FTR#‘s 1254 & 1255 Pandemics, Inc., Parts 4 and 5

This pro­gram fur­ther devel­ops the con­sor­tium of Eco­Health Alliance, Metabio­ta, In-Q-Tel and Munich Rein­sur­ance. 

Tak­en togeth­er, a num­ber of points of infor­ma­tion high­light­ed here go a long way to prov­ing the legal con­cept of “con­scious­ness of guilt,” the guilt being intent to cre­ate the pan­dem­ic and knowl­edge that such a thing was done.

(The infor­ma­tion pre­sent­ed here should be tak­en in con­junc­tion with infor­ma­tion pre­sent­ed in–among oth­er programs–FTR#‘s 1151, 1152 and 1153. In turn, those pro­grams are devel­op­ments of doc­u­men­ta­tion pre­sent­ed in our many pro­grams about Covid-19.)

Of para­mount impor­tance in eval­u­at­ing the mate­r­i­al here and in the oth­er broad­casts about Covid-19 is the devel­op­ment of syn­thet­ic biol­o­gy and the man­ner in which it enables bio­log­i­cal war­fare: “ . . . Advances in the area mean that sci­en­tists now have the capa­bil­i­ty to recre­ate dan­ger­ous virus­es from scratch; make harm­ful bac­te­ria more dead­ly; and mod­i­fy com­mon microbes so that they churn out lethal tox­ins once they enter the body. . . In the report, the sci­en­tists describe how syn­thet­ic biol­o­gy, which gives researchers pre­ci­sion tools to manip­u­late liv­ing organ­isms, ‘enhances and expands’ oppor­tu­ni­ties to cre­ate bioweapons. . . . Today, the genet­ic code of almost any mam­malian virus can be found online and syn­the­sised. ‘The tech­nol­o­gy to do this is avail­able now,’ said [Michael] Impe­ri­ale. “It requires some exper­tise, but it’s some­thing that’s rel­a­tive­ly easy to do, and that is why it tops the list. . . .”

Going a long way toward prov­ing con­scious­ness of guilt are:

1.–The behav­ior of Peter Daszak and col­leagues in “gam­ing” the Lancet state­ment on the “nat­ur­al” ori­gin of the coro­n­avirus (Dasza­k’s Eco­Health Alliance–funded and advised by the nation­al secu­ri­ty establishment–is impli­cat­ed in the cre­ation of the SARS COV‑2.)
2.–The reac­tion of gov­ern­ment offi­cials to Trump admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials into the ori­gins of the virus, advis­ing would be inves­ti­ga­tors that such inquiries would open a “can of worms,” or “a Pan­do­ra’s Box” because it would should light on U.S. fund­ing of the projects.
3.–Metabiota–partnered with Eco­Health Alliance–was net­worked with In-Q-Tel (the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty’s ven­ture cap­i­tal arm) and Munich Re to pro­vide pan­dem­ic insur­ance. Their 2018 busi­ness mod­el direct­ly fore­shad­owed the pan­dem­ic.
4.–Many aspects of the SARS COV‑2 virus, includ­ing its curi­ous FCS site and insti­tu­tion­al­ized obfus­ca­tion of aspects of the pan­dem­ic it caused sug­gest delib­er­ate cov­er-up. Why would the NIH redact 290 pages of a doc­u­ment request­ed by an FOIA suit!! Why were sequences of bat coro­n­avirus genomes removed from pub­lic view?

We begin by not­ing the OUN/B affil­i­a­tion of Ulana Suprun, who was the Ukrain­ian Min­is­ter of Health from 2016 until2019, plac­ing her very much “in the mix” with Andrew C. Weber and the Metabio­ta, Eco­Health Alliance and Munich Re con­sor­tium.

” . . . . Suprun is the hus­band of the Ukrain­ian Amer­i­can Ulana Suprun, a promi­nent Ban­dera enthu­si­ast with ties to the Ukrain­ian far-right who served as the Health­care Min­is­ter of Ukraine from July 2016 through August 2019. . . .”

We can con­fi­dent­ly con­clude that Metabio­ta founder NathanWolfe was in Jef­frey Epstein’s orbit.

We include a link to an excel­lent Covert Action Mag­a­zine arti­cle about Epstein and his myr­i­ad intel­li­gence con­nec­tions for the con­ve­nience of the lis­ten­er and req­ui­site back­ground infor­ma­tion.

Recap­ping infor­ma­tion from our “Oswald Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy” series, we note that Trump offi­cials who were look­ing to tout the Chi­nese “lab-leak” hypoth­e­sis were told to avoid the top­ic, lest it cre­ate prob­lems for the U.S.

Note, as well, that both Peter Daszak and Ralph Bar­ic, asso­ci­at­ed with Eco­Health Alliance, were engaged in dubi­ous maneu­ver­ing to eclipse atten­tion on the pos­si­ble U.S. spon­sor­ship of the SARS COV‑2 gain-of-func­tion manip­u­la­tions.

1.–” . . . . It soon emerged, based on emails obtained by a Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion group called U.S. Right to Know, that Daszak had not only signed but orga­nized the influ­en­tial Lancet state­ment, with the inten­tion of con­ceal­ing his role and cre­at­ing the impres­sion of sci­en­tif­ic una­nim­i­ty. . . .”
2.–” . . . . In one State Depart­ment meet­ing, offi­cials seek­ing to demand trans­paren­cy from the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment say they were explic­it­ly told by col­leagues not to explore the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virology’s gain-of-func­tion research, because it would bring unwel­come atten­tion to U.S. gov­ern­ment fund­ing of it. . . . because it would ‘‘open a can of worms’ if it con­tin­ued.’. . .”
3.–” . . . . As the group probed the lab-leak sce­nario, among oth­er pos­si­bil­i­ties, its mem­bers were repeat­ed­ly advised not to open a ‘Pandora’s box,’ said four for­mer State Depart­ment offi­cials inter­viewed by Van­i­ty Fair. The admo­ni­tions ‘smelled like a cov­er-up,’ said Thomas DiNan­no . . . .”

In our exhaus­tive series on the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic, we have pre­sent­ed over­whelm­ing evi­dence that the SARS CoV‑2 was syn­the­sized in a U.S. lab.

Hav­ing chaired a Lancet com­mis­sion to inves­ti­gate the ori­gins of SARS CoV‑2, Dr. Jef­frey Sachs is “pret­ty con­vinced” that the virus came from a U.S. lab­o­ra­to­ry.

He opines that it was a “blun­der.”

Although we believe Covid-19 was a bio­log­i­cal war­fare attack, we are great­ly encour­aged that some­one of Sachs’ stature has come for­ward in this regard.

In many past pro­grams, we have high­light­ed insti­tu­tions impli­cat­ed in the appar­ent “bio-skull­dug­gery” sur­round­ing the U.S. bio­log­i­cal war­fare gam­bit involv­ing what Mr. Emory has termed “The Oswald Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy.” This is dis­cussed in: FTR#‘s 1157–1159, 1170, 1183 through 1193, and 1215.

The essence of the “Oswald Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy” gam­bit con­cerns the DTRA and Pen­ta­gon fund­ing of bat-borne coro­n­avirus research at the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy, much of it through Peter Dasza­k’s Eco­Health Alliance. Once the research was com­plete, it result­ed in pub­li­ca­tion which includ­ed the genome of the bat virus­es being researched. Using tech­nol­o­gy dis­cussed above (in the Guardian arti­cle), the virus­es were then syn­the­sized from scratch and pop­u­la­tion groups were vec­tored with the same viral strains being researched by the WIV. 

Dr. Sachs’ rumi­na­tions about a U.S. bio­log­i­cal lab­o­ra­to­ry ori­gin of SARS-CoV­‑2 are fleshed out in an interview–featured on his website–with the Tehran Times.

Note that he con­tin­ues to opine that the release was a “blun­der” and that it did not result from bio­log­i­cal war­fare research. Again, this is mod­i­fied lim­it­ed hang­out.

Next, the pro­gram reviews an excerpt­ing of a Wired Mag­a­zine arti­cle about the Metabiota/Munich Rein­sur­ance project.

Bear in mind that In-Q-Tel, the ven­ture cap­i­tal arm of the CIA and the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, is greas­ing the wheels of this project with financ­ing.

We high­light two key points of infor­ma­tion:

1.–The busi­ness suc­cess of the pan­dem­ic insur­ance would nec­es­sar­i­ly incor­po­rate analy­sis of the “fear fac­tor” of poten­tial pan­dem­ic pathogens: ” . . . . As sophis­ti­cat­ed as Metabiota’s sys­tem was, how­ev­er, it would need to be even more refined to incor­po­rate into an insur­ance pol­i­cy. The mod­el would need to cap­ture some­thing much more dif­fi­cult to quan­ti­fy than his­tor­i­cal deaths and med­ical stock­piles: fear. The eco­nom­ic con­se­quences of a scourge, the his­tor­i­cal data showed, were as much a result of society’s response as they were to the virus itself. . . . The Sen­ti­ment Index was built to be, as Oppen­heim put it, ‘a cat­a­log of dread.’ For any giv­en pathogen, it could spit out a score from 0 to 100 accord­ing to how fright­en­ing the pub­lic would find it. . . . Mad­hav and her team, along with Wolfe and Oppen­heim, also researched the broad­er eco­nom­ic con­se­quences of dis­ease out­breaks, mea­sured in the ‘cost per death pre­vent­ed’ incurred by soci­etal inter­ven­tions. ‘Mea­sures that decreased per­son-to-per­son con­tact, includ­ing social dis­tanc­ing, quar­an­tine, and school clo­sures, had the great­est cost per death pre­vent­ed, most like­ly because of the amount of eco­nom­ic dis­rup­tion caused by those mea­sures,’ they wrote in a 2018 paper. . . .”
2.–More sin­is­ter, still, is the fact that Metabio­ta had ana­lyzed the sce­nario of a nov­el coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic two years before it hap­pened. This appears to be the 2018 paper referred to above. Do not fail to note that, at the time that Metabio­ta was run­ning this sce­nario, they were part­nered with Eco­Health Alliance, which was using Pen­ta­gon and USAID mon­ey to research and per­form gain-of-func­tion on these types of coro­n­avirus­es!! ” . . . . As the human and eco­nom­ic dev­as­ta­tion mul­ti­plied in tan­dem across the globe, Metabiota’s employ­ees sud­den­ly found them­selves liv­ing inside their own model’s pro­jec­tions. Just two years ear­li­er, the com­pa­ny had run a large set of sce­nar­ios fore­cast­ing the con­se­quences of a nov­el coro­n­avirus spread­ing around the globe. . . .”

Despite our deep reser­va­tions about Jef­frey Sachs—expressed in numer­ous pro­grams and posts–it’s remark­able just how damn­ing our con­clud­ing arti­cle is.

Sachs is some­one in a posi­tion to bring real pub­lic atten­tion to this top­ic, if he choos­es to do so. The authors make a com­pelling case for an inde­pen­dent inves­ti­ga­tion, and who would be in a bet­ter posi­tion than Sachs to make this case pub­licly after he dis­band­ed his Lancet Com­mis­sion over these kinds of con­cerns? That’s all part of what is going to make this a sto­ry to watch.

“ . . . . Infor­ma­tion now held by the research team head­ed by EHA (7), as well as the com­mu­ni­ca­tions of that research team with US research fund­ing agen­cies, includ­ing NIH, USAID, DARPA, DTRA, and the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty, could shed con­sid­er­able light on the exper­i­ments under­tak­en by the US-fund­ed research team and on the pos­si­ble rela­tion­ship, if any, between those exper­i­ments and the emer­gence of SARS-CoV­‑2. . . .”

If our sus­pi­cions about Sachs are well-found­ed, he might be in posi­tion to con­trol the results that do emerge.

Nonethe­less, this arti­cle has some remark­able points of infor­ma­tion to be con­sid­ered and it is alto­geth­er wel­come and impor­tant that some­one of Dr. Sachs’ high pro­fes­sion­al pro­file and pres­tige has come for­ward:

