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.
Kids may unknowingly be consuming an animal contraceptive when they eat a chicken sandwich at Chick-fil-A, according to a Moms Across America’s (MAA) report on veterinary drugs and hormones found in food served in the most popular U.S. fast food restaurants.
The nonprofit MAA this month released results from food samples tested for veterinary drugs, including antibiotics and hormones. Health Research Institute, a Fairfield, Iowa, nonprofit independent lab, conducted the testing.
The results showed that a Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich contained nicarbazin, an antiparasitic that also functions as a bird contraceptive.
Sixty percent of samples from the U.S.’ top 10 fast food chains also contained the antibiotic monensin, which can cause severe harm in humans and remains unapproved for human use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Zen Honeycutt, MAA’s founder and executive director, called the results “shocking” and “disturbing,” especially because some fast food chains supply school lunches.
Honeycutt and other healthy food advocates on Oct. 17 will present the test results to U.S. lawmakers during a congressional briefing on U.S. food toxicity.
“Thirty million school meals are served to our children each day,” Honeycutt told The Defender, “and for millions of underprivileged children, these toxic meals are their only access to nutrition.” She added:
“The impact of millions of Americans, especially children and young adults, consuming a known animal contraceptive daily is concerning.
“With infertility problems on the rise, the reproductive health of this generation is front and center for us, in light of these results.”
Commenting on MAA’s fast food testing initiative, attorney Michael Baum, a senior partner at Wisner Baum said:
“Toxins like the ones Moms Across America’s testing found in major fast foods don’t belong in anybody’s food, especially children’s food.
“Repeated exposure to them can build up and cause unexpected harms — kudos to Moms Across America for getting this testing done and published.”
Under Baum’s leadership, the law firm has won billions of dollars in consumer fraud and product liability cases against major pharmaceutical and life sciences companies, including Bayer Corp. (formerly Monsanto), Eli Lilly, Forest Labs, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer and more.
Baum added, “These fast food companies should now take steps to eliminate the toxins from what they offer kids and adults to eat.”
Infectious disease specialist: antibiotics in fast food samples ‘concerning’
Health Research Institute tested samples from Taco Bell, Chipotle, Dunkin’, Wendy’s, Domino’s, Burger King, Subway, Starbucks, Chick-fil-A and McDonald’s.
Only products from Chipotle and Subway had no detectable levels of veterinary drugs and hormones.
Testing found monensin, an antibiotic used to increase milk production in dairy cows, in: McDonald’s Big Mac, Burger King’s Quarter Pounder, Domino’s extra pepperoni pizza, Wendy’s Cheeseburger, Dunkin’s sausage, egg and cheese Breakfast Sandwich and Taco Bell’s Beef Taco Supreme.
The Dunkin’ sandwich, the Domino’s pizza and Starbucks’ Double-Smoked Bacon, Cheddar & Egg Sandwich had traces of narasin, an antibiotic used in livestock and poultry. Wendy’s Cheeseburger also contained a substantial amount of narasin.
Monensin and narasin are antibiotic ionophores that work by increasing the ion permeability of cell membranes. They are primarily used to prevent coccidiosis, an intestinal parasitic infection.
Dr. Dimitri Drekonja, an infectious diseases specialist and associate professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota, found it “concerning” that multiple fast food products contained ionophores. He told The Defender:
“People should worry about any unnecessary antibiotic use, whether in humans or animals, in that all use selects for more resistant organisms, some of which ultimately end up causing human infections.”
“While I would prefer it be zero,” Drekonja said he was “encouraged” to see that only three of the 104 drugs tested for were present in the samples.
Nicarbazin — the drug found in Chick-fil-A’s chicken sandwich — is also used for treating coccidiosis in meat birds, and for preventing reproduction in geese and pigeons.
A 2005 report on food safety control in the poultry industry noted the drug had “been on the market for decades” but recently was “prohibited due to incomplete toxicological data.”
However, as of June 7, the FDA allows nicarbazin for use in poultry to prevent coccidiosis and “for increased rate of weight gain and improved feed efficiency.”
Chick-fil-A did not immediately respond to The Defender’s request for comment on its use of nicarbazin in its chickens.
As small and mid-sized farms close their doors, governments and corporate entities can scoop up the land — is it all part of Agenda 2030 and the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals?
Story at a glance:
A war against farmers has emerged, threatening to push them off the land they’ve farmed for generations.
As small and mid-sized farms close their doors, governments and corporate entities can scoop up the land.
Those in control of the land control the food supply and, along with it, the people
Much of this threat is cloaked under Agenda 2030, which includes 17 sustainable development goals with 169 specific targets to be imposed across the globe, in every country, by 2030.
The push to eat insects is part of this plan; in 2021, the European Commission authorized mealworms as food, releasing a news release touting “the growing role that insects will play as part of a healthier, more sustainable diet.”
