 of conflict of interest. We’re letting the billions of dollars that change hands over at NIH and between NIH and Big Pharma to be completely unscrutinized,” says Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), the author of the legislation. “This is probably the first reform bill that actually has a chance to correct some of the things that are rotten in the system.”

The NIH’s lack of transparency about the royalties paid to its scientists has been a source of controversy for decades.

[…]

Via https://reason.com/2024/03/07/rand-pauls-bill-would-require-nih-scientists-to-disclose-royalties-they-receive-from-drug-companies/

New Law Would Make COVID Vaccine Makers Liable for Injuries, Deaths

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covid vaccines with justice scales and word "liable"

By  Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D.

Children’s Health Defense is among the organizations that support a bill introduced Tuesday by Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) that would remove the liability shield for manufacturers of COVID-19 vaccines and open the door for vaccine-injured Americans to sue companies like Pfizer and Moderna.

The Let Injured Americans Be Legally Empowered Act, or the LIABLE Act, would “allow Americans who took vaccines that were misleadingly promoted and forced onto many Americans via federal mandates to pursue civil litigation for their injuries,” according to a summary of the bill publicized by Fox News.

“These vaccines were given emergency use authorization unilaterally and did not go through the normal FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] approval process,” the summary stated.

Commenting on the proposed legislation, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) President Mary Holland said:

“The damages and fatalities caused by the COVID-19 vaccine demand accountability. This legislation represents a critical milestone in rectifying these injustices and paving the way for a more accountable future. This legislation is crucial for holding vaccine manufacturers accountable.”

CHD is among the organizations supporting the legislation.

According to Roy’s office, “COVID-19 vaccines are considered ‘countermeasures’ under the Public Readiness and Preparedness (PREP) Act, which broadly shields their manufacturers from civil liability related to losses stemming from the vaccines.”

“Instead, injured Americans must seek relief under the onerous Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) — but only 11 COVID-19-related claims have been paid out of CICP.”

Holland said the CICP is “wholly inadequate and inconsistent with constitutional principles in providing just redress.”

The proposed legislation would remove all federal liability protections for the COVID-19 vaccine, preserve the ability of injured Americans to access pre-existing compensation programs, such as the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), and would be retroactive, allowing Americans vaccinated and injured before the bill’s passage to sue.

In a statement, Roy said, “The long train of abuses committed by the government and public health establishment in response to COVID-19 will continue to impact the American people for years to come.”

As a result, Roy said he is “introducing the LIABLE Act to empower Americans to remove crony federal liability protections for COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers and empower injured Americans. The American people deserve justice for the infringement on their personal medical freedom and those medically harmed deserve restitution.”

React19, a nonprofit organization that advocates on behalf of vaccine injury victims, also welcomed the proposed legislation. Dr. Joel Wallskog, a Wisconsin orthopedic surgeon who no longer practices due to injuries he sustained from the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, is co-chair of the organization. He told The Defender:

“React19 supports the LIABLE Act. The COVID-19 public health emergency ended in 2023. Despite this, pharmaceutical companies, the government, and health care organizations are still protected from all liability through the PREP Act until at least Dec. 31, 2024.

“This blanket immunity provided by the PREP Act robs the American public injured by the COVID-19 shots of their right to due process and jury trial. We are relegated to CICP, which is an obvious failure.”

‘Hindsight will show this was absolutely necessary’

According to Fox News, the PREP Act “limits liability for the manufacturing, development and distribution of medical countermeasures related to a public health emergency.” COVID-19 vaccines were distributed in the U.S. on this basis.

In turn, the PREP Act created CICP, “which has a one-year statute of limitations and only provides compensation in the event of death or serious injury,” Fox News reported. As a result, COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers “are mostly immune from civil lawsuits, even if those seeking money damages have medical proof of their vaccine-related injuries.”

“Millions of Americans were forced to take a COVID-19 shot out of fear of losing their livelihoods and under false pretenses,” Roy told Fox News on Tuesday, contrasting the 11 claims compensated by CICP with the 700 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines which have been administered in the U.S.

Wallskog said CICP “has a 98% denial rate” and, as of Jan. 1, has issued a total “of about $41,000” for the 11 claims it has compensated — an average of approximately $3,700 per claim.

Ray Flores, senior outside counsel for CHD, is an expert on the PREP Act and CICP. He told The Defender he “would be thrilled” to see PREP Act manufacturer protection removed. “Someday, hindsight will show this was absolutely necessary,” Flores said.

Flores noted that U.S. government guarantees made to vaccine manufacturers early during the pandemic prohibited the government from “using or authorizing COVID-19 vaccine” unless they were “protected from liability under a declaration issued under the PREP Act, or a successor COVID-19 PREP Act declaration of equal or greater scope.”

“If this bill proceeds, this will be the battleground,” Flores said.

Lawsuits will help determine if COVID vaccines were as ‘safe and effective’ as claimed

Big Pharma did not welcome the proposed legislation. In a statement shared with Fox News, Andrew Powaleny, senior director of public affairs for PhRMA [Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America], an industry trade group, said:

“COVID-19 has been a reminder of why we need safe and effective vaccines. All vaccines, including those for COVID-19, are subject to a rigorous safety and efficacy review process and post-market monitoring.

“By upending the existing liability framework manufacturers rely upon to provide predictable vaccine development, our ability to address future public health threats will be at risk.”

But other experts disagreed. Writing Tuesday in The Blaze, commentator and author Daniel Horowitz asked, “Should a product that is completely funded, marketed, monopolized, and then mandated by government be less liable than Toyota is for its airbags?”

Horowitz added, “Ideally, the NCVIA [the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986] and the PREP Act should be repealed entirely.”

Still, he welcomed Roy’s proposed legislation. “Giving consumers their day in court will be the perfect way to sort out whether Pfizer’s and Moderna’s products are as safe and effective as they claim,” he wrote.

“It’s highly likely that tens of millions of people are currently without recourse for compensation from a product that was fraudulently foisted upon the American people by these companies in collusion with the federal government,” Horowitz said. “Knowing that, Roy’s bill comes as welcome relief.”

According to Fox News, “Roy has led the charge against those vaccine mandates, including leading efforts to roll back COVID-19 vaccine mandates in the U.S. military.”

Co-sponsors of the bill include Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Josh Brecheen (R-Okla.), Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), Michael Cloud (R-Texas), Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), Bob Good (R-Va.), Clay Higgins (R-La.), Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Mary Miller (R-Ill.), Barry Moore (R-Utah), Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), Randy Weber (R-Texas), Troy Nehls (R-Texas), Andy Harris (R-Md.), Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), Eli Crane (R-Ariz.), Russ Fulcher (R-Idaho), Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.) and Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.).

“Americans injured by the COVID-19 shots deserve better,” Wallskog said. “They did what they thought was the right thing for themselves, their families and the nation. Now, they are left abandoned. This legislation gives them a chance at fair and just compensation.”

“The time has come for our nation to recognize these injuries and allow them legal recourse,” he added.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/chip-roy-liable-act-covid-vaccine-manufacturers/