1.–“ . . . . Much of the work on SARS-like CoVs per­formed in Wuhan was part of an active and high­ly col­lab­o­ra­tive US–China sci­en­tif­ic research pro­gram fund­ed by the US Gov­ern­ment (NIH, Defense Threat Reduc­tion Agency [DTRA—Pentagon, D.E.], and US Agency for Inter­na­tion­al Devel­op­ment [USAID]—State Depart­ment, fre­quent cov­er for CIA, D.E.), coor­di­nat­ed by researchers at Eco­Health Alliance (EHA—Chief fun­ders are Pen­ta­gon, USAID, sci­ence and pol­i­cy advi­sor is David Franz, for­mer com­mand­ing offi­cer of the U.S. Army Research Insti­tute of Infec­tious Disease—D.E.), but involv­ing researchers at sev­er­al oth­er US insti­tu­tions. For this rea­son, it is impor­tant that US insti­tu­tions be trans­par­ent about any knowl­edge of the detailed activ­i­ties that were under­way in Wuhan and in the Unit­ed States. The evi­dence may also sug­gest that research insti­tu­tions in oth­er coun­tries were involved, and those too should be asked to sub­mit rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion (e.g., with respect to unpub­lished sequences). . . .”
2.–“ . . . . as out­lined below, much could be learned by inves­ti­gat­ing US-sup­port­ed and US-based work that was under­way in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Wuhan-based insti­tu­tions, includ­ing the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy (WIV), Chi­na. It is still not clear whether the IC inves­ti­gat­ed these US-sup­port­ed and US-based activ­i­ties. If it did, it has yet to make any of its find­ings avail­able to the US sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty for inde­pen­dent and trans­par­ent analy­sis and assess­ment. If, on the oth­er hand, the IC [Intel­li­gence Com­mu­ni­ty] did not inves­ti­gate these US-sup­port­ed and US-based activ­i­ties, then it has fall­en far short of con­duct­ing a com­pre­hen­sive inves­ti­ga­tion. . . .”
3.–“ . . . . Par­tic­i­pat­ing US insti­tu­tions include the EHA, the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na (UNC), the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia at Davis (UCD), the NIH, and the USAID.Under a series of NIH grants and USAID con­tracts, EHA coor­di­nat­ed the col­lec­tion of SARS-like bat CoVs from the field in south­west Chi­na and south­east Asia, the sequenc­ing of these virus­es, the archiv­ing of these sequences (involv­ing UCD), and the analy­sis and manip­u­la­tion of these virus­es (notably at UNC). A broad spec­trum of coro­n­avirus research work was done not only in Wuhan (includ­ing groups at Wuhan Uni­ver­si­ty and the Wuhan CDC, as well as WIV) but also in the Unit­ed States. The exact details of the field­work and lab­o­ra­to­ry work of the EHA-WIV-UNC part­ner­ship, and the engage­ment of oth­er insti­tu­tions in the Unit­ed States and Chi­na, has not been dis­closed for inde­pen­dent analy­sis. The pre­cise nature of the exper­i­ments that were con­duct­ed, includ­ing the full array of virus­es col­lect­ed from the field and the sub­se­quent sequenc­ing and manip­u­la­tion of those virus­es, remains unknown. . . .”
4.–“ . . . . The NIH could say more about the pos­si­ble role of its grantees in the emer­gence of SARS-CoV­‑2, yet the agency has failed to reveal to the pub­lic the pos­si­bil­i­ty that SARS-CoV­‑2 emerged from a research-asso­ci­at­ed event, even though sev­er­al researchers raised that con­cern on Feb­ru­ary 1, 2020, in a phone con­ver­sa­tion that was doc­u­ment­ed by email (5). Those emails were released to the pub­lic only through FOIA, and they sug­gest that the NIH lead­er­ship took an ear­ly and active role in pro­mot­ing the ‘zoonot­ic hypoth­e­sis’ and the rejec­tion of the lab­o­ra­to­ry-asso­ci­at­ed hypoth­e­sis. . . .”
5.–“ . . . . The NIH has resist­ed the release of impor­tant evi­dence, such as the grant pro­pos­als and project reports of EHA, and has con­tin­ued to redact mate­ri­als released under FOIA, includ­ing a remark­able 290-page redac­tion in a recent FOIA release. . . .”
6.–“ . . . . Act­ing NIH Direc­tor Lawrence Tabak tes­ti­fied before Con­gress that sev­er­al such sequences in a US data­base were removed from pub­lic view. . . .”
7.–“ . . . . Spe­cial con­cerns sur­round the pres­ence of an unusu­al furin cleav­age site (FCS) in SARS-CoV­‑2 (10) that aug­ments the path­o­genic­i­ty and trans­mis­si­bil­i­ty of the virus rel­a­tive to relat­ed virus­es like SARS-CoV­‑1 (11, 12). SARS-CoV­‑2 is, to date, the only iden­ti­fied mem­ber of the sub­genus sar­be­covirus that con­tains an FCS, although these are present in oth­er coro­n­avirus­es (13, 14). A por­tion of the sequence of the spike pro­tein of some of these virus­es is illus­trat­ed in the align­ment shown in Fig. 1, illus­trat­ing the unusu­al nature of the FCS and its appar­ent inser­tion in SARS-CoV­‑2 (15).From the first weeks after the genome sequence of SARS-CoV­‑2 became avail­able, researchers have com­ment­ed on the unex­pect­ed pres­ence of the FCS with­in SARS-CoV‑2—the impli­ca­tion being that SARS-CoV­‑2 might be a prod­uct of lab­o­ra­to­ry manip­u­la­tion. In a review piece argu­ing against this pos­si­bil­i­ty, it was assert­ed that the amino acid sequence of the FCS in SARS-CoV­‑2 is an unusu­al, non­stan­dard sequence for an FCS and that nobody in a lab­o­ra­to­ry would design such a nov­el FCS (13). . . .”
8.–“ . . . . In fact, the asser­tion that the FCS in SARS-CoV­‑2 has an unusu­al, non­stan­dard amino acid sequence is false. The amino acid sequence of the FCS in SARS-CoV­‑2 also exists in the human ENaC a sub­unit (16), where it is known to be func­tion­al and has been exten­sive­ly stud­ied (17, 18). The FCS of human ENaC a has the amino acid sequence RRAR’SVAS ( 2), an eight–amino-acid sequence that is per­fect­ly iden­ti­cal with the FCS of SARS-CoV­‑2 (16).ENaC is an epithe­lial sodi­um chan­nel, expressed on the api­cal sur­face of epithe­lial cells in the kid­ney, colon, and air­ways (19, 20), that plays a crit­i­cal role in con­trol­ling flu­id exchange. The ENaC a sub­unit has a func­tion­al FCS (17, 18) that is essen­tial for ion chan­nel func­tion (19) and has been char­ac­ter­ized in a vari­ety of species. The FCS sequence of human ENaC a (20) is iden­ti­cal in chim­panzee, bonobo, orang­utan, and goril­la (SI Appen­dix , Fig. 1), but diverges in all oth­er species, even pri­mates, except one. (The one non-human non-great ape species with the same sequence is Pip­istrel­lus kuh­lii, a bat species found in Europe and West­ern Asia; oth­er bat species, includ­ing Rhi­nolo­phus fer­rume­quinem, have a dif­fer­ent FCS sequence in ENaC a [RKAR’SAAS]). . . .”
9.–“ . . . . One con­se­quence of this “mol­e­c­u­lar mim­ic­ry” between the FCS of SARS CoV‑2 spike and the FCS of human ENaC is com­pe­ti­tion for host furin in the lumen of the Gol­gi appa­ra­tus, where the SARS-CoV­‑2 spike is processed. This results in a decrease in human ENaC expres­sion (21). A decrease in human ENaC expres­sion com­pro­mis­es air­way func­tion and has been impli­cat­ed as a con­tribut­ing fac­tor in the patho­gen­e­sis of COVID-19 (22). Anoth­er con­se­quence of this aston­ish­ing mol­e­c­u­lar mim­ic­ry is evi­denced by appar­ent cross-reac­tiv­i­ty with human ENaC of anti­bod­ies from COVID-19 patients, with the high­est lev­els of cross-react­ing anti­bod­ies direct­ed against this epi­tope being asso­ci­at­ed with most severe dis­ease (23).  [Auto-immune reac­tion, pos­si­bly over­lap­ping mRNA vaccines—D.E.]. . . .”
10.–“ . . . . We do know that the inser­tion of such FCS sequences into SARS-like virus­es was a spe­cif­ic goal of work pro­posed by the EHA-WIV-UNC part­ner­ship with­in a 2018 grant pro­pos­al (“DEFUSE”) that was sub­mit­ted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) (25).The 2018 pro­pos­al to DARPA was not fund­ed, but we do not know whether some of the pro­posed work was sub­se­quent­ly car­ried out in 2018 or 2019, per­haps using anoth­er source of fund­ing. . . .”
11.–“ . . . . We also know that that this research team would be famil­iar with sev­er­al pre­vi­ous exper­i­ments involv­ing the suc­cess­ful inser­tion of an FCS sequence into SARS-CoV­‑1 (26) and oth­er coro­n­avirus­es, and they had a lot of expe­ri­ence in con­struc­tion of chimeric SARS-like virus­es (27–29). In addi­tion, the research team would also have some famil­iar­i­ty with the FCS sequence and the FCS-depen­dent acti­va­tion mech­a­nism of human ENaC (19), which was exten­sive­ly char­ac­ter­ized at UNC (17, 18).For a research team assess­ing the pan­dem­ic poten­tial of SARS-relat­ed coro­n­avirus­es, the FCS of human ENaC—an FCS known to be effi­cient­ly cleaved by host furin present in the tar­get loca­tion (epithe­lial cells) of an impor­tant tar­get organ (lung), of the tar­get organ­ism (human)—might be a ratio­nal, if not obvi­ous, choice of FCS to intro­duce into a virus to alter its infec­tiv­i­ty, in line with oth­er work per­formed pre­vi­ous­ly. . . .”
12.–“ . . . . Of course, the mol­e­c­u­lar mim­ic­ry of ENaC with­in the SARS-CoV­‑2 spike pro­tein might be a mere coin­ci­dence, although one with a very low prob­a­bil­i­ty. The exact FCS sequence present in SARS-CoV­‑2 has recent­ly been intro­duced into the spike pro­tein of SARS-CoV­‑1 in the lab­o­ra­to­ry, in an ele­gant series of exper­i­ments (12, 30), with pre­dictable con­se­quences in terms of enhanced viral trans­mis­si­bil­i­ty and path­o­genic­i­ty. Obvi­ous­ly, the cre­ation of such SARS‑1/2 “chimeras” is an area of some con­cern for those respon­si­ble for present and future reg­u­la­tion of this area of biol­o­gy. . . .”
13.–“ . . . . Infor­ma­tion now held by the research team head­ed by EHA (7), as well as the com­mu­ni­ca­tions of that research team with US research fund­ing agen­cies, includ­ing NIH, USAID, DARPA, DTRA, and the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty, could shed con­sid­er­able light on the exper­i­ments under­tak­en by the US-fund­ed research team and on the pos­si­ble rela­tion­ship, if any, between those exper­i­ments and the emer­gence of SARS-CoV­‑2. . . .”

FTR#1253 Pandemics, Inc., Part 3

This pro­gram con­tin­ues analy­sis of the “Pan­demics, Inc.” con­sor­tium of Metabio­ta, Eco­Health Alliance, In-Q-Tel and Munich Re.

We note that Andrew C. Weber–a key exec­u­tive of Metabiota–had an inter­est­ing back­ground: ” . . . . He joined Metabio­ta in Feb­ru­ary 2016 as Head of Glob­al Part­ner­ships in the Gov­ern­ment Busi­ness Unit. . . . He served until Octo­ber 2014 as Assis­tant Sec­re­tary of Defense for Nuclear, Chem­i­cal & Bio­log­i­cal Defense Pro­grams. . . .”

Weber was in that post at Metabio­ta when, in Octo­ber of 2016, Metabio­ta ini­ti­at­ed its projects in Ukraine.

Next, the pro­gram reviews an excerpt­ing of a Wired Mag­a­zine arti­cle about the Metabiota/Munich Rein­sur­ance project.

Bear in mind that In-Q-Tel, the ven­ture cap­i­tal arm of the CIA and the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, is greas­ing the wheels of this project with financ­ing.

We high­light two key points of infor­ma­tion:

1.–The busi­ness suc­cess of the pan­dem­ic insur­ance would nec­es­sar­i­ly incor­po­rate analy­sis of the “fear fac­tor” of poten­tial pan­dem­ic pathogens: ” . . . . As sophis­ti­cat­ed as Metabiota’s sys­tem was, how­ev­er, it would need to be even more refined to incor­po­rate into an insur­ance pol­i­cy. The mod­el would need to cap­ture some­thing much more dif­fi­cult to quan­ti­fy than his­tor­i­cal deaths and med­ical stock­piles: fear. The eco­nom­ic con­se­quences of a scourge, the his­tor­i­cal data showed, were as much a result of society’s response as they were to the virus itself. . . . The Sen­ti­ment Index was built to be, as Oppen­heim put it, ‘a cat­a­log of dread.’ For any giv­en pathogen, it could spit out a score from 0 to 100 accord­ing to how fright­en­ing the pub­lic would find it. . . . Mad­hav and her team, along with Wolfe and Oppen­heim, also researched the broad­er eco­nom­ic con­se­quences of dis­ease out­breaks, mea­sured in the ‘cost per death pre­vent­ed’ incurred by soci­etal inter­ven­tions. ‘Mea­sures that decreased per­son-to-per­son con­tact, includ­ing social dis­tanc­ing, quar­an­tine, and school clo­sures, had the great­est cost per death pre­vent­ed, most like­ly because of the amount of eco­nom­ic dis­rup­tion caused by those mea­sures,’ they wrote in a 2018 paper. . . .”
2.–More sin­is­ter, still, is the fact that Metabio­ta had ana­lyzed the sce­nario of a nov­el coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic two years before it hap­pened. This appears to be the 2018 paper referred to above. Do not fail to note that, at the time that Metabio­ta was run­ning this sce­nario, they were part­nered with Eco­Health Alliance, which was using Pen­ta­gon and USAID mon­ey to research and per­form gain-of-func­tion on these types of coro­n­avirus­es!! ” . . . . As the human and eco­nom­ic dev­as­ta­tion mul­ti­plied in tan­dem across the globe, Metabiota’s employ­ees sud­den­ly found them­selves liv­ing inside their own model’s pro­jec­tions. Just two years ear­li­er, the com­pa­ny had run a large set of sce­nar­ios fore­cast­ing the con­se­quences of a nov­el coro­n­avirus spread­ing around the globe. . . .”

Next, we review aspects of impor­tant arti­cle presents depth on a num­ber of over­lap­ping con­sid­er­a­tions about bio­log­i­cal war­fare, the Covid “op” and the Ukraine war.

Of par­tic­u­lar impor­tance, here, is H5N1’s poten­tial sig­nif­i­cance of the In-Q-Tel, Metabio­ta, Munich Re pan­dem­ic insur­ance con­sor­tium.

In addi­tion to the H5N1’s real or poten­tial impact on busi­ness­es involved with one aspect or anoth­er of com­mer­cial poul­try, the pos­si­bil­i­ty that a weaponized/zoonotic muta­tion of the virus could spawn a dev­as­tat­ing human pan­dem­ic could be a major dri­ver of “fear” and the will­ing­ness of busi­ness­es to pur­chase pan­dem­ic insur­ance.