Are green policies around the world, targeting everything from too much nitrogen to the protection of endangered species, all part of a plan to get small farmers off the land, paving the way for totalitarian control of the food supply — and insects as part of your daily diet?
These and other tough questions are posed by Roman Balmakov, Epoch Times reporter and host of Facts Matter, in “No Farmers No Food: Will You Eat the Bugs?”
“The people in charge of some of the most powerful organizations on the planet have determined that agriculture, specifically animal agriculture is to blame for global warming, and global warming is to blame for the high prices of food as well as food shortages.
“And so by switching our diets from beef, chicken and pork, to crickets and mealworms, we’ll be able to stop temperatures from rising, lower the price of food and possibly to even save the planet.”
But in interviews with farmers around the world, including in Holland and Sri Lanka, a very different story is told, one that began with a decades-old environmental policy.
In 1972, a United Nations (U.N.) meeting about climate change was held to come up with a plan to manage the planet in a sustainable manner.
This led to the creation of Agenda 21 (Agenda for the 21st Century) — the inventory and control plan for all land, water, minerals, plants, animals, construction, means of production, food, energy, information, education and all human beings in the world.
Agenda 21 is now more commonly referred to as Agenda 2030, the year the plan’s goals are slated to be met.
In 2019, the World Economic Forum (WEF) entered into a strategic alliance with the U.N., which called for the U.N. to “use public-private partnerships as the model for nearly all policies that it implements, most specifically the implementation of the 17 sustainable development goals.”
Agenda 2030 is composed of these 17 sustainable development goals with 169 specific targets, including ending poverty and achieving gender equality, to be imposed across the globe, in every country, by 2030.
“Very comprehensive document if you read it,” says international journalist Alex Newman. “We’re talking hundreds of pages governing really every facet of life, everything from education to land use policy to economics to law. Every area of life was found there.”
“There is absolutely no way for the sustainable development goals to be implemented, to be tracked, to be monitored, without the total obliteration of individual freedom. Some of the goals sound nice — ending hunger, who could possibly be against ending hunger?
“The problem is, when you set a nebulous goal like that, it requires total power from the state to be able to accomplish that.
“And of course, they will never accomplish that, right? There is no way to literally eradicate all poverty from the face of the Earth, but it gives government and global institutions, like the U.N., an easy excuse to basically do whatever they want under the guise of meeting these goals.”
Is the nitrogen crisis real?
Dutch farmers are in crisis as their government has stepped up plans to move them off the land. You can hear about this in-depth via Dutch investigative journalist Elze van Hamelen’s report and podcast for The Solari Report — Dutch Farmers and Fishermen: The People Who Feed Us.
“In 2021, the European Union’s Natura 2000 network released a map of areas in the Netherlands that are now protected against nitrogen emissions. Any Dutch farmer who operates their farm within 5 kilometers of a Natura 2000 protected area would now need to severely curtail their nitrogen output, which in turn would limit their production,” Balmakov explains.
Dutch dairy farmer Nynke Koopmans with the Forum for Democracy believes the nitrogen problem is made up. “It’s one big lie,” she says. “The nitrogen has nothing to do with environmental. It’s just getting rid of farmers.”
Another farmer said if new nitrogen rules go into effect, he’d have to reduce his herd of 58 milking cows down to six.
Nitrogen scientist Jaap C. Hanekamp was working for a government committee to study nitrogen, tasked with analyzing the government’s nitrogen model.
He told Balmakov:
“The whole policy is based on the deposition model about how to deal with nitrogen emissions on nature areas. And I looked at the validation studies and show that the model is actually crap. It doesn’t work.
“And doesn’t matter. They still continue using it, which is, in a sense, unsettling. I mean, really, can we do such a thing in terms of policy? Use a model which doesn’t work? It’s never about innovation, it’s always about getting rid of farmers.”
The ultimate agenda: no land ownership for the people
As farmers shut down, the government can swoop in and take the land, which may be what the agenda is really about.
According to Eva Vlaardingerbroek, former member of Forum for Democracy and a political commentator:
“I’ve always said that the nitrogen crisis is, first of all, a made-up crisis. It’s manufactured, and the only solution that has ever been proposed is forced expropriation. So, it is the government that will take hold of their land … We have a housing crisis in the Netherlands, as you know, this is a very tiny country.
“We have a lot of people, and we have a growing population because of immigration. And we need places to house those immigrants.
“And I think that that’s partly why the government wants that land. They need houses, and they need to build houses, which is funny, because apparently building houses is also what emits nitrogen.
“But that’s not the people they’re coming after. They’re coming, specifically, after the farmers because they want the land. So that is the ultimate goal.”
But it’s not only farmers in the Netherlands who are being affected. In 2020, California became the first U.S. state to commit to a 30 by 30 goal, pledging to put 30% of its land and water under government control by 2030.
But as Margaret Byfield, executive director of American Stewards of Liberty, says, this paves the way for private land ownership to disappear:
“The concept in America is self-rule. We the People will rule our government and our Founding Fathers understood that the small landholder is the most important part of the state.
“The idea was that the land would be distributed among the people so they could always control their government. California has developed a 30 by 30 plan. They’re pushing 30 by 30 in the state …
“The ultimate agenda is that there is no ownership of land so that we don’t own anything. We either own property, or we are property. That’s really what we’re fighting from the global governance perspective.
“They have to eliminate our ability to control our government, which means they have to take our land.”
Other seemingly sustainable government regulations may also be wrapped up in this plan. Rep. Doug LaMalfa, farmer and California representative, explains:
“A lot of this came about in the early ‘70s Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, which were good things, you know, the Endangered Species Act, but it’s been abused from what the original intent was.
“Congress did not intend for it to be abused the way it is and manipulated. The way it is these days, when they wrote those bills, they would have never passed them.”
The globalists have it all planned out
Much of the new world order’s plans are based on crisis management and the idea that a great crisis will occur that will lead to the great transition, where globalists will swoop in to save the day, transforming society into the promised paradise. “At some point down the line, the narrative changed to be around climate,” Balmakov says.
Prior to this, it was the Cold War, but this changed after a 1991 Club of Rome meeting. Both the Rockefellers and early WEF affiliations can be tied back to the Club of Rome, a think tank that aligned with neo-Malthusianism — the idea that an overly large population would decimate resources — and intended to implement a global depopulation agenda.
[…]
Bring on the bugs
Globalists suggest eating bugs will protect the planet by eliminating the need for livestock, cutting down on agricultural land use and protecting the environment.
The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization also encourages the consumption of insects and insect-based foods.
In July 2021, WEF also published an article, categorized under “food security,” in which they promote the use of insects, writing we “need to give insects the role they deserve in our food systems.”
They justify this proposal by saying it will address an impending food crisis.
In 2021, the European Commission authorized mealworms as food, releasing a news release touting “the growing role that insects will play as part of a healthier, more sustainable diet, as well as the benefits for the environment for years to come.”
On 13 October Fuellmich, who lives in Mexico with his wife, was arrested at the German consulate when he went to pick up a new passport and extradited to Frankfurt. He’s currently in prison. Fuellmich is the courageous lawyer who founded the original Corona investigative committee to examine the crimes that were committed against humanity by the plandemic and forced injections. He has done countless interviews with experts in the medical, scientific and legal field and is leading the way to hold the perpetrators to account. His efforts, and his optimism has saved countless lives of people who were on the verge of suicide. His former partner, the attorney Viviane Fischer, has made public accusations against him that are outrageous. It forced him to detach himself from the original corona investigative committee and go his own way. He founded icic.law, the International Crimes Investigative Committee and has continued shedding light on the crimes committed.
According to his lawyer Dagmar Schoen, they hope to get him out of pre-trial detention as soon as possible and asked supporters to mail letters by the thousands to him in jail. She hopes that this will so overwhelm their mail system, that they will pressure the district attorney and the court to release him until the trial.
To support Fuellmich, please mail him a letter of support to the following address. Postcards, drawings and envelopes with glitter will be rejected by the mail system. So please only send letters in plain envelopes.
JVA Rosdorf
Dr. Reiner Fuellmich
Am Grossen Sieke 8
37124 Rosdorf
Germany
Obviously he will not be able to answer all these letters. They serve to get him out as soon as possible, particularly out of possible harms way, and to boost his morale.
China’s Special Envoy on Middle East Zhai Jun met the envoys of Arab states in Beijing at the latter’s request for a group meeting to discuss the grave situation in Gaza, Beijing, October 13, 2023
One hundred years after the Arab Revolt (1916-1918) against the ruling Ottoman Turks amidst the impending defeat of Germany and the Triple Alliance in World War I, another armed uprising by the Arabs has erupted — this time around, against Israeli occupation, in the backdrop of the looming defeat of the United States and the NATO in Ukraine War — presenting a thrilling spectacle of history repeating unabridged.
The Ottoman Empire disintegrated as a result of the Arab Revolt. Israel too will have to vacate its occupied territories and make space for a state of Palestine, which of course, will be a crushing defeat for the US and marks the end of its global dominance, reminiscent of the Battle of Cambrai in Northern France (1918) where Germans — surrounded, exhausted and with disintegrating morale amidst a deteriorating domestic situation — faced the certainty that the war had been lost, and surrendered.