Key Points of Analy­sis and Dis­cus­sion Include:

1.–” . . . . The emer­gence of the virus in 1997 in Hong Kong was eeri­ly pre­dict­ed by Kennedy Short­ridge, the sci­en­tist who would dis­cov­er it. H5N1 didn’t infect humans until Short­ridge and his col­leagues had been study­ing its human infec­tion poten­tial in their labs for sev­er­al years. At the time, the nat­ur­al leap of a flu direct­ly from poul­try to humans was so improb­a­ble that sci­en­tists first sus­pect­ed that it was the result of con­t­a­m­i­na­tion from Shortridge’s lab. . . .”
2.–Normally, H5N1 human infec­tions are extreme­ly rare: ” . . . . H5N1 hard­ly ever infects peo­ple. News about high­ly path­o­gen­ic avian influen­za usu­al­ly leads with how dead­ly it is. Rarely is it men­tioned that the dis­ease hard­ly ever infects peo­ple. H5N1 kills more than half of the peo­ple who get it, but H5N1 has cir­cled the globe for decades and there have only ever been 860 human infec­tions world­wide. . . .”
3.–More about how rare human infec­tions are and the rise of avian infec­tions in 2022: ” . . . . There has nev­er been an H5N1 pan­dem­ic and no human infec­tion­with H5N1 bird flu has ever been iden­ti­fied in the U.S. That’s an extra­or­di­nary safe­ty record, giv­en how filthy U.S. fac­to­ry farms and slaugh­ter­hous­es are and how fast the infec­tion spreads among crowd­ed birds. So far in 2022, 29 states have report­ed out­breaks of bird flu in 213 flocks result­ing in the culling of near­ly 31 mil­lion birds, includ­ing almost 5 per­cent of egg-lay­ing hens. In 2015, it was even worse with 50 mil­lion birds culled, but there wasn’t a sin­gle human case. . . .”
4.–” . . . . Antho­ny Fau­ci has made sig­nif­i­cant invest­ments in gain-of-func­tion research to give H5N1 pan­dem­ic poten­tial, mak­ing it eas­i­ly trans­mis­si­ble from per­son to person—and Bill Gates chipped in, too! . . .”
5.–” . . . . In Feb­ru­ary 2006, Fau­ci con­vened a one-day in-house ‘NIAID Influen­za Research Sum­mit’ to  iden­ti­fy influen­za research pri­or­i­ties. In Sep­tem­ber, he opened up the top­ic to a 35-mem­ber ‘Blue Rib­bon Pan­el on Influen­za Research’ that includ­ed Fouch­i­er and Kawao­ka. The Blue Rib­bon panel’s report doesn’t men­tion gain-of-func­tion exper­i­ments, but Fau­ci gave them grants to do just that. [Ron] Fouch­i­er and [Yoshi­hi­ro] Kawaoka’s now infa­mous gain-of-func­tion research showed that, through lab manip­u­la­tion, H5N1 could be altered to become high­ly trans­mis­si­ble among humans via air­borne infec­tion. . . .”
6.–” . . . . The first human H5N1 out­break occurred in Hong Kong in 1997, the year of what the British call the ‘Hong Kong han­dover,’ when sov­er­eign­ty over Hong Kong was trans­ferred from the U.K. to Chi­na. It was dur­ing this ‘polit­i­cal­ly sen­si­tive’ year that Kennedy Short­ridge, an Aus­tralian sci­en­tist who was the direc­tor of the World Health Organization’s ref­er­ence lab­o­ra­to­ry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hong Kong, con­firmed human cas­es of high­ly path­o­gen­ic bird flu. . . .”
7.–” . . . .The 1997 Hong Kong H5N1 virus was unique in every respect. Time mag­a­zine report­ed, ‘On the H gene at a point called the cleav­age site, [was] found a tell­tale muta­tion, the same kind of muta­tion found in oth­er high­ly path­o­gen­ic avian virus­es. …The virus … had regions that were iden­ti­cal to por­tions of [an] avian virus that struck Penn­syl­va­nia [chick­ens] in 1983.” The L.A. Times report­ed, ‘The H5 piece came from a virus in a goose. The N1 piece came from a sec­ond virus in a quail. The remain­ing flu genes came from a third virus, also in quail.’ . . . .”
8.–” . . . . Short­ridge had been study­ing how avian influen­za virus­es spread to humans since 1975. Pri­or to dis­cov­er­ing H5N1, Short­ridge eeri­ly pre­dict­ed its emer­gence. As Frank Ching report­ed in ‘Bird Flu, SARS and Beyond’: As ear­ly as 1982, Short­ridge had labeled south­ern Chi­na, where humans and domes­tic ani­mals lived in close prox­im­i­ty, ‘an epi­cen­ter for the ori­gin of pan­demics.’ Ten years lat­er, he called south­ern Chi­na a ‘virus soup’ and warned that pan­dem­ic influen­za was a zoono­sis, that is, it could be trans­mit­ted from ani­mals to humans and, in 1995, he warned that influen­za in south­ern Chi­na could not prop­er­ly be called an ’emerg­ing’ infec­tion because it was con­stant­ly lurk­ing. ‘Elu­sive might be more apt,’ he wrote. . . .”
9.–” . . . . An exam­ple of Shortridge’s pen­chant for such pre­dic­tions is his 1995 Lancet arti­cle “The next pan­dem­ic influen­za virus?” Curi­ous­ly, H5N1 emerged two years lat­er, in 1997, in the same city where Short­ridge worked, Hong Kong. . . .”
10.–” . . . . At the time, the nat­ur­al leap of a flu direct­ly from poul­try to humans was thought to be so unlike­ly that sci­en­tists first sus­pect­ed con­t­a­m­i­na­tion from Shortridge’s lab was the cause of the high­ly improb­a­ble H5N1 diag­no­sis. How would that con­t­a­m­i­na­tion hap­pen unless Short­ridge hadn’t already been work­ing with H5N1 in the lab? . . .”
11.–” . . . . H5N1 didn’t cause dis­ease in humans until this poten­tial had been stud­ied in a lab for sev­er­al years. Fau­ci had been fund­ing Kawao­ka and Fouchier’s efforts to get bird flu to leap to humans since 1990 and their work was con­nect­ed to what Short­ridge was doing in Hong Kong. For sev­en years pri­or to the first human H5N1 out­break in 1997, Fau­ci had been fund­ing Kawaoka’s gain-of-func­tion bird flu research at St. Jude Children’s Research Hos­pi­tal and Kawaoka’s men­tor there, Robert G. Web­ster, was work­ing and pub­lish­ing with Short­ridge. Every year, Web­ster spent three months work­ing with Short­ridge at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hong Kong, accord­ing to this pro­file of Web­ster which men­tions Kawao­ka as his pro­tege. . . .”
12.–” . . . . The most eerie con­nec­tion between Short­ridge and Webster’s labs is that the clos­est known rel­a­tive of the 1997 Hong Kong H5N1 was the avian virus that struck Penn­syl­va­nia chick­ens in 1983—that Yoshi­hi­ro Kawao­ka had stud­ied. Accord­ing to Time mag­a­zine: Web­ster assigned a young sci­en­tist, Yoshi­hi­ro Kawao­ka, to try to fig­ure out how the [1983] virus trans­formed itself into such a ‘hot’ pathogen. Kawao­ka, now a pro­fes­sor of virol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin, Madi­son, com­pared the genet­ic struc­ture of virus­es from the first and sec­ond waves and found only a sin­gle, extreme­ly sub­tle change in the H gene. The two virus­es dif­fered by just one nucleotide–one of 1,700 nucleotides that made up the gene. . . .”
13.–”. . . . There’s also a con­nec­tion to Fouch­i­er, through his men­tor at the Eras­mus Med­ical Cen­ter in Rot­ter­dam, the Nether­lands, Jan De Jong, also a col­league and col­lab­o­ra­tor of Short­ridge and Webster’s. . . .”
14.–” . . . . Kawaoka’s col­league and men­tor Robert G. Web­ster and Fouchier’s col­league and men­tor Jan De Jong were the first sci­en­tists out­side of Hong Kong to receive sam­ples of the 1997 H5N1 flu from Shortridge’s lab. . . .”
15.–” . . . . De Jong is often cred­it­ed with being the one who iden­ti­fied the 1997 Hong Kong flu as H5N1, but he did so with ‘a pan­el of reagents to every type of flu strain yet known’ that had been brought from Webster’s lab in Mem­phis to the Nation­al Influen­za Cen­tre in Rot­ter­dam. . . .”
16.–” . . . . Kawao­ka and Fouch­i­er are of post-Bio­log­i­cal Weapons Con­ven­tion era where the weaponiza­tion of pathogens is euphemisti­cal­ly called ‘gain-of-func­tion’ research, but their old­er col­leagues, De Jong, Short­ridge and Web­ster came of age pri­or to 1972 and their men­tors were of the pre-Bio­log­i­cal Weapons Con­ven­tion era when virol­o­gists know­ing­ly and open­ly engi­neered virus­es for mil­i­tary pur­pos­es. . . .”
17.–” . . . . Short­ridge and Web­ster were trained by Frank Mac­far­lane Bur­net who served on the Aus­tralian Depart­ment of Defence’s New Weapons and Equip­ment Devel­op­ment Com­mit­tee in the 1940s and 50s. The Fed­er­a­tion of Amer­i­can Sci­en­tists lists some of the most chill­ing things Bur­net rec­om­mend­ed: Bur­net … said Aus­tralia should devel­op bio­log­i­cal weapons that would work in trop­i­cal Asia with­out spread­ing to Aus­trali­a’s more tem­per­ate pop­u­la­tion cen­tres. . . .”
18.–Burnet’s obser­va­tions: ” . . . . ‘Specif­i­cal­ly to the Aus­tralian sit­u­a­tion, the most effec­tive counter-offen­sive to threat­ened inva­sion by over­pop­u­lat­ed Asi­at­ic coun­tries would be direct­ed towards the destruc­tion by bio­log­i­cal or chem­i­cal means of trop­i­cal food crops and the dis­sem­i­na­tion of infec­tious dis­ease capa­ble of spread­ing in trop­i­cal but not under Aus­tralian con­di­tions.’ . . .”
18.–The broad­cast notes a fright­en­ing rela­tion­ship between Metabio­ta and the selec­tion of Philip Zelikow to head a com­mis­sion to deter­mine the ori­gin of Covid-19: ” . . . . In 2008, Google.org com­mit­ted $30 mil­lion to virus hunt­ing and gain-of-func­tion research on poten­tial pan­dem­ic pathogens through a project it called Pre­dict and Pre­vent. At least $5.5 mil­lion of that went to Dr. Nathan Wolfe’s non-prof­it Glob­al Viral Fore­cast­ing Ini­tia­tive, which was soon to become the for-prof­it Metabio­ta. Oth­er GVFI fun­ders at the time includ­ed the Skoll Foun­da­tion, which also gave $5.5 mil­lion, the Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion, Mer­ck Research Lab­o­ra­to­ries and the US Depart­ment of Defense. . . .”
19.–” . . . . When the GVFI became the for-prof­it Metabio­ta, Google Ven­tures con­tin­ued to invest. In addi­tion, it cre­at­ed a busi­ness part­ner­ship with Metabio­ta, ‘offer­ing its big-data exper­tise to help the com­pa­ny serve its customers–insurers, gov­ern­ment agen­cies and oth­er organizations–by offer­ing them fore­cast­ing and risk-man­age­ment tools.’ In oth­er words, they sell pan­dem­ic insur­ance. . . .”
20.–”. . . . Now that Metabio­ta has got­ten caught up in the COVID ori­gins scan­dal, its orig­i­nal investors, Eric Schmidt of Google, Jef­frey Skoll of EBay, Rajiv Shah of The Rock­e­feller Foun­da­tion (for­mer­ly USAID direc­tor, Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion) chipped in to fund the COVID Com­mis­sion Plan­ning Group, a white-wash led by Philip Zelikow who gave us the 9–11 Com­mis­sion cov­er-up. . . .”
21.–In past pro­grams, we have not­ed that David Franz, for­mer head of the U.S.A.M.R.I.I.D at Fort Det­rick was a key advi­sor to Eco­HealthAl­liance. Franz helped pro­duce the encap­su­lat­ed, weapons-grade anthrax used in the 2001 anthrax attacks: ” . . . . One of Metabiota’s PREDICT part­ners is Eco­Health Alliance, whose sci­ence and pol­i­cy advi­sor, David Franz, pro­duced the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks while work­ing for South­ern Research and part­ner­ing with sci­en­tists at Bat­telle. . . .”

The pro­gram con­cludes with dis­cus­sion of Munich Re’s deep polit­i­cal asso­ci­a­tion with the Third Reich, both in its  ini­tial, above-ground phase and in its role as a crit­i­cal ele­ment of the remark­able, lethal Bor­mann cap­i­tal asso­ci­a­tion. 

FTR#‘s 1251 and 1252: Pandemics Inc., Parts 1 and 2

The first pro­gram begins by not­ing the join­ing of Metabio­ta with Munich Re, which, as we shall see, is work­ing with that firm and an Amer­i­can insur­ance bro­ker to offer pan­dem­ic insur­ance.

The firms are being financed by In-Q-Tel, the CIA and intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty’s ven­ture cap­i­tal wing!

To pro­vide depth and insight to the dis­cus­sion, we review some key aspects of Metabio­ta:

High­lights of the Dis­cus­sion:

1.–” . . . . The com­man­der of the Russ­ian Nuclear, Bio­log­i­cal and Chem­i­cal Pro­tec­tion Forces, claimed there was a ‘scheme of inter­ac­tion between US gov­ern­ment agen­cies and Ukrain­ian bio­log­i­cal objects’ and point­ed to the ‘financ­ing of such activ­i­ties by struc­tures close to the cur­rent US lead­er­ship, in par­tic­u­lar the invest­ment fund Rose­mont Seneca, which is head­ed by Hunter Biden.’. . .”
2.–” . . . . Moscow’s claim that Hunter Biden helped finance a US mil­i­tary ‘bioweapons’ research pro­gram in Ukraine is at least par­tial­ly true, accord­ing to new emails obtained exclu­sive­ly by DailyMail.com. . . .”
3.–” . . . . emails from Hunter’s aban­doned lap­top show he helped secure mil­lions of dol­lars of fund­ing for Metabio­ta, a Depart­ment of Defense con­trac­tor spe­cial­iz­ing in research on pan­dem­ic-caus­ing dis­eases that could be used as bioweapons. . . .”
4.–” . . . . Metabio­ta has been an offi­cial part­ner of Eco­Health Alliance since 2014, accord­ing to its web­site. . . .”
5.–” . . . . He also intro­duced Metabio­ta to an alleged­ly cor­rupt Ukrain­ian gas firm, Buris­ma, for a ‘sci­ence project’ involv­ing high biose­cu­ri­ty lev­el labs in Ukraine . . . .”
6.–” . . . . Emails and defense con­tract data reviewed by DailyMail.com sug­gest that Hunter had a promi­nent role in mak­ing sure Metabio­ta was able to con­duct its pathogen research just a few hun­dred miles from the bor­der with Rus­sia. . . .”
7.–” . . . . Metabio­ta has worked in Ukraine for Black & Veatch, a US defense con­trac­tor with deep ties to mil­i­tary intel­li­gence agen­cies, which built secure labs in Ukraine that ana­lyzed killer dis­eases and bioweapons. . . .”
8.–” . . . . Hunter was also par­tic­u­lar­ly involved in Metabio­ta’s oper­a­tions in Ukraine. Hunter’s pitch­es to investors claimed that they not only orga­nized fund­ing for the firm, they also helped it ‘get new cus­tomers’ includ­ing ‘gov­ern­ment agen­cies in case of Metabio­ta’. . . .”
9.–” . . . . For­mer senior CIA offi­cer Sam Fad­dis, who has reviewed emails on Hunter’s lap­top, told DailyMail.com that the offer to help assert Ukraine’s inde­pen­dence was odd for a biotech exec­u­tive [Metabio­ta vice-pres­i­dent Mary Gut­tieri]. ‘It rais­es the ques­tion, what is the real pur­pose of this ven­ture? It’s very odd,’ he said. . . .”
10.–” . . . . Gut­tieri had a lead­ing role in Metabio­ta’s Ukraine oper­a­tions, meet­ing with oth­er com­pa­ny exec­u­tives and US and Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary offi­cials in Octo­ber 2016 to dis­cuss ‘coop­er­a­tion in sur­veil­lance and pre­ven­tion of espe­cial­ly dan­ger­ous infec­tious dis­eases, includ­ing zoonot­ic dis­eases in Ukraine and neigh­bor­ing coun­tries’ accord­ing to a 2016 report by the Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy Cen­ter in Ukraine. . . .”
11.–” . . . . Four days after Gut­tier­i’s April 2014 email, Buris­ma exec­u­tive Vadym Pozharskyi wrote to Hunter reveal­ing that the then-Vice Pres­i­den­t’s son had pitched a ‘sci­ence project’ involv­ing Buris­ma and Metabio­ta in Ukraine. ‘As I under­stand the Metabio­ta was a sub­con­tract to prin­ci­pal con­tac­tor of the DoD B&V [Black & Veatch]. . . .”
12.–” . . . . Fad­dis told DailyMail.com that the attempt to get Metabio­ta to form a part­ner­ship with Buris­ma was a per­plex­ing and wor­ry­ing rev­e­la­tion. ‘His father was the Vice Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States and in charge of rela­tions with Ukraine. So why was Hunter not only on the board of a sus­pect Ukrain­ian gas firm, but also hooked them up with a com­pa­ny work­ing on bioweapons research?’ Fad­dis said. . . .”
13.–” . . . . ‘The DoD posi­tion is that  . . . . this is pan­dem­ic ear­ly warn­ing research. We don’t know for sure that’s all that was going on. . . .”
14.–” . . . . Gov­ern­ment spend­ing records show the Depart­ment of Defense award­ed an $18.4million con­tract to Metabio­ta between Feb­ru­ary 2014 and Novem­ber 2016, with $307,091 ear­marked for ‘Ukraine research projects’. . . .”
15.–” . . . . The US Defense Threat Reduc­tion Agency (DTRA) also com­mis­sioned B&V to build a Bio­log­i­cal Safe­ty Lev­el 3 lab­o­ra­to­ry in Odessa, Ukraine in 2010, which ‘pro­vid­ed enhanced equip­ment and train­ing to effec­tive­ly, safe­ly and secure­ly iden­ti­fy espe­cial­ly dan­ger­ous pathogens’ accord­ing to a com­pa­ny press release. Such labs are used to ‘study infec­tious agents or tox­ins that may be trans­mit­ted through the air and cause poten­tial­ly lethal infec­tions,’ the US Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices says. . . .”
16.–” . . . . In anoth­er sign of the deep ties between Metabio­ta and the Depart­ment of Defense, Hunter’s RSTP busi­ness part­ner Rob Walk­er said he would ‘have a friend reach out to DoD on the down low’, in order to prove the com­pa­ny’s bona fides to top prospec­tive investors Gold­man Sachs and Mor­gan Stan­ley in Octo­ber 2014. . . .”
17.–” . . . . Metabio­ta also has close ties to the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy (WIV), sus­pect­ed to be the source of the COVID-19 out­break. WIV was a hotspot for con­tro­ver­sial ‘gain of func­tion’ research that can cre­ate super-strength virus­es. Chi­nese sci­en­tists per­formed gain of func­tion research on coro­n­avirus­es at the WIV, work­ing along­side a US-backed orga­ni­za­tion Eco­Health Alliance that has since drawn intense scruti­ny over its coro­n­avirus research since the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic. Researchers from the Wuhan insti­tute, Metabio­ta and Eco­Health Alliance pub­lished a study togeth­er in 2014 on infec­tious dis­eases from bats in Chi­na, which notes that tests were per­formed at the WIV. Shi Zhengli, the WIV Direc­tor of the Cen­ter for Emerg­ing Infec­tious Dis­eases who became dubbed the ‘bat lady’ for her cen­tral role in bat coro­n­avirus research at the lab, was a con­trib­u­tor to the paper. . . .”

Next, we note that Metabiota–which uses AI and social media scrap­ing (among oth­er tools) to gauge the “fear fac­tor” involved with pan­dem­ic readi­ness (and the asso­ci­at­ed pan­dem­ic insur­ance policies)–was gaug­ing the fear fac­tor for mon­key pox, which had man­i­fest­ed some human infec­tions in the Con­go as “low.”

This was in ear­ly 2020. Now, the dis­ease is on the “front burn­er,” so to speak. Peo­ple are afraid of the “new pan­dem­ic.”

Despite only 306 doc­u­ment­ed cas­es in the U.S. (as of 6/28/2022), hun­dreds of thou­sands of vac­cine dos­es are being read­ied for human use.

The dis­ease bears an epi­demi­o­log­i­cal sim­i­lar­i­ty to AIDS: an African mon­key virus infect­ing gay males with mul­ti­ple sex part­ners.

Note that the Wired Mag­a­zine arti­cle that will com­prise the bulk of this pro­gram presents the ludi­crous “chim­panzee” ori­gins of AIDS, which we ana­lyzed in FTR# 557.

Next, we review an excerpt from tes­ti­mo­ny before a House appro­pri­a­tions sub­com­mit­tee that was draw­ing up the defense bud­get for the fol­low­ing year. (The hear­ings were in 1969.) The tes­ti­mo­ny dis­cuss­es the pos­si­bil­i­ty of using genet­ic engi­neer­ing to pro­duce a dis­ease that would be “refrac­to­ry” to the immune sys­tem. This is vir­tu­al­ly the clin­i­cal def­i­n­i­tion of AIDS. It is worth not­ing that the project was fund­ed, and just such a disease—AIDS—appeared in just the time frame posit­ed. It is also worth not­ing that, in the 2002 edi­tion of A High­er Form of Killing, this pas­sage is omit­ted!!

We have cov­ered AIDS as a bio­log­i­cal war­fare weapon in numer­ous pro­grams, includ­ing: AFA#16, as well as FTR#‘s 16, 19, 606, 644, 682, 1115, 1123.

The first pro­gram con­cludes with the begin­ning of the read­ing of a long Wired Mag­a­zine arti­cle about the Metabiota/Munich Rein­sur­ance project. The read­ing is com­plet­ed in the sec­ond pro­gram.

Before read­ing the arti­cle as a whole, we high­light two key points of infor­ma­tion:

1.–The busi­ness suc­cess of the pan­dem­ic insur­ance would nec­es­sar­i­ly incor­po­rate analy­sis of the “fear fac­tor” of poten­tial pan­dem­ic pathogens: ” . . . . As sophis­ti­cat­ed as Metabiota’s sys­tem was, how­ev­er, it would need to be even more refined to incor­po­rate into an insur­ance pol­i­cy. The mod­el would need to cap­ture some­thing much more dif­fi­cult to quan­ti­fy than his­tor­i­cal deaths and med­ical stock­piles: fear. The eco­nom­ic con­se­quences of a scourge, the his­tor­i­cal data showed, were as much a result of society’s response as they were to the virus itself. . . . The Sen­ti­ment Index was built to be, as Oppen­heim put it, ‘a cat­a­log of dread.’ For any giv­en pathogen, it could spit out a score from 0 to 100 accord­ing to how fright­en­ing the pub­lic would find it. . . . Mad­hav and her team, along with Wolfe and Oppen­heim, also researched the broad­er eco­nom­ic con­se­quences of dis­ease out­breaks, mea­sured in the ‘cost per death pre­vent­ed’ incurred by soci­etal inter­ven­tions. ‘Mea­sures that decreased per­son-to-per­son con­tact, includ­ing social dis­tanc­ing, quar­an­tine, and school clo­sures, had the great­est cost per death pre­vent­ed, most like­ly because of the amount of eco­nom­ic dis­rup­tion caused by those mea­sures,’ they wrote in a 2018 paper. . . .”
2.–More sin­is­ter, still, is the fact that Metabio­ta had ana­lyzed the sce­nario of a nov­el coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic two years before it hap­pened. This appears to be the 2018 paper referred to above. Do not fail to note that, at the time that Metabio­ta was run­ning this sce­nario, they were part­nered with Eco­Health Alliance, which was using Pen­ta­gon and USAID mon­ey to research and per­form gain-of-func­tion on these types of coro­n­avirus­es!! ” . . . . As the human and eco­nom­ic dev­as­ta­tion mul­ti­plied in tan­dem across the globe, Metabiota’s employ­ees sud­den­ly found them­selves liv­ing inside their own model’s pro­jec­tions. Just two years ear­li­er, the com­pa­ny had run a large set of sce­nar­ios fore­cast­ing the con­se­quences of a nov­el coro­n­avirus spread­ing around the globe. . . .”

FTR#1250 The Ukraine War Meets “The Oswald Institute of Virology,” Part 3

This is the third pro­gram in a short series updat­ing not only our inquiry into the Covid “op” but the over­lap­ping inquiry into the Metabiota/Pentagon bio­log­i­cal research/warfare pro­gram in Ukraine.

In our “Bio-Psy-Op Apoc­a­lypse Now” pro­grams, we not­ed Gilead Sci­ences’ devel­op­ment of the Tam­i­flu anti-viral devel­oped for use in the event of a human adap­ta­tion of H5N1 avian flu.

Pre­vi­ous­ly the chair­man of Gilead­’s board of direc­tors, Defense Sec­re­tary Don­ald Rums­feld had the Pen­ta­gon stock­pile Tam­i­flu, while retain­ing gen­er­ous amounts of Gilead stock–Rumsfeld prof­it­ed hand­some­ly there­by.

We have also dis­cussed the gain-of-func­tion research done on H5N1 to make it more infec­tive in numer­ous pro­grams.

This pro­gram explores the Ukraine pro­grams and the alle­ga­tion that weaponized H5N1 was being devel­oped in that coun­try.

Our research into Metabio­ta  and the Ukraine bio­log­i­cal lab­o­ra­to­ries is dis­cussed in–among oth­er programs–FTR#1239. 

Research into the alle­ga­tion of “dig­i­tized” migra­to­ry birds to be used as weapons is high­light­ed in FTR#1243.

In this and suc­ceed­ing pro­grams, we will ana­lyze a very impor­tant arti­cle pre­sent­ing depth on a num­ber of over­lap­ping con­sid­er­a­tions about bio­log­i­cal war­fare, the Covid “op” and the Ukraine war.

Recap­ping, under­scor­ing and detail­ing an impor­tant milieu involved for decades with bio­log­i­cal war­fare advo­ca­cy, gain-of-func­tion advo­ca­cy and manip­u­la­tion of H5N1 avian flu, and research­ing the rare human out­breaks of the dis­ease:

Two fig­ures at oppo­site tem­po­ral ends of this array are Antho­ny Fau­ci and Frank Mac­far­lane Bur­net. Fau­ci has chan­neled financ­ing to gain-of-func­tion manip­u­la­tions per­formed by Ron Fouch­i­er and Yoshi­hi­ro Kawao­ka. Kawo­ka and Fouch­i­er, in turn, are net­worked with Jan De Jong and Robert G. Web­ster.

Web­ster and Kennedy Short­ridge are both colleagues/proteges of Mac­far­lane Bur­net.

The decades long net­work of research projects and curi­ous out­breaks of H5N1 among both birds and humans is detailed below:

Key Points of Analy­sis and Dis­cus­sion Include:

1.–” . . . . The emer­gence of the virus in 1997 in Hong Kong was eeri­ly pre­dict­ed by Kennedy Short­ridge, the sci­en­tist who would dis­cov­er it. H5N1 didn’t infect humans until Short­ridge and his col­leagues had been study­ing its human infec­tion poten­tial in their labs for sev­er­al years. At the time, the nat­ur­al leap of a flu direct­ly from poul­try to humans was so improb­a­ble that sci­en­tists first sus­pect­ed that it was the result of con­t­a­m­i­na­tion from Shortridge’s lab. . . .”
3.–Normally, H5N1 human infec­tions are extreme­ly rare: ” . . . . H5N1 hard­ly ever infects peo­ple. News about high­ly path­o­gen­ic avian influen­za usu­al­ly leads with how dead­ly it is. Rarely is it men­tioned that the dis­ease hard­ly ever infects peo­ple. H5N1 kills more than half of the peo­ple who get it, but H5N1 has cir­cled the globe for decades and there have only ever been 860 human infec­tions world­wide. . . .”
4.–More about how rare human infec­tions are and the rise of avian infec­tions in 2022: ” . . . . There has nev­er been an H5N1 pan­dem­ic and no human infec­tion with H5N1 bird flu has ever been iden­ti­fied in the U.S. That’s an extra­or­di­nary safe­ty record, giv­en how filthy U.S. fac­to­ry farms and slaugh­ter­hous­es are and how fast the infec­tion spreads among crowd­ed birds. So far in 2022, 29 states have report­ed out­breaks of bird flu in 213 flocks result­ing in the culling of near­ly 31 mil­lion birds, includ­ing almost 5 per­cent of egg-lay­ing hens. In 2015, it was even worse with 50 mil­lion birds culled, but there wasn’t a sin­gle human case. . . .”
5.–” . . . . Antho­ny Fau­ci has made sig­nif­i­cant invest­ments in gain-of-func­tion research to give H5N1 pan­dem­ic poten­tial, mak­ing it eas­i­ly trans­mis­si­ble from per­son to person—and Bill Gates chipped in, too! . . .”
6.–” . . . . In Feb­ru­ary 2006, Fau­ci con­vened a one-day in-house ‘NIAID Influen­za Research Sum­mit’ to  iden­ti­fy influen­za research pri­or­i­ties. In Sep­tem­ber, he opened up the top­ic to a 35-mem­ber ‘Blue Rib­bon Pan­el on Influen­za Research’ that includ­ed Fouch­i­er and Kawao­ka. The Blue Rib­bon panel’s report doesn’t men­tion gain-of-func­tion exper­i­ments, but Fau­ci gave them grants to do just that. [Ron] Fouch­i­er and [Yoshi­hi­ro] Kawaoka’s now infa­mous gain-of-func­tion research showed that, through lab manip­u­la­tion, H5N1 could be altered to become high­ly trans­mis­si­ble among humans via air­borne infec­tion. . . .”
7.–” . . . . The first human H5N1 out­break occurred in Hong Kong in 1997, the year of what the British call the ‘Hong Kong han­dover,’ when sov­er­eign­ty over Hong Kong was trans­ferred from the U.K. to Chi­na. It was dur­ing this ‘polit­i­cal­ly sen­si­tive’ year that Kennedy Short­ridge, an Aus­tralian sci­en­tist who was the direc­tor of the World Health Organization’s ref­er­ence lab­o­ra­to­ry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hong Kong, con­firmed human cas­es of high­ly path­o­gen­ic bird flu. . . .”
8.–” . . . .The 1997 Hong Kong H5N1 virus was unique in every respect. Time mag­a­zine report­ed, ‘On the H gene at a point called the cleav­age site, [was] found a tell­tale muta­tion, the same kind of muta­tion found in oth­er high­ly path­o­gen­ic avian virus­es. …The virus … had regions that were iden­ti­cal to por­tions of [an] avian virus that struck Penn­syl­va­nia [chick­ens] in 1983.” The L.A. Times report­ed, ‘The H5 piece came from a virus in a goose. The N1 piece came from a sec­ond virus in a quail. The remain­ing flu genes came from a third virus, also in quail.’ . . . .”
9.–” . . . . Short­ridge had been study­ing how avian influen­za virus­es spread to humans since 1975. Pri­or to dis­cov­er­ing H5N1, Short­ridge eeri­ly pre­dict­ed its emer­gence. As Frank Ching report­ed in ‘Bird Flu, SARS and Beyond’: As ear­ly as 1982, Short­ridge had labeled south­ern Chi­na, where humans and domes­tic ani­mals lived in close prox­im­i­ty, ‘an epi­cen­ter for the ori­gin of pan­demics.’ Ten years lat­er, he called south­ern Chi­na a ‘virus soup’ and warned that pan­dem­ic influen­za was a zoono­sis, that is, it could be trans­mit­ted from ani­mals to humans and, in 1995, he warned that influen­za in south­ern Chi­na could not prop­er­ly be called an ’emerg­ing’ infec­tion because it was con­stant­ly lurk­ing. ‘Elu­sive might be more apt,’ he wrote. . . .”
10.–” . . . . An exam­ple of Shortridge’s pen­chant for such pre­dic­tions is his 1995 Lancet arti­cle “The next pan­dem­ic influen­za virus?” Curi­ous­ly, H5N1 emerged two years lat­er, in 1997, in the same city where Short­ridge worked, Hong Kong. . . .”
11.–” . . . . At the time, the nat­ur­al leap of a flu direct­ly from poul­try to humans was thought to be so unlike­ly that sci­en­tists first sus­pect­ed con­t­a­m­i­na­tion from Shortridge’s lab was the cause of the high­ly improb­a­ble H5N1 diag­no­sis. How would that con­t­a­m­i­na­tion hap­pen unless Short­ridge hadn’t already been work­ing with H5N1 in the lab? . . .”
12.–” . . . . H5N1 didn’t cause dis­ease in humans until this poten­tial had been stud­ied in a lab for sev­er­al years. Fau­ci had been fund­ing Kawao­ka and Fouchier’s efforts to get bird flu to leap to humans since 1990 and their work was con­nect­ed to what Short­ridge was doing in Hong Kong. For sev­en years pri­or to the first human H5N1 out­break in 1997, Fau­ci had been fund­ing Kawaoka’s gain-of-func­tion bird flu research at St. Jude Children’s Research Hos­pi­tal and Kawaoka’s men­tor there, Robert G. Web­ster, was work­ing and pub­lish­ing with Short­ridge. Every year, Web­ster spent three months work­ing with Short­ridge at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hong Kong, accord­ing to this pro­file of Web­ster which men­tions Kawao­ka as his pro­tege. . . .”
13.–” . . . . The most eerie con­nec­tion between Short­ridge and Webster’s labs is that the clos­est known rel­a­tive of the 1997 Hong Kong H5N1 was the avian virus that struck Penn­syl­va­nia chick­ens in 1983—that Yoshi­hi­ro Kawao­ka had stud­ied. Accord­ing to Time mag­a­zine: Web­ster assigned a young sci­en­tist, Yoshi­hi­ro Kawao­ka, to try to fig­ure out how the [1983] virus trans­formed itself into such a ‘hot’ pathogen. Kawao­ka, now a pro­fes­sor of virol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin, Madi­son, com­pared the genet­ic struc­ture of virus­es from the first and sec­ond waves and found only a sin­gle, extreme­ly sub­tle change in the H gene. The two virus­es dif­fered by just one nucleotide–one of 1,700 nucleotides that made up the gene. . . .”
14.–”. . . . There’s also a con­nec­tion to Fouch­i­er, through his men­tor at the Eras­mus Med­ical Cen­ter in Rot­ter­dam, the Nether­lands, Jan De Jong, also a col­league and col­lab­o­ra­tor of Short­ridge and Webster’s. . . .”
15.–” . . . . Kawaoka’s col­league and men­tor Robert G. Web­ster and Fouchier’s col­league and men­tor Jan De Jong were the first sci­en­tists out­side of Hong Kong to receive sam­ples of the 1997 H5N1 flu from Shortridge’s lab. . . .”
16.–” . . . . De Jong is often cred­it­ed with being the one who iden­ti­fied the 1997 Hong Kong flu as H5N1, but he did so with ‘a pan­el of reagents to every type of flu strain yet known’ that had been brought from Webster’s lab in Mem­phis to the Nation­al Influen­za Cen­tre in Rot­ter­dam. . . .”
17.–” . . . . Kawao­ka and Fouch­i­er are of post-Bio­log­i­cal Weapons Con­ven­tion era where the weaponiza­tion of pathogens is euphemisti­cal­ly called ‘gain-of-func­tion’ research, but their old­er col­leagues, De Jong, Short­ridge and Web­ster came of age pri­or to 1972 and their men­tors were of the pre-Bio­log­i­cal Weapons Con­ven­tion era when virol­o­gists know­ing­ly and open­ly engi­neered virus­es for mil­i­tary pur­pos­es. . . .”
18.–” . . . . Short­ridge and Web­ster were trained by Frank Mac­far­lane Bur­net who served on the Aus­tralian Depart­ment of Defence’s New Weapons and Equip­ment Devel­op­ment Com­mit­tee in the 1940s and 50s. The Fed­er­a­tion of Amer­i­can Sci­en­tists lists some of the most chill­ing things Bur­net rec­om­mend­ed: Bur­net … said Aus­tralia should devel­op bio­log­i­cal weapons that would work in trop­i­cal Asia with­out spread­ing to Aus­trali­a’s more tem­per­ate pop­u­la­tion cen­tres. . . .”
19.–Burnet’s obser­va­tions: ” . . . . ‘Specif­i­cal­ly to the Aus­tralian sit­u­a­tion, the most effec­tive counter-offen­sive to threat­ened inva­sion by over­pop­u­lat­ed Asi­at­ic coun­tries would be direct­ed towards the destruc­tion by bio­log­i­cal or chem­i­cal means of trop­i­cal food crops and the dis­sem­i­na­tion of infec­tious dis­ease capa­ble of spread­ing in trop­i­cal but not under Aus­tralian con­di­tions.’ . . .”
20.–The broad­cast notes a fright­en­ing rela­tion­ship between Metabio­ta and the selec­tion of Philip Zelikow to head a com­mis­sion to deter­mine the ori­gin of Covid-19: ” . . . . In 2008, Google.org com­mit­ted $30 mil­lion to virus hunt­ing and gain-of-func­tion research on poten­tial pan­dem­ic pathogens through a project it called Pre­dict and Pre­vent. At least $5.5 mil­lion of that went to Dr. Nathan Wolfe’s non-prof­it Glob­al Viral Fore­cast­ing Ini­tia­tive, which was soon to become the for-prof­it Metabio­ta. Oth­er GVFI fun­ders at the time includ­ed the Skoll Foun­da­tion, which also gave $5.5 mil­lion, the Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion, Mer­ck Research Lab­o­ra­to­ries and the US Depart­ment of Defense. . . .”
21.–” . . . . When the GVFI became the for-prof­it Metabio­ta, Google Ven­tures con­tin­ued to invest. In addi­tion, it cre­at­ed a busi­ness part­ner­ship with Metabio­ta, ‘offer­ing its big-data exper­tise to help the com­pa­ny serve its customers–insurers, gov­ern­ment agen­cies and oth­er organizations–by offer­ing them fore­cast­ing and risk-man­age­ment tools.’ In oth­er words, they sell pan­dem­ic insur­ance. . . .”
22.–”. . . . Now that Metabio­ta has got­ten caught up in the COVID ori­gins scan­dal, its orig­i­nal investors, Eric Schmidt of Google, Jef­frey Skoll of EBay, Rajiv Shah of The Rock­e­feller Foun­da­tion (for­mer­ly USAID direc­tor, Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion) chipped in to fund the COVID Com­mis­sion Plan­ning Group, a white-wash led by Philip Zelikow who gave us the 9–11 Com­mis­sion cov­er-up. . . .”
23.–In past pro­grams, we have not­ed that David Franz, for­mer head of the U.S.A.M.R.I.I.D at Fort Det­rick was a key advi­sor to Eco­HealthAl­liance. Franz helped pro­duce the encap­su­lat­ed, weapons-grade anthrax used in the 2001 anthrax attacks: ” . . . . One of Metabiota’s PREDICT part­ners is Eco­Health Alliance, whose sci­ence and pol­i­cy advi­sor, David Franz, pro­duced the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks while work­ing for South­ern Research and part­ner­ing with sci­en­tists at Bat­telle. . . .” 

Piv­ot­ing to the sub­ject of appar­ent Russ­ian dis­cov­er­ies of an advanced Amer­i­can-financed bio­log­i­cal war­fare pro­gram in Ukraine, we access the com­men­tary of M.K. Bhadraku­mar, a for­mer Indi­an diplo­mat.

Bhadraku­mar under­scores some ter­ri­fy­ing aspects of the appar­ent B.W. pro­gram, includ­ing “dig­i­tized” migra­to­ry birds, tracked by satel­lite and fit­ted with cap­sules of dead­ly microbes. When the birds are over a tar­get­ed coun­try, they can be killed, trig­ger­ing a pan­dem­ic.

” . . . . A mind-bog­gling ‘dis­cov­ery’ that Russ­ian forces in Ukraine stum­bled upon is the use of num­bered birds by the Pen­ta­gon-fund­ed labs. . . . On the basis of this data, groups of migra­to­ry birds are caught, dig­i­tized and cap­sules of germs are attached to them that car­ry a chip to be con­trolled through com­put­ers. . . . Dur­ing the long flight of the birds that have been dig­i­tized in the Pen­ta­gon bio-labs, their move­ment is mon­i­tored step by step by means of satel­lites and the exact loca­tions are deter­mined. . . . Dur­ing the long flight of the birds that have been dig­i­tized in the Pen­ta­gon bio-labs, their move­ment is mon­i­tored step by step by means of satel­lites and the exact loca­tions are deter­mined. . . . The idea is that if the Biden Admin­is­tra­tion (or the CIA) has a require­ment to inflict harm on, say, Rus­sia or Chi­na (or India for that mat­ter), the chip is destroyed when the bird is in their skies.  Plain­ly put, kill the bird car­ry­ing the epi­dem­ic. . . . once the ‘dig­i­tized’ bird is killed and the cap­sule of germs it car­ries is released, the dis­ease spreads in the ‘X’ or ‘Y’ coun­try. It becomes a high­ly cost-effec­tive method of harm­ing an ene­my coun­try with­out any need of war or coup d’état or col­or rev­o­lu­tion. The Rus­sians have made the shock­ing claim that they are actu­al­ly in pos­ses­sion of such migra­to­ry birds dig­i­tized in the Pentagon’s bio-labs. . . .”

A 2014 blog post details a 1960’s pro­gram in India that may have been a pre­cur­sor to the appar­ent “digitized/weaponized” migra­to­ry birds pro­gram in Ukraine. 

” . . . . It appeared that a unit of the U.S. Army called Migra­to­ry Ani­mal Patho­log­i­cal Sur­vey was inter­est­ed in the project. The Army’s inter­est lay in know­ing whether bac­te­ria were being trans­mit­ted by the migrat­ing birds. The project offered an excel­lent means of inves­ti­ga­tion and there­fore had acquired an omi­nous sig­nif­i­cance. . . .”

Anoth­er pos­si­ble 1960’s pre­cur­sor of the “migra­to­ry birds of mass destruc­tion” in Ukraine was a pro­gram to place vora­cious, dis­ease-car­ry­ing Lone Star ticks in the Atlantic Fly­way, through which migra­to­ry birds trav­el from Latin Amer­i­ca through to the Amer­i­can North­east.

” . . . . The sites were locat­ed on the Atlantic Fly­way, the migra­to­ry bird super­high­way that runs along the east­ern South Amer­i­can and North Amer­i­can coasts. . . . . . . . Lone star ticks have sev­er­al sur­vival advan­tages over their deer tick cousins. They don’t wait patient­ly on a stalk of grass for pass­ing prey; they are active hunters that crawl toward any car­bon diox­ide-emit­ting ani­mal, includ­ing birds. . . . But in the 1970s, these ticks began rapid­ly expand­ing their range. 7 The first lone star tick observed on Mon­tauk, Long Island, was in 1971, and as of 2018, estab­lished pop­u­la­tions have been observed as far north as Maine. 8 . . . .  All this begs the ques­tion: What is dri­ving this mass migra­tion of the lone star tick and its dis­ease-caus­ing hitch­hik­ers north­ward? . . . .”

Is this research in any way linked to the Russ­ian alle­ga­tions of weaponiza­tion of H5N1 avian flu detailed in FTR#‘s 1248 and 1249?

FTR#1249 The Ukraine War Meets “The Oswald Institute of Virology,” Part 2

This is the sec­ond pro­gram in a short series updat­ing not only our inquiry into the Covid “op” but the over­lap­ping inquiry into the Metabiota/Pentagon bio­log­i­cal research/warfare pro­gram in Ukraine.

In our “Bio-Psy-Op Apoc­a­lypse Now” pro­grams, we not­ed Gilead Sci­ences’ devel­op­ment of the Tam­i­flu anti-viral devel­oped for use in the event of a human adap­ta­tion of H5N1 avian flu.

Pre­vi­ous­ly the chair­man of Gilead­’s board of direc­tors, Defense Sec­re­tary Don­ald Rums­feld had the Pen­ta­gon stock­pile Tam­i­flu, while retain­ing gen­er­ous amounts of Gilead stock–Rumsfeld prof­it­ed hand­some­ly there­by.

We have also dis­cussed the gain-of-func­tion research done on H5N1 to make it more infec­tive in numer­ous pro­grams.

This pro­gram explores the Ukraine pro­grams and the alle­ga­tion that weaponized H5N1 was being devel­oped in that coun­try.