The torrential flow of events through the past week is breathtaking, starting with a phone call made by Iran’s President Sayyid Ebrahim Raisi to the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Wednesday to discuss a common strategy toward the situation following the devastating attack by the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, against Israel on October 7.
Earlier on Tuesday, in a powerful statement, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had emphasised that “From the military and intelligence aspects, this defeat (by Hamas) is irreparable. It is a devastating earthquake. It is unlikely that the (Israeli) usurping regime will be able to use the help of the West to repair the deep impacts that this incident has left on its ruling structures.” (See my blog Iran warns Israel against its apocalyptic war.)
A senior Iranian official told Reuters that Raisi’s call to the Crown Prince aimed to “support Palestine and prevent the spread of war in the region. The call was good and promising.” Having forged a broad understanding with Saudi Arabia, Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian held discussion with his Emirati counterpart, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, during which he called upon Islamic and Arab countries to extend their support to the Palestinian people, emphasising the urgency of the situation.
On Thursday, Amir-Abdollahian embarked on a regional tour to Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Qatar through Saturday to coordinate with the various resistance groups. Notably, he met Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Doha. Amir-Abdollahian told the media that unless Israel stopped its barbaric air strikes on Gaza, an escalation by the Resistance is inevitable and Israel could suffer a “huge earthquake,” as Hezbollah is in a state of readiness to intervene.
Axios reported on Saturday citing two diplomatic sources that Tehran has delivered a strong message to Tel Aviv via the UN that it will have to intervene if the Israeli aggression on Gaza persists. Simply put, Tehran will not be deterred by the deployment of 2 US aircraft carriers and several warships and fighter jets off the shores of Israel. On Sunday, White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan acknowledged that the US couldn’t rule out that Iran might intervene in the conflict.
In the meantime, while Iran was coordinating with the resistance groups on the military front, China and Saudi Arabia shifted gear on the diplomatic track. On Thursday, even as the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was heading for Arab capitals after talks in Tel Aviv, seeking help to get the hostages released by Hamas, China’s Special Envoy on the Middle East Zhai Jun contacted the Deputy Minister for Political Affairs of the Saudi foreign ministry Arabia Saud M. Al-Sati on the Palestine-Israel situation with focus on the Palestine issue and the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza, in particular. The contrast couldn’t be sharper.
On the same day, an extraordinary event took place in the Chinese foreign ministry when the Arab envoys in Beijing sought a group meeting with Special Envoy Zhai to underscore their collective stance that a “very severe” humanitarian crisis has emerged following Israel’s attack on Gaza and “the international community has the responsibility to take immediate actions to ease the tension, promote the resumption of talks for peace, and safeguard the Palestinian people’s lawful national rights.”
The Arab ambassadors thanked China “for upholding a just position on the Palestinian question … and expressed the hope that China will continue to play a positive and constructive role.” Zhai voiced full understanding that the “top priority is to keep calm and exercise restraint, protect civilians, and provide necessary conditions for relieving the humanitarian crisis.”
After this extraordinary meeting, the Chinese Foreign Ministry posted on its website at midnight a full-bodied statement by Member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and Foreign Minister Wang Yi titled China Stands on the Side of Peace and Human Conscience on the Question of Palestine. This reportedly prompted a call by the Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan to Wang Yi.
Interestingly, Blinken too called Wang Yi from Riyadh on October 14, where, according to the state department readout, he “reiterated U.S. support for Israel’s right to defend itself and called for an immediate cessation of Hamas’ attacks and the release of all hostages” and stressed the importance of “discouraging other parties (read Iran and Hezbollah) from entering the conflict.”
Succinctly put, in all these exchanges involving Saudi Arabia — especially, in Blinken’s meetings in Riyadh with Saudi FM and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, while the US focused on the hostage issue, the Saudi side instead turned the attention to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The state department readouts (here and here) bring out the two sides’ divergent priorities.
Suffice to say, a coordinated Saudi-Iranian strategy backed by China is putting pressure on Israel to agree to a ceasefire and to de-escalate. The UN’s backing isolates Israel further.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s exit is to be expected but he won’t throw in the towel without a fight. US-Israel ties may come under strain. President Biden is caught in a bind, harking back to Jimmy Carter’s predicament over the Iran hostage crisis in 1980, which ended his bid for a second term as president.Biden is already backtracking.
Where do things go from here? Clearly, the longer the Israeli assault on Gaza continues, the international condemnation and demand to allow a humanitarian corridor will only intensify. Not only will countries like India which expressed “solidarity” with Israel lose face in the Global South, even Washington’s European allies will be hard-pressed. It remains to be seen whether an invasion of Gaza by Israel is anymore realistic at all.
Going forward, the Arab-Iran-China axis will raise the plight of Gaza in the UN Security Council unless Israel retracted. Russia has proposed a draft resolution and is insisting on a voting. If the US vetoes the resolution, the UN GA may step in to adopt it.
Meanwhile, the US project to resuscitate the Abraham Accords loses traction and the plot to undermine the China-brokered Saudi-Iranian rapprochement faces sudden death.
As regards the power dynamic in West Asia, these trends can only work to the advantage of Russia and China, especially if the BRICS were to take a lead role at some point to navigate a Middle East peace process that is no longer the monopoly of the US. This is payback time for Russia.
The era of petrodollar is ending — and along with that, the US’ global hegemony. The emergent trends, therefore, go a long way to strengthen multipolarity in the world order.
CIA operative Donald Rickard admitted to role in capture of African hero
On August 5, 1962, Nelson Mandela was apprehended by South African authorities while driving with Cecil Williams, a white Communist theater director, from Durban to Johannesburg.
At the time, Mandela, a leader of the military wing of the anti-Apartheid African National Congress (ANC), was a fugitive from South Africa’s Apartheid regime.
After his arrest, Mandela was tried for treason and served 27 years at the infamous Robben Island prison, before being freed and becoming South Africa’s first Black president after the fall of the Apartheid regime in 1994.
Details have since emerged indicating that the South African police who arrested Mandela had been tipped off about his whereabouts by the CIA.
August 1962 was during the height of the Cold War—Mandela’s capture occurred only a few weeks before the Cuban Missile Crisis—and the American intelligence community believed that Mandela and the ANC were secret allies of the Soviets—which indeed they were.
The U.S. government was also intent on keeping South Africa open to U.S. corporations—the U.S. signed a military cooperation agreement with South Africa, an important source of uranium and other strategic minerals—and did not like the left-wing character of the ANC and the prospect of it destabilizing the country.
This past February, Richard Stengel wrote in Time magazine about his quest to uncover the truth about Mandela’s arrest.
Stengel noted that, in 1986, while Mandela was still in prison, when the U.S. Congress was contemplating putting anti-Apartheid sanctions on South Africa, the Johannesburg Star printed an un-bylined news story that said, according to a “retired senior police officer,” the South African police had been tipped off to Mandela’s whereabouts by an American diplomat at the U.S. consulate in Durban who was “the CIA operative for that region.”
In 1963, the diplomat, according to the Star, had revealed his role while drunk at a party at the Durban apartment of “Mad” Mike Hoare, a well-known Anglo-Irish mercenary.
Four years after the Star article, at the time of Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 when he was about to visit the U.S. and get a hero’s welcome, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a piece reporting that a “retired [American] intelligence official” said that, within hours of Mandela’s arrest, a “senior CIA operative” named Paul Eckel walked into his office in Washington and said, “We have turned Mandela over to the South African security branch. We gave them every detail, what he would be wearing, the time of day, just where he would be. They have picked him up. It is one of our greatest coups.”
The article further quoted a former South African intelligence official named Gerard Ludi as saying the CIA had a paid informant in the ANC Durban branch who told the local case officer where Mandela would be.
Then, in 2016, a long-retired CIA officer named Donald Rickard, then 88 years old, gave an interview to British film director John Irvin in which he said he had informed the South African police about Mandela.
Speaking to Irvin for his dramatized documentary, Mandela’s Gun, Rickard confirmed that he had been operating under cover as a State Department vice-consul in Durban.
He described the city as a “cauldron” of anti-Apartheid activity and that the ANC was riling up the city’s substantial Indian community.
Rickard stated further that “Mandela was going to come down and incite the Indians and I found when he was coming down and how he was coming, and he came in a black limousine with a guy sitting in the back as the passenger and he was the driver. That’s where I was involved and that’s where Mandela was caught.”
When I was a professor at Bucknell University from 2006 to 2009, my office was next to Donald’s nephew, a popular English professor who had been active in the anti-Vietnam War movement who had told me about his Uncle and Mandela.
Reached for this article, he said he could not add anything more to what was reported by Stengel in Time magazine.
A 2018 biography of mercenary Mike Hoare quotes him confirming Donald Rickard’s story.
Rickard was personally unrepentant about assisting in Mandela’s capture, saying:
“Mandela was completely under the control of the Soviet Union. He was a toy of Moscow. He could have incited a war in South Africa. The United [States] would have to get involved, grudgingly, and things could have gone to hell…The Soviet Union would have done anything to get its hands on the mineral chest—anything—and Khrushchev said: ‘When we get it we’ll dictate the terms of surrender for the West.’ We were teetering on the brink here and it had to be stopped, which meant Mandela had to be stopped. And I put a stop to it.”
Donald Rickard died two weeks after his confession. His only regret was that he had been indiscrete. Rickard said “the biggest mistake of my life” was boasting about it at Mike Hoare’s party. “I was never promoted again after I came back from South Africa. They were embarrassed that I embarrassed them.”