Our research into Metabio­ta  and the Ukraine bio­log­i­cal lab­o­ra­to­ries is dis­cussed in–among oth­er programs–FTR#1239. 

Research into the alle­ga­tion of “dig­i­tized” migra­to­ry birds to be used as weapons is high­light­ed in FTR#1243.

In this and suc­ceed­ing pro­grams, we will ana­lyze a very impor­tant arti­cle pre­sent­ing depth on a num­ber of over­lap­ping con­sid­er­a­tions about bio­log­i­cal war­fare, the Covid “op” and the Ukraine war.

Key Points of Analy­sis and Dis­cus­sion Include:

1.–” . . . . The emer­gence of the virus in 1997 in Hong Kong was eeri­ly pre­dict­ed by Kennedy Short­ridge, the sci­en­tist who would dis­cov­er it. H5N1 didn’t infect humans until Short­ridge and his col­leagues had been study­ing its human infec­tion poten­tial in their labs for sev­er­al years. At the time, the nat­ur­al leap of a flu direct­ly from poul­try to humans was so improb­a­ble that sci­en­tists first sus­pect­ed that it was the result of con­t­a­m­i­na­tion from Shortridge’s lab. . . .”
2.–Normally, H5N1 human infec­tions are extreme­ly rare: ” . . . . H5N1 hard­ly ever infects peo­ple. News about high­ly path­o­gen­ic avian influen­za usu­al­ly leads with how dead­ly it is. Rarely is it men­tioned that the dis­ease hard­ly ever infects peo­ple. H5N1 kills more than half of the peo­ple who get it, but H5N1 has cir­cled the globe for decades and there have only ever been 860 human infec­tions world­wide. . . .”
3.–More about how rare human infec­tions are and the rise of avian infec­tions in 2022: ” . . . . There has nev­er been an H5N1 pan­dem­ic and no human infec­tion with H5N1 bird flu has ever been iden­ti­fied in the U.S. That’s an extra­or­di­nary safe­ty record, giv­en how filthy U.S. fac­to­ry farms and slaugh­ter­hous­es are and how fast the infec­tion spreads among crowd­ed birds. So far in 2022, 29 states have report­ed out­breaks of bird flu in 213 flocks result­ing in the culling of near­ly 31 mil­lion birds, includ­ing almost 5 per­cent of egg-lay­ing hens. In 2015, it was even worse with 50 mil­lion birds culled, but there wasn’t a sin­gle human case. . . .”
4.–” . . . . Antho­ny Fau­ci has made sig­nif­i­cant invest­ments in gain-of-func­tion research to give H5N1 pan­dem­ic poten­tial, mak­ing it eas­i­ly trans­mis­si­ble from per­son to person—and Bill Gates chipped in, too! . . .”
5.–” . . . . In Feb­ru­ary 2006, Fau­ci con­vened a one-day in-house ‘NIAID Influen­za Research Sum­mit’ to  iden­ti­fy influen­za research pri­or­i­ties. In Sep­tem­ber, he opened up the top­ic to a 35-mem­ber ‘Blue Rib­bon Pan­el on Influen­za Research’ that includ­ed Fouch­i­er and Kawao­ka. The Blue Rib­bon panel’s report doesn’t men­tion gain-of-func­tion exper­i­ments, but Fau­ci gave them grants to do just that. [Ron] Fouch­i­er and [Yoshi­hi­ro] Kawaoka’s now infa­mous gain-of-func­tion research showed that, through lab manip­u­la­tion, H5N1 could be altered to become high­ly trans­mis­si­ble among humans via air­borne infec­tion. . . .”
6.–” . . . . The first human H5N1 out­break occurred in Hong Kong in 1997, the year of what the British call the ‘Hong Kong han­dover,’ when sov­er­eign­ty over Hong Kong was trans­ferred from the U.K. to Chi­na. It was dur­ing this ‘polit­i­cal­ly sen­si­tive’ year that Kennedy Short­ridge, an Aus­tralian sci­en­tist who was the direc­tor of the World Health Organization’s ref­er­ence lab­o­ra­to­ry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hong Kong, con­firmed human cas­es of high­ly path­o­gen­ic bird flu. . . .”
7.–” . . . .The 1997 Hong Kong H5N1 virus was unique in every respect. Time mag­a­zine report­ed, ‘On the H gene at a point called the cleav­age site, [was] found a tell­tale muta­tion, the same kind of muta­tion found in oth­er high­ly path­o­gen­ic avian virus­es. …The virus … had regions that were iden­ti­cal to por­tions of [an] avian virus that struck Penn­syl­va­nia [chick­ens] in 1983.” The L.A. Times report­ed, ‘The H5 piece came from a virus in a goose. The N1 piece came from a sec­ond virus in a quail. The remain­ing flu genes came from a third virus, also in quail.’ . . . .”
8.–” . . . . Short­ridge had been study­ing how avian influen­za virus­es spread to humans since 1975. Pri­or to dis­cov­er­ing H5N1, Short­ridge eeri­ly pre­dict­ed its emer­gence. As Frank Ching report­ed in ‘Bird Flu, SARS and Beyond’: As ear­ly as 1982, Short­ridge had labeled south­ern Chi­na, where humans and domes­tic ani­mals lived in close prox­im­i­ty, ‘an epi­cen­ter for the ori­gin of pan­demics.’ Ten years lat­er, he called south­ern Chi­na a ‘virus soup’ and warned that pan­dem­ic influen­za was a zoono­sis, that is, it could be trans­mit­ted from ani­mals to humans and, in 1995, he warned that influen­za in south­ern Chi­na could not prop­er­ly be called an ’emerg­ing’ infec­tion because it was con­stant­ly lurk­ing. ‘Elu­sive might be more apt,’ he wrote. . . .”
9.–” . . . . An exam­ple of Shortridge’s pen­chant for such pre­dic­tions is his 1995 Lancet arti­cle “The next pan­dem­ic influen­za virus?” Curi­ous­ly, H5N1 emerged two years lat­er, in 1997, in the same city where Short­ridge worked, Hong Kong. . . .”
10.–” . . . . At the time, the nat­ur­al leap of a flu direct­ly from poul­try to humans was thought to be so unlike­ly that sci­en­tists first sus­pect­ed con­t­a­m­i­na­tion from Shortridge’s lab was the cause of the high­ly improb­a­ble H5N1 diag­no­sis. How would that con­t­a­m­i­na­tion hap­pen unless Short­ridge hadn’t already been work­ing with H5N1 in the lab? . . .”
11.–” . . . . H5N1 didn’t cause dis­ease in humans until this poten­tial had been stud­ied in a lab for sev­er­al years. Fau­ci had been fund­ing Kawao­ka and Fouchier’s efforts to get bird flu to leap to humans since 1990 and their work was con­nect­ed to what Short­ridge was doing in Hong Kong. For sev­en years pri­or to the first human H5N1 out­break in 1997, Fau­ci had been fund­ing Kawaoka’s gain-of-func­tion bird flu research at St. Jude Children’s Research Hos­pi­tal and Kawaoka’s men­tor there, Robert G. Web­ster, was work­ing and pub­lish­ing with Short­ridge. Every year, Web­ster spent three months work­ing with Short­ridge at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hong Kong, accord­ing to this pro­file of Web­ster which men­tions Kawao­ka as his pro­tege. . . .”
12.–” . . . . The most eerie con­nec­tion between Short­ridge and Webster’s labs is that the clos­est known rel­a­tive of the 1997 Hong Kong H5N1 was the avian virus that struck Penn­syl­va­nia chick­ens in 1983—that Yoshi­hi­ro Kawao­ka had stud­ied. Accord­ing to Time mag­a­zine: Web­ster assigned a young sci­en­tist, Yoshi­hi­ro Kawao­ka, to try to fig­ure out how the [1983] virus trans­formed itself into such a ‘hot’ pathogen. Kawao­ka, now a pro­fes­sor of virol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin, Madi­son, com­pared the genet­ic struc­ture of virus­es from the first and sec­ond waves and found only a sin­gle, extreme­ly sub­tle change in the H gene. The two virus­es dif­fered by just one nucleotide–one of 1,700 nucleotides that made up the gene. . . .”
13.–”. . . . There’s also a con­nec­tion to Fouch­i­er, through his men­tor at the Eras­mus Med­ical Cen­ter in Rot­ter­dam, the Nether­lands, Jan De Jong, also a col­league and col­lab­o­ra­tor of Short­ridge and Webster’s. . . .”
14.–” . . . . Kawaoka’s col­league and men­tor Robert G. Web­ster and Fouchier’s col­league and men­tor Jan De Jong were the first sci­en­tists out­side of Hong Kong to receive sam­ples of the 1997 H5N1 flu from Shortridge’s lab. . . .”
15.–” . . . . De Jong is often cred­it­ed with being the one who iden­ti­fied the 1997 Hong Kong flu as H5N1, but he did so with ‘a pan­el of reagents to every type of flu strain yet known’ that had been brought from Webster’s lab in Mem­phis to the Nation­al Influen­za Cen­tre in Rot­ter­dam. . . .”
16.–” . . . . Kawao­ka and Fouch­i­er are of post-Bio­log­i­cal Weapons Con­ven­tion era where the weaponiza­tion of pathogens is euphemisti­cal­ly called ‘gain-of-func­tion’ research, but their old­er col­leagues, De Jong, Short­ridge and Web­ster came of age pri­or to 1972 and their men­tors were of the pre-Bio­log­i­cal Weapons Con­ven­tion era when virol­o­gists know­ing­ly and open­ly engi­neered virus­es for mil­i­tary pur­pos­es. . . .”
17.–” . . . . Short­ridge and Web­ster were trained by Frank Mac­far­lane Bur­net who served on the Aus­tralian Depart­ment of Defence’s New Weapons and Equip­ment Devel­op­ment Com­mit­tee in the 1940s and 50s. The Fed­er­a­tion of Amer­i­can Sci­en­tists lists some of the most chill­ing things Bur­net rec­om­mend­ed: Bur­net … said Aus­tralia should devel­op bio­log­i­cal weapons that would work in trop­i­cal Asia with­out spread­ing to Aus­trali­a’s more tem­per­ate pop­u­la­tion cen­tres. . . .”
18.–Burnet’s obser­va­tions: ” . . . . ‘Specif­i­cal­ly to the Aus­tralian sit­u­a­tion, the most effec­tive counter-offen­sive to threat­ened inva­sion by over­pop­u­lat­ed Asi­at­ic coun­tries would be direct­ed towards the destruc­tion by bio­log­i­cal or chem­i­cal means of trop­i­cal food crops and the dis­sem­i­na­tion of infec­tious dis­ease capa­ble of spread­ing in trop­i­cal but not under Aus­tralian con­di­tions.’ . . .”
18.–The broad­cast notes a fright­en­ing rela­tion­ship between Metabio­ta and the selec­tion of Philip Zelikow to head a com­mis­sion to deter­mine the ori­gin of Covid-19: ” . . . . In 2008, Google.org com­mit­ted $30 mil­lion to virus hunt­ing and gain-of-func­tion research on poten­tial pan­dem­ic pathogens through a project it called Pre­dict and Pre­vent. At least $5.5 mil­lion of that went to Dr. Nathan Wolfe’s non-prof­it Glob­al Viral Fore­cast­ing Ini­tia­tive, which was soon to become the for-prof­it Metabio­ta. Oth­er GVFI fun­ders at the time includ­ed the Skoll Foun­da­tion, which also gave $5.5 mil­lion, the Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion, Mer­ck Research Lab­o­ra­to­ries and the US Depart­ment of Defense. . . .”
19.–” . . . . When the GVFI became the for-prof­it Metabio­ta, Google Ven­tures con­tin­ued to invest. In addi­tion, it cre­at­ed a busi­ness part­ner­ship with Metabio­ta, ‘offer­ing its big-data exper­tise to help the com­pa­ny serve its customers–insurers, gov­ern­ment agen­cies and oth­er organizations–by offer­ing them fore­cast­ing and risk-man­age­ment tools.’ In oth­er words, they sell pan­dem­ic insur­ance. . . .”
20.–”. . . . Now that Metabio­ta has got­ten caught up in the COVID ori­gins scan­dal, its orig­i­nal investors, Eric Schmidt of Google, Jef­frey Skoll of EBay, Rajiv Shah of The Rock­e­feller Foun­da­tion (for­mer­ly USAID direc­tor, Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion) chipped in to fund the COVID Com­mis­sion Plan­ning Group, a white-wash led by Philip Zelikow who gave us the 9–11 Com­mis­sion cov­er-up. . . .”
21.–In past pro­grams, we have not­ed that David Franz, for­mer head of the U.S.A.M.R.I.I.D at Fort Det­rick was a key advi­sor to Eco­Health Alliance. Franz helped pro­duce the encap­su­lat­ed, weapons-grade anthrax used in the 2001 anthrax attacks: ” . . . . One of Metabiota’s PREDICT part­ners is Eco­Health Alliance, whose sci­ence and pol­i­cy advi­sor, David Franz, pro­duced the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks while work­ing for South­ern Research and part­ner­ing with sci­en­tists at Bat­telle. . . .” 

FTR#1248 The Ukraine War Meets The “Oswald Institute of Virology,” Part 1

This is the first pro­gram in a short series updat­ing not only our inquiry into the Covid “op” but the over­lap­ping inquiry into the Metabiota/Pentagon bio­log­i­cal research/warfare pro­gram in Ukraine.

In our “Bio-Psy-Op Apoc­a­lypse Now” pro­grams, we not­ed Gilead Sci­ences’ devel­op­ment of the Tam­i­flu anti-viral devel­oped for use in the event of a human adap­ta­tion of H5N1 avian flu.

Pre­vi­ous­ly the chair­man of Gilead­’s board of direc­tors, Defense Sec­re­tary Don­ald Rums­feld had the Pen­ta­gon stock­pile Tam­i­flu, while retain­ing gen­er­ous amounts of Gilead stock–Rumsfeld prof­it­ed hand­some­ly there­by.

We have also dis­cussed the gain-of-func­tion research done on H5N1 to make it more infec­tive in numer­ous pro­grams.

This pro­gram explores the Ukraine pro­grams and the alle­ga­tion that weaponized H5N1 was being devel­oped in that coun­try.

Our research into Metabio­ta  and the Ukraine bio­log­i­cal lab­o­ra­to­ries is dis­cussed in–among oth­er programs–FTR#1239. 

Research into the alle­ga­tion of “dig­i­tized” migra­to­ry birds to be used as weapons is high­light­ed in FTR#1243.