Richard Stengel has recently reviewed declassified documents, which point to the U.S. government’s concern about Mandela being a Communist organizer, and the CIA’s role in tracking him.
Stengel filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to see if they would confirm any details surrounding Mandela’s capture, which they refused to do.
Nevertheless, the evidence seems clear from Rickard’s testimony and other revelations that the CIA was behind the capture and long-term imprisonment of one of the 20th century’s greatest historical figures.
Armstrong begins this lecture by discussing the Islamic Golden Age, in which Islamic scholars made major discoveries and innovations in science, math, medicine, astronomy, art, poetry and architecture. At a time when most of European society was a backwater, interaction with the Islamic world significantly advanced European knowledge of math and medicine.
Europeans owe their numbering system (with Arabic numerals replacing Roman numerals), the concept of zero (which derives from Hindu culture), algebra, trigonometry and calculus to their interactions with Muslim scholars.
Islamic scholars also revived the philosophical teachings of Aristotle, which had been lost to European society. In medicine, they also revived the teachings of Galen and other Greek physicians, as well as performing the first surgical treatment of breast cancer and the first thyroidectomies.
The first European medical school, founded in Italy in the 9th century, was based on the precepts of the Islamic physician Avicenna.
Shortly after Muslim warriors defeated most of the Middle East, North Africa and Spain, it began splitting into rival factions: the Fatimids (mainly associated with Shi’ite Islam), the Umayeds and the Abbasid (both mainly associated with Sunni Islam). The Umayeds were were largely responsible for the conquest of Spain, The Abbasid, who conquered Iraq, moved the capitol of the Islamic caliphate from Mecca to Baghdad in the 8th century. In the 9th century, they founded the first Islamic House of Wisdom. The latter employed numerous Jews and Christians, as well as Arabs, in its translation centers because they could read Hebrew and Greek. There were also major centers of learning in Cordova (on the Iberian peninsula).
In 1171 the Kurdish Sunni Salahuddin, who would retake Jerusalem from the Christians in 1187, overthrew the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt, establishing the Ayyubid Dynasty (subsequently recognized and allied with the Abbasid Caliphate).
During the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258, the Mongols burned all the books in the House of Wisdom, slaughtered the scholars and destroyed the city’s advanced irrigation and public water supply. Viewing the destruction of Baghdad as a punishment from God, leading Islamic scholars adopted increasingly rigid religious beliefs, replacing schools devoted to scientific inquire to those focusing on religious study (Madrasa).
In 1212, the Islamic armies in Iberia (who were mainly Berber converts from North Africa) were defeated by a coalition of rival kings: Sancho VII of Navarre, Peter II of Aragon and Alfonso II of Portugal and driven out of northern Iberia to southern Spain.
Film can be watched free with a library card on Kanopy.
Danny Casolaro’s Death in August 1991 Was Ruled a Suicide But Overwhelming Evidence Indicates That He Was Murdered—Likely by Rogue Elements of the CIA in Collaboration with the Kuwaiti Royal Family
When a housekeeper at the Martinsburg, West Virginia, Sheraton Hotel entered Room 517 on the morning of August 10, 1991, she found journalist Danny Casolaro of Fairfax, Virginia, lying dead in a tub of bloody water.
Casolaro’s wrists were slashed twelve times with one of the cuts being so deep that it severed a tendon. Within 24 hours, Casolaro’s body was embalmed—without authorization from his family, which was only notified of his death two days afterwards.
The death was ruled a suicide, which his family knew to be untrue.
This cabal included the major players in the Iran-Contra scandal involving illegal arms smuggling to counter-revolutionaries (Contras) in Nicaragua.
Their criminal activity extended into drug trafficking, money laundering, and acts of international terrorism, carried out in collaboration with the Gambino and other crime families.
Thirty-two years after Casolaro’s death, his son Trey is calling for the reopening of the case and reclassification of his death as a murder.
Trey told CovertAction Magazine that he was 22 years old and living in Colorado when his father was killed.
He said that the day before his father was found dead, he made a collect call to his dad who told him about the research that he had been undertaking. He told Trey that he was meeting a guy from Iraq in Martinsburg, and also meeting with someone who worked for the Defense Department.
Unfortunately, that was the last time that Trey would speak to his father.
The forensic evidence points very clearly to Danny being murdered. The razor-blade cuts were too deep on both arms for a suicide, particularly for a man squeamish about blood.
There was one bruise on Casolaro’s arm and another on his head that were never accounted for and signs that an assailant had tried to asphyxiate him.
Three of Casolaro’s fingernails were missing, and a housekeeper saw two bloody towels, which indicated that blood had been cleaned up by someone else.
According to confidential sources Casolaro had been found with Ethyl Alcohol, Absolute, in his system that had been injected into his spine to “deaden the nerves below his head.”
An unnamed Sheraton Hotel maid told the Martinsburg police she saw a man leaving Casolaro’s room the morning of his death.
Down to the sports clothes the maid said he was wearing, the man resembled Major Joseph Cuellar, a CIA and Special Forces operative who worked at Business Risks International, a private security company functioning as a CIA front.
In the days before his death, Casolaro had received death threats and been warned by intelligence professionals that he was in over his head and that his life was in danger. Strangers in military uniforms appeared at his funeral. Casolaro had told his brother, “if anything happens to me, don’t believe it was an accident.”
After his death Danny’s car was found empty at the hotel car park when it had previously been stacked with papers from his investigation. A briefcase, bag and two envelopes in his possession were missing.
The briefcase was filled with incriminating, highly classified documents delivered to Casolaro in Martinsburg the day before his death by William Turner, a former Hughes Aircraft employee. The briefcase has never been accounted for.
Turner stated the documents included “computer printouts and other documents [Casolaro had] received from un-named sources and from Alan Standorf [a National Secrutiy Agency (NSA) employee who was found beaten to death in the back seat of his car in a parking lot at Washington National Airport in January 1991] and documents relating to the sale of modified PROMIS [Prosecution Management Information System] software…to Canada, Australia and Israel.”
The PROMIS software had been developed by a former NSA staffer named Bill Hamilton and his wife Nancy to help law enforcement agencies collect money and to track criminals.
The Hamiltons’ company, Institute for Law and Social Research (INSLAW), was forced into bankruptcy and seized in the early 1980s by officials in the Justice Department working under then-Attorney General Edwin Meese.
Meese provided the PROMIS software to the CIA and foreign intelligence services so they could track wire transfers from banks, move black funds more easily, and enhance surveillance operations.
The software modifications were undertaken by Michael Riconosciuto who was working for Wackenhut, a CIA-front corporation at the Cabazon Indian Reservation in Riverside County, California, from where arms were smuggled to the Nicaraguan Contras, the right-wing group mobilized by the CIA to fight the left-wing Sandinistas, which overthrew the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship in 1979.
Riconosciuto testified in U.S. federal court that the PROMIS software was modified for covert SWIFT Banking and it was installed at Transaction Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Citibank. Riconosciuto also testified that the modified PROMIS software was renamed the “LEAN” software and was sold to Australia.
Further modifications were undertaken by Hadron, Inc,, owned by Dr. Earl Brian, a veteran of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam and former California Secretary of Health Care Services, who was involved in the “October Surprise” where the Reagan campaign paid the Iranians to delay the release of American hostages during the 1980 election to make incumbent Jimmy Carter look bad and help Reagan win the White House.
Investigative authors James Ridgeway and Doug Vaughan revealed that the mysterious Robert Booth Nichols, known by the FBI and the Australian Federal Police to be associated with the CIA and the Gambino crime family, had returned from Kuwait to assist Casolaro with his investigations into the PROMIS software and monitor what he was uncovering.
Nichols owned Meridian International Logistics and had negotiated the sale of his G77 machine guns to the Kuwait government. Nichols told Casolaro that he was assisting the Kuwaiti royal family to recover gold bullion and art artifacts that had been stolen by Saddam Hussein’s forces when invading Kuwait.
A month before Casolaro’s death, Casolaro met CIA operative Theodore Shackley’s girlfriend at a party—obviously not by coincidence—and caught her going through his research files when she went to his home.
Theodore Shackley was the former CIA station chief in Saigon who coordinated the Phoenix Program, which resulted in the murders of 40,000 suspected Vietcong insurgents. Shackley had also run drugs in Laos with General Vang Pao and coordinated anti-Castro terrorist operations in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs landing.
When Shackley was fired from the CIA during the Carter administration, George H. W. Bush helped him set up private security companies, among them TGS International and Research Associates International, that received lucrative military and intelligence contracts with the Kuwaiti royal family, a key U.S. proxy in the Middle East which played a crucial role in the Iran-Contra affair.
Casolaro had in his briefcase copies of two checks—for $1 million and $4 million—made out by members of the Kuwaiti royal family to arms dealers Adnan Khashoggi and Manucher Ghorbanifar through the Monte Carlo branch of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) for the purchase of TOW missiles from Iran.
The TOW missiles purchased by the Kuwaiti royal family through BCCI were sent to Iran and the profits were used to purchase arms that were sent to Nicaraguan Contras in violation of the 1984 Boland Amendment forbidding U.S. military support to the Contras who had carried out terrorist acts inside Nicaragua.