In this and suc­ceed­ing pro­grams, we will ana­lyze a very impor­tant arti­cle pre­sent­ing depth on a num­ber of over­lap­ping con­sid­er­a­tions about bio­log­i­cal war­fare, the Covid “op” and the Ukraine war.

Key Points of Analy­sis and Dis­cus­sion Include:

1.–” . . . . The emer­gence of the virus in 1997 in Hong Kong was eeri­ly pre­dict­ed by Kennedy Short­ridge, the sci­en­tist who would dis­cov­er it. H5N1 didn’t infect humans until Short­ridge and his col­leagues had been study­ing its human infec­tion poten­tial in their labs for sev­er­al years. At the time, the nat­ur­al leap of a flu direct­ly from poul­try to humans was so improb­a­ble that sci­en­tists first sus­pect­ed that it was the result of con­t­a­m­i­na­tion from Shortridge’s lab. . . .”
2.–Normally, H5N1 human infec­tions are extreme­ly rare: ” . . . . H5N1 hard­ly ever infects peo­ple. News about high­ly path­o­gen­ic avian influen­za usu­al­ly leads with how dead­ly it is. Rarely is it men­tioned that the dis­ease hard­ly ever infects peo­ple. H5N1 kills more than half of the peo­ple who get it, but H5N1 has cir­cled the globe for decades and there have only ever been 860 human infec­tions world­wide. . . .”
3.–More about how rare human infec­tions are and the rise of avian infec­tions in 2022: ” . . . . There has nev­er been an H5N1 pan­dem­ic and no human infec­tion with H5N1 bird flu has ever been iden­ti­fied in the U.S. That’s an extra­or­di­nary safe­ty record, giv­en how filthy U.S. fac­to­ry farms and slaugh­ter­hous­es are and how fast the infec­tion spreads among crowd­ed birds. So far in 2022, 29 states have report­ed out­breaks of bird flu in 213 flocks result­ing in the culling of near­ly 31 mil­lion birds, includ­ing almost 5 per­cent of egg-lay­ing hens. In 2015, it was even worse with 50 mil­lion birds culled, but there wasn’t a sin­gle human case. . . .”
4.–” . . . . Antho­ny Fau­ci has made sig­nif­i­cant invest­ments in gain-of-func­tion research to give H5N1 pan­dem­ic poten­tial, mak­ing it eas­i­ly trans­mis­si­ble from per­son to person—and Bill Gates chipped in, too! . . .”
5.–” . . . . In Feb­ru­ary 2006, Fau­ci con­vened a one-day in-house ‘NIAID Influen­za Research Sum­mit’ to  iden­ti­fy influen­za research pri­or­i­ties. In Sep­tem­ber, he opened up the top­ic to a 35-mem­ber ‘Blue Rib­bon Pan­el on Influen­za Research’ that includ­ed Fouch­i­er and Kawao­ka. The Blue Rib­bon panel’s report doesn’t men­tion gain-of-func­tion exper­i­ments, but Fau­ci gave them grants to do just that. [Ron] Fouch­i­er and [Yoshi­hi­ro] Kawaoka’s now infa­mous gain-of-func­tion research showed that, through lab manip­u­la­tion, H5N1 could be altered to become high­ly trans­mis­si­ble among humans via air­borne infec­tion. . . .”
6.–” . . . . H5N1 didn’t cause dis­ease in humans until this poten­tial had been stud­ied in a lab for sev­er­al years. Fau­ci had been fund­ing Kawao­ka and Fouchier’s efforts to get bird flu to leap to humans since 1990 and their work was con­nect­ed to what Short­ridge was doing in Hong Kong. For sev­en years pri­or to the first human H5N1 out­break in 1997, Fau­ci had been fund­ing Kawaoka’s gain-of-func­tion bird flu research at St. Jude Children’s Research Hos­pi­tal and Kawaoka’s men­tor there, Robert G. Web­ster, was work­ing and pub­lish­ing with Short­ridge. Every year, Web­ster spent three months work­ing with Short­ridge at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hong Kong, accord­ing to this pro­file of Web­ster which men­tions Kawao­ka as his pro­tege. . . .”
7.–” . . . . The most eerie con­nec­tion between Short­ridge and Webster’s labs is that the clos­est known rel­a­tive of the 1997 Hong Kong H5N1 was the avian virus that struck Penn­syl­va­nia chick­ens in 1983—that Yoshi­hi­ro Kawao­ka had stud­ied. Accord­ing to Time mag­a­zine: Web­ster assigned a young sci­en­tist, Yoshi­hi­ro Kawao­ka, to try to fig­ure out how the [1983] virus trans­formed itself into such a ‘hot’ pathogen. Kawao­ka, now a pro­fes­sor of virol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin, Madi­son, com­pared the genet­ic struc­ture of virus­es from the first and sec­ond waves and found only a sin­gle, extreme­ly sub­tle change in the H gene. The two virus­es dif­fered by just one nucleotide–one of 1,700 nucleotides that made up the gene. . . .”
8.–”. . . . There’s also a con­nec­tion to Fouch­i­er, through his men­tor at the Eras­mus Med­ical Cen­ter in Rot­ter­dam, the Nether­lands, Jan De Jong, also a col­league and col­lab­o­ra­tor of Short­ridge and Webster’s. . . .”
9.–” . . . . Kawaoka’s col­league and men­tor Robert G. Web­ster and Fouchier’s col­league and men­tor Jan De Jong were the first sci­en­tists out­side of Hong Kong to receive sam­ples of the 1997 H5N1 flu from Shortridge’s lab. . . .”
10.–” . . . . De Jong is often cred­it­ed with being the one who iden­ti­fied the 1997 Hong Kong flu as H5N1, but he did so with ‘a pan­el of reagents to every type of flu strain yet known’ that had been brought from Webster’s lab in Mem­phis to the Nation­al Influen­za Cen­tre in Rot­ter­dam. . . .”
11.–” . . . . Kawao­ka and Fouch­i­er are of post-Bio­log­i­cal Weapons Con­ven­tion era where the weaponiza­tion of pathogens is euphemisti­cal­ly called ‘gain-of-func­tion’ research, but their old­er col­leagues, De Jong, Short­ridge and Web­ster came of age pri­or to 1972 and their men­tors were of the pre-Bio­log­i­cal Weapons Con­ven­tion era when virol­o­gists know­ing­ly and open­ly engi­neered virus­es for mil­i­tary pur­pos­es. . . .”
12.–” . . . . Short­ridge and Web­ster were trained by Frank Mac­far­lane Bur­net who served on the Aus­tralian Depart­ment of Defence’s New Weapons and Equip­ment Devel­op­ment Com­mit­tee in the 1940s and 50s. The Fed­er­a­tion of Amer­i­can Sci­en­tists lists some of the most chill­ing things Bur­net rec­om­mend­ed: Bur­net … said Aus­tralia should devel­op bio­log­i­cal weapons that would work in trop­i­cal Asia with­out spread­ing to Aus­trali­a’s more tem­per­ate pop­u­la­tion cen­tres. . . .”
13.–Burnet’s obser­va­tions: ” . . . . ‘Specif­i­cal­ly to the Aus­tralian sit­u­a­tion, the most effec­tive counter-offen­sive to threat­ened inva­sion by over­pop­u­lat­ed Asi­at­ic coun­tries would be direct­ed towards the destruc­tion by bio­log­i­cal or chem­i­cal means of trop­i­cal food crops and the dis­sem­i­na­tion of infec­tious dis­ease capa­ble of spread­ing in trop­i­cal but not under Aus­tralian con­di­tions.’ . . .”
14.–The broad­cast notes a fright­en­ing rela­tion­ship between Metabio­ta and the selec­tion of Philip Zelikow to head a com­mis­sion to deter­mine the ori­gin of Covid-19: ” . . . . In 2008, Google.org com­mit­ted $30 mil­lion to virus hunt­ing and gain-of-func­tion research on poten­tial pan­dem­ic pathogens through a project it called Pre­dict and Pre­vent. At least $5.5 mil­lion of that went to Dr. Nathan Wolfe’s non-prof­it Glob­al Viral Fore­cast­ing Ini­tia­tive, which was soon to become the for-prof­it Metabio­ta. Oth­er GVFI fun­ders at the time includ­ed the Skoll Foun­da­tion, which also gave $5.5 mil­lion, the Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion, Mer­ck Research Lab­o­ra­to­ries and the US Depart­ment of Defense. . . .”
15.–” . . . . When the GVFI became the for-prof­it Metabio­ta, Google Ven­tures con­tin­ued to invest. In addi­tion, it cre­at­ed a busi­ness part­ner­ship with Metabio­ta, ‘offer­ing its big-data exper­tise to help the com­pa­ny serve its customers–insurers, gov­ern­ment agen­cies and oth­er organizations–by offer­ing them fore­cast­ing and risk-man­age­ment tools.’ In oth­er words, they sell pan­dem­ic insur­ance. . . .”
16.–”. . . . Now that Metabio­ta has got­ten caught up in the COVID ori­gins scan­dal, its orig­i­nal investors, Eric Schmidt of Google, Jef­frey Skoll of EBay, Rajiv Shah of The Rock­e­feller Foun­da­tion (for­mer­ly USAID direc­tor, Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion) chipped in to fund the COVID Com­mis­sion Plan­ning Group, a white-wash led by Philip Zelikow who gave us the 9–11 Com­mis­sion cov­er-up. . . .”
17.–In past pro­grams, we have not­ed that David Franz, for­mer head of the U.S.A.M.R.I.I.D at Fort Det­rick was a key advi­sor to Eco­HealthAl­liance. Franz helped pro­duce the encap­su­lat­ed, weapons-grade anthrax used in the 2001 anthrax attacks: ” . . . . One of Metabiota’s PREDICT part­ners is Eco­Health Alliance, whose sci­ence and pol­i­cy advi­sor, David Franz, pro­duced the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks while work­ing for South­ern Research and part­ner­ing with sci­en­tists at Bat­telle. . . .” 

FTR#1247 How Many Lies Before You Belong to The Lies?, Part 20

This pro­gram fea­tures a read­ing of an inter­view done with Colonel Jacques Baud by The Pos­til.

Key Points of Dis­cus­sion and Analy­sis: As with the two ana­lyt­i­cal pieces Baud did on the con­duct and progress of the war itself, Colonel Baud stress­es that the pic­ture of the Ukraine War being pre­sent­ed by West­ern politi­cians and media voic­es con­sists of what they want to hap­pen, rather than the infor­ma­tion that would be pro­vid­ed by a good intel­li­gence ser­vice, which would present the sit­u­a­tion as it actu­al­ly exists:

1.–“ . . . . As a result, we tend to por­tray the ene­my as we wished him to be, rather than as he actu­al­ly is. This is the ulti­mate recipe for fail­ure. . . .”
2.–“ . . . . First, most peo­ple, includ­ing politi­cians and jour­nal­ists, still con­fuse Rus­sia and the USSR. For instance, they don’t under­stand why the com­mu­nist par­ty is the main oppo­si­tion par­ty in Rus­sia. . . .”
3.–“ . . . . Most peo­ple, includ­ing the top brass, tend to con­fuse ‘Rus­sia’ and ‘USSR.’ As I was in NATO, I could hard­ly find some­one who could explain what Russia’s vision of the world is or even its polit­i­cal doc­trine. Lot of peo­ple think Vladimir Putin is a com­mu­nist. . . .”
4.–“ . . . . In 2014, dur­ing the Maid­an rev­o­lu­tion in Kiev, I was in NATO in Brus­sels. I noticed that peo­ple didn’t assess the sit­u­a­tion as it was, but as they wished it would be. This is exact­ly what Sun Tzu describes as the first step towards fail­ure. . . .”
5.–“ . . . . We like to call him [Putin] a ‘dic­ta­tor,’ but we have a hard time to explain what we mean by that. As exam­ples, peo­ple come up invari­ably with the assas­si­na­tion of such and such jour­nal­ist or for­mer FSB or GRU agents, although evi­dence is extreme­ly debat­able. . . .”
6.–“ . . . . the Ger­man doc­tors in the Char­ité Hos­pi­tal in Berlin, were not able to iden­ti­fy any nerve agent in Navalny’s body. Sur­pris­ing­ly, they pub­lished their find­ingsin the respect­ed med­ical review The Lancet, show­ing that Naval­ny prob­a­bly expe­ri­enced a bad com­bi­na­tion of med­i­cine and oth­er sub­stances. The Swedish mil­i­tary lab that ana­lyzed Navalny’s blood—redacted the name of the sub­stance they dis­cov­ered, which is odd since every­body expect­ed ‘Novi­chok’ to be men­tioned. . . .”
7.–“ . . . . In fact, it appeared clear to me that nobody in NATO had the slight­est inter­est in Ukraine. The main goal was to desta­bi­lize Rus­sia. . . .”
8.–“ . . . . The prob­lem here is that these far-right fanat­ics threat­ened to kill Zelen­sky were he to try to make peace with Rus­sia. As a result, Zelen­sky found him­self sit­ting between his promis­es and the vio­lent oppo­si­tion of an increas­ing­ly pow­er­ful far-right move­ment. In May 2019, on the Ukrain­ian media Obozre­va­tel, Dmytro Yarosh, head of the ‘Pravy Sek­tor’ mili­tia and advis­er to the Army Com­man­der in Chief, open­ly threat­ened Zelen­sky with death, if he came to an agree­ment with Rus­sia. . . .”
9.–“ . . . . I am not sure about the so-called ‘col­or-rev­o­lu­tions’ aim at spread­ing democ­ra­cy. My take is that it is just a way to weaponize human rights, the rule of law or democ­ra­cy in order to achieve geo-strate­gic objec­tives. . . .”
10.–“ . . . . Ukraine is a case in point. After 2014, despite West­ern influ­ence, it has nev­er been a democ­ra­cy: cor­rup­tion soared between 2014 and 2020; in 2021, it banned oppo­si­tion media and jailed the leader of the main par­lia­men­tary oppo­si­tion par­ty. As some inter­na­tion­al orga­ni­za­tions have report­ed, tor­ture is a com­mon prac­tice, and oppo­si­tion lead­ers as well as jour­nal­ists are chased­by the Ukrain­ian Secu­ri­ty Ser­vice. . . .”
11.–“ . . . . But as soon as you come up with west­ern data that do not fit into the main­stream nar­ra­tive, you have extrem­ists claim­ing you ‘love Putin.’ . . .”
12.–“ . . . . Our media are so wor­ried about find­ing ratio­nal­i­ty in Putin’s actions that they turn a blind eye to the crimes com­mit­ted by Ukraine, thus gen­er­at­ing a feel­ing of impuni­ty for which Ukraini­ans are pay­ing the price. This is the case of the attack on civil­ians by a mis­sile in Kramatorsk—we no longer talk about it because the respon­si­bil­i­ty of Ukraine is very like­ly, but this means that the Ukraini­ans could do it again with impuni­ty. . . .”
13.–“ . . . . With the end of the Cold War, Rus­sia expect­ed being able to devel­op clos­er rela­tions with its West­ern neigh­bors. It even con­sid­ered join­ing NATO. But the US resist­ed every attempt of rap­proche­ment. . . .”
14.–“ . . . . The pur­pose of this incred­i­ble polar­iza­tion is to pre­vent any dia­logue or nego­ti­a­tion with Rus­sia. We are back to what hap­pened in 1914, just before the start of WWI. . . .”
15.–“ . . . . Since 2014, I haven’t met any intel­li­gence pro­fes­sion­al who could con­firm any Russ­ian mil­i­tary pres­ence in the Don­bass. In fact, Crimea became the main ‘evi­dence’ of Russ­ian ‘inter­ven­tion.’ Of course, West­ern his­to­ri­ans ignore superbly that Crimea was sep­a­rat­ed from Ukraine by ref­er­en­dum in Jan­u­ary 1990, six months before Ukrain­ian inde­pen­dence and under Sovi­et rule. In fact, it’s Ukraine that ille­gal­ly annexed Crimea in 1995. . . .”
16.–“ . . . . Regard­less of what Rus­sia does, US and west­ern strat­e­gy is to weak­en it. From that point on, Rus­sia has no real stake in its rela­tions with us. Again, the US objec­tive is not to have a ‘bet­ter’ Ukraine or a ‘bet­ter’ Rus­sia, but a weak­er Rus­sia. . . .”
17.–“ . . . . As Hen­ry Kissinger said in the Wash­ing­ton Post: ‘For the West, the demo­niza­tion of Vladimir Putin is not a pol­i­cy; it is an ali­bi for the absence of one.’ . . .”
18.–“ . . . . I think the decay of US hege­mo­ny will be the main fea­ture of the next decades. . . . . The loss of con­fi­dence in the US dol­lar may have sig­nif­i­cant impact on the US econ­o­my at large. . . . a sig­nif­i­cant dete­ri­o­ra­tion could lead the Unit­ed States to engage in more con­flicts around the world. This is some­thing that we are see­ing today . . . .”