Theodore Shackley at the time was negotiating the deal with Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar along with other rogue CIA officers known as the “secret team” who helped coordinate the Iran-Contra drugs and arms smuggling operations. Members of the secret team included Oliver North, Richard Armitage, Michael Ledeen and Richard Secord, the latter of whom was in contact with Danny Casolaro.
The funds from the checks for the TOW missiles were transferred by Robert Sensi, who worked for the secret owner of BCCI and former Kuwait Airways Chairman Faisal Saud Al-Fulaij, and worked directly also for CIA Director William Casey as a CIA asset.
Sensi also worked for William Wilson, U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican, and Robert Gray, Chairman of Hill & Knowlton representing the Kuwait Government and the Nicaraguan Contras.[1]
Casolaro’s last girlfriend, Wendy Golden, was invited by the Crown Prince of Kuwait while Casolaro was in Martinsburg to spend one week at the Watergate Hotel, where Robert Sensi worked in the Kuwait Embassy.
Golden was never interviewed by the Martinsburg police or FBI, which reaffirmed the suicide ruling based on the spurious reasoning that Casolaro had brought a shoelace with him to Martinsburg—supposedly to hang himself—while leaving a suicide note that Trey believes was fabricated.
At the time of Casolaro’s death, Senator John Kerry (D-MA), Chair of the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, was heading an investigation into BCCI, which laundered funds for the CIA and organized crime networks.
Kerry was demanding that attorney Robert Altman provide copies of all BCCI payments made to Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar through the Monte Carlo branch, the same checks and transaction records Casolaro had in his possession, which would have opened his investigation and put powerful people in jail.
[…]
According to William Turner, Robert A. Altman, a BCCI attorney who had power of attorney to represent Faisal Saud Al-Fulaij, had reluctantly agreed to meet with Casolaro in Martinsburg because Casolaro was threatening to give the checks to Senator Kerry’s investigation along with two folders of documents exposing a Pentagon fraud involving Hughes Aircraft.
[…]
Casolaro was hot on the trail of illegal sales of chemical weapons to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein by members of the “secret team” who helped their friends make billions from construction and oil contracts after the first Persian Gulf War, for which the Kuwaitis had helped lobby.
A lot of what we know now about Casolaro’s research into what he called “The Octopus,” or CIA-organized crime networks, has resulted from a 21-year investigation carried out by Osborne, who was science adviser to the Australian Federal Liberal Party in 1995.
[…]
Osborne has developed a webpage dedicated to the memory of Casolaro and a podcast series that offers a treasure trove of information on Casolaro and the corruption in the CIA and government that Casolaro was helping to expose.
[…]
“Casolaro was a wonderful investigator who was linking all the major scandals of the 1980s—PROMIS software, Iran-Contra, BCCI, October Surprise, Nugan Hand Bank, Iraq-Gate, Bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 and others—together,” Osborne said. “He was ahead of all other journalists and died for it. He deserves to be honored and to receive a prestigious journalistic prize.”
In an astonishing statement at a press briefing Wednesday, National Security Department spokesperson John Kirby admitted the US is running out of interest in weaponizing Ukraine for the long term. Since Ukraine is on US life support to continue fighting their lost cause to recapture Crimea, Donbas and join NATO, it’s clear ‘game over’ for Ukraine looms.
“I think in the immediate term, right now, we can continue to support Ukraine – with the authorities in the appropriations we have. But, you know, we’re … certainly running out of runway.”
Kirby then shifted from the runway metaphor to one even starker. “The US administration had the means to support Ukraine in the near term. But you don’t want to be trying to bake in long-term support when you’re at the end of the rope,” And on the Ukraine funding, we’re coming near to the end of the rope. I mean, today we announced $200 million, and we’ll keep that aid going as long as we can, but it’s not going to be indefinite”
Is Ukraine President Zelensky listening to Kirby’s ominous warning? If he had an iota of understanding of Ukraine’s rapidly deteriorating plight, he’d immediately partner with responsible countries such as Turkey to initiate negotiations with Russia to end the war. He did that 18 months ago, Marcy 31-April 1, 2022, inking a tentative deal with Russia to end the war without losing any territory in Donbas, albeit giving Donbas regional autonomy under Ukraine sovereignty. The agreement would also have ended Ukraine’s self-destructive NATO aspirations.
To sum up: The US provoked the war by championing Ukraine NATO membership and weaponizing their civil war that killed thousands in Donbas. When Russia invaded to prevent both, the US sabotaged every effort to end the war quickly and peaceably, prolonging it with $113 billion in weapons and other aid. Result? Hundreds of thousands of dead Ukrainians with no chance of victory.
It’s not just the US that is “certainly running out of runway” and “coming near to the end of the rope.” The US is moving on to enabling and supplying the ongoing destruction of Gaza. No more runway and no more rope are much more appropriate to the former comedian staring in ‘Tragedy in Ukraine.’