FTR#1246 How Many Lies Before You Belong to The Lies?, Part 19

In this pro­gram, we present a sec­ond analy­sis of Colonel Jacques Baud’s analy­sis of the mil­i­tary sit­u­a­tion in the Ukraine war.

Key Points of Dis­cus­sion and Analy­sis: Colonel Baud recaps his analy­sis pre­sent­ed in his first article—that the move on Kiev was a diver­sion and the main “Schw­er­punkt” of the Russ­ian offen­sive is encir­cling the bulk of the Ukrain­ian forces con­cen­trat­ed on the bor­der of the Don­bass; Baud’s con­tention that the West fun­da­men­tal­ly mis­in­ter­pret­ed Russia’s oper­a­tion because its ana­lysts saw Russ­ian intent as being what the West would have done—trying to cap­ture the cap­i­tal in order to effect “regime change;” West­ern polit­i­cal and media pun­dits are see­ing things as they want them to be and not how they are; The West’s divorce from accu­rate intel­li­gence pro­vid­ed by intel­li­gence ser­vices; The West’s reliance on fun­da­men­tal­ly unre­li­able Ukrain­ian bat­tle­field “intel­li­gence;” The West’s sub­ver­sion of the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a nego­ti­at­ed set­tle­ment by send­ing Ukraine weapons in the hope/belief that Ukraine has a chance of win­ning; Baud sup­ports the view expressed in pre­vi­ous pro­grams that Rus­sia is NOT indis­crim­i­nate­ly bomb­ing civil­ian pop­u­la­tions; Baud points out that Rus­sia empha­sizes action involv­ing ground troops and does not engage in the kind of mas­sive aer­i­al bom­bard­ment that pro­duced mas­sive civil­ian casu­al­ties in West­ern mil­i­tary cam­paigns; Baud points out that Russ­ian mil­i­tary action is pri­mar­i­ly in the eth­nic Russ­ian areas of Ukraine in which the civil­ian pop­u­la­tion is not hos­tile to their forces; Con­verse­ly, the Ukrain­ian “ultra-nation­al­ist” forces are deployed in cities where the civil­ian pop­u­la­tion has no con­nec­tion with the com­bat­ants, max­i­miz­ing civil­ian loss­es; Dis­cus­sion of the Russ­ian offi­cers lead­ing from the rear—leading to high­er casu­al­ties and fun­da­men­tal mis­un­der­stand­ing of this by West­ern com­men­ta­tors; Dis­cus­sion of for­eign “vol­un­teers” fight­ing for Ukraine and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of West­ern weapon­ry falling into the hands of future ter­ror­ists-to-be; Baud’s belief that U.S. and Ger­man intel­li­gence knew of the Ukrain­ian intent to attack the Don­bass, delib­er­ate­ly push­ing Ukraine into the war; “Ukraine was thus instru­men­tal­ized to affect Rus­sia;” Baud reit­er­ates his con­tention that the West and France’s Macron, in par­tic­u­lar, com­plete­ly under­mined diplo­ma­cy and uphold­ing the Min­sk agree­ments; A dis­turb­ing truth con­cern­ing Putin’s plac­ing of Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert; “ . . . . it fol­lowed the thin­ly veiled threat made by Jean-Yves Le Dri­an, three days ear­li­er, that NATO could use nuclear weapons . . .”; The increas­ing vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty of the West to manip­u­la­tion by “false-flag oper­a­tions;” The fact that Rus­sia destroyed its stock­pile of bio­log­i­cal weapons and the West has not; “ . . . . But in the cur­rent atmos­phere, all the con­di­tions are now met for an inci­dent to hap­pen that would push the West to become more involved, in some form, in the Ukrain­ian con­flict (a “false-flag” inci­dent). . . .”

The pro­gram con­cludes with pre­sen­ta­tion of an inter­view with Jacques Baud, which will be read in full in our next pro­gram.

FTR#1245 How Many Lies Before You Belong to The Lie?, Part 18

The sec­ond of a pro­ject­ed four-part dis­cus­sion of the deci­sive­ly impor­tant work of for­mer Swiss intel­li­gence offi­cer Jacques Baud, this pro­gram presents and details fun­da­men­tals of the Ukraine war and the his­to­ry lead­ing up to it. This analy­sis will be sup­ple­ment­ed in the remain­ing pro­grams in the series.

His CV is pre­sent­ed below, and will be sup­ple­ment­ed by more detail in an inter­view pre­sent­ed with him.

The read­ing of this arti­cle is con­tin­ued from our last pro­gram. 

Baud points out that the pre­sen­ta­tion of the war in the West is bad­ly skewed, with politi­cians and media pur­su­ing ide­ol­o­gized fan­tasies, rather than sub­stan­tive analy­sis com­ing from intel­li­gence agen­cies.

The essence of Baud’s war analy­sis is pre­sen­ta­tion of com­pelling doc­u­men­ta­tion that the Ukraine war was begun by the West—the U.S. and NATO in particular—in order to weak­en Rus­sia.

Facil­i­tat­ing a mur­der­ous pro­gram of sys­tem­at­ic atroc­i­ty com­mit­ted by Ukraine’s gov­ern­ment against the Russ­ian-speak­ing minor­i­ty of Ukraine, it is the West and the Biden admin­is­tra­tion in par­tic­u­lar, that bear respon­si­bil­i­ty for the con­flict.

As will be seen, analy­sis of the actu­al con­flict itself is fun­da­men­tal­ly skewed in the U.S. and Europe. Far from being “incom­pe­tent,” Rus­sia quick­ly exe­cut­ed maneu­ver war­fare to cut-off the bulk of the Ukrain­ian army, which was poised for a lethal offen­sive against the Russ­ian-speak­ing East.

Russia’s pri­ma­ry objective—completely mis­un­der­stood in the West and sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly mis­rep­re­sent­ed by polit­i­cal and media inter­ests alike—was large­ly achieved with­in a short peri­od.

The Russ­ian forces occu­pied ter­ri­to­ry rough­ly equiv­a­lent to the U.K in a mat­ter of days, fix­ing Ukrain­ian forces with a diver­sion­ary move toward Kiev, elim­i­nat­ing Ukraine’s abil­i­ty to move large num­bers of troops and trap­ping the pri­ma­ry Ukrain­ian forces in the East.

This will be more com­plete­ly dis­cussed, ana­lyzed and pre­sent­ed in the remain­ing pro­grams fea­tur­ing Baud’s work.

 Key Points of Analy­sis and Dis­cus­sion Include: Baud’s first-hand involve­ment in NATO train­ing of the Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary; Baud’s for­mer posi­tion as chief of Swiss intelligence’s divi­sion on War­saw pact forces dur­ing the Cold War; Baud’s exten­sive UN expe­ri­ence on pro­lif­er­a­tion of small arms, their dis­tri­b­u­tion to civil­ian pop­u­la­tions and the dele­te­ri­ous effects of that dis­tri­b­u­tion; The fun­da­men­tal, insti­tu­tion­al­ized dis­tor­tion of the conflict—politicians and media ignor­ing real­i­ty (includ­ing and espe­cial­ly that pre­sent­ed by intel­li­gence pro­fes­sion­als) and incul­cat­ing the pub­lic (and them­selves) with an inflam­ma­to­ry, demon­stra­bly false nar­ra­tive that engen­ders a dan­ger­ous pol­i­cy of esca­la­tion; The essen­tial mis­un­der­stand­ing of the gen­e­sis of the Ukrain­ian con­flict; The cen­tral issue of the post-Maid­an government’s ban­ning of the Russ­ian lan­guage in Ukraine’s East­ern dis­tricts; The fun­da­men­tal mis­un­der­stand­ing of, and mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of, the civ­il war in Ukraine’s East as a dynam­ic involv­ing “Russ­ian Sep­a­ratists” and “inter­fer­ence” by Putin; Putin’s advice to the Russ­ian-speak­ing East­ern dis­tricts NOT to seek a ref­er­en­dum on auton­o­my; The Ukrain­ian government’s launch of an ill-fat­ed mil­i­tary sup­pres­sion against those dis­tricts; The fun­da­men­tal cor­rup­tion and inep­ti­tude of the post-Maid­an Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary; The false nar­ra­tive dis­trib­uted in the west that Rus­sia was involved in any way with the civ­il war in East­ern Ukraine; The fail­ure of the civ­il war against the East­ern dis­tricts because of that inep­ti­tude; The defec­tion of large “maneu­ver” units of the Ukrain­ian armed forces—armor, artillery and mis­sile for­ma­tions; The mon­u­men­tal fail­ure to report for duty of the Ukrain­ian reserve per­son­nel; Ukraine’s piv­ot to NATO to form the Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary; Jacques Baud’s role in that attempt­ed for­ma­tion; NATO’s cre­ation of the fas­cist “reprisal units,” exem­pli­fied by the Azov Reg­i­ment; The Azov regiment’s sym­bol­ic, and his­tor­i­cal nos­tal­gia for the ”Das Reich” Division—2nd Waf­fen SS; The oper­a­tional strength of the NATO-cre­at­ed fas­cist ter­ri­to­r­i­al defense units—102,000; The real­i­ty behind a 2021” hijack­ing of a RyanAir flight in Belarus; the fact that the “journalist”—Roman Protassevitch—was a promi­nent mem­ber of the Azov reg­i­ment; the fact that the action was in keep­ing with the rules of force; The war’s gen­e­sis with a Ukrain­ian cam­paign to con­quer and dec­i­mate the Russ­ian-speak­ing regions of the East; the Duma’s advo­ca­cy of diplo­mat­ic recog­ni­tion for the Russ­ian-speak­ing regions; Putin’s ini­tial refusal to rec­og­nize the regions; France and the West’s refusal to imple­ment the Min­sk Agree­ments; France and the West’s insis­tence on direct con­fronta­tion between Ukraine and Rus­sia; The Ukraine’s ini­ti­a­tion of the con­flict by bom­bard­ing the Russ­ian-speak­ing dis­tricts and mass­ing their army for an all-out assault; Putin’s grant­i­ng of the Duma’s request and diplo­mat­ic recog­ni­tion of the inde­pen­dence of the Russ­ian-speak­ing regions; Those regions’ request for mil­i­tary assis­tance; Putin’s pos­i­tive response to that request, ini­ti­at­ing the con­flict; The Russ­ian strat­e­gy of using pres­sure on Kiev as a diver­sion, draw­ing Ukrain­ian forces around it and per­mit­ting the encir­clement of the bulk of the Ukrain­ian army in East­ern Ukraine; The West’s fun­da­men­tal mis­un­der­stand­ing of Putin’s and Russia’s war aims, due to their own strate­gic and oper­a­tional myopia; The “slow­down” of Russ­ian oper­a­tions, due to the fact that they have already achieved their objec­tive; The “reprisal” units’ delib­er­ate block­ing of civil­ian evac­u­a­tion cor­ri­dors, so that the civil­ians can be used to delib­er­ate­ly impede Russ­ian mil­i­tary progress; The West’s manip­u­la­tion of Zelen­sky and Ukraine, in essence brib­ing him with arms pur­chas­es to “bleed Rus­sia;” The dis­tri­b­u­tion of small arms to Ukrain­ian urban pop­u­la­tions, a devel­op­ment that Baud feels will lead to atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted against fel­low civil­ians; The strong prob­a­bil­i­ty that the Azov Reg­i­ment was using the Mar­i­upol mater­ni­ty hos­pi­tal as a strate­gic van­tage point, and that the Rus­sians fired on it as a legit­i­mate mil­i­tary tar­get; The West­’s using of that “War Crime” to jus­ti­fy fur­ther arms ship­ments; The West­’s sys­tem­at­ic dis­tor­tion and “weaponiza­tion” of war cov­er­age; The joint secu­ri­ty pro­vid­ed to the Cher­nobyl nuclear plant by BOTH Ukrain­ian and Russ­ian sol­diers to pre­vent sab­o­tage; Baud’s obser­va­tion that the West­’s pro­vid­ing of large amounts of small arms to the pop­u­la­tions of Kiev and Kharkov will lead to trou­ble; Baud’s obser­va­tion that polit­i­cal and media ele­ments in the West are pre­sent­ing infor­ma­tion at vari­ance with what intel­li­gence ser­vices have been able to ver­i­fy; The mur­der of Ukrain­ian diplo­mats and politi­cians who have been will­ing to nego­ti­ate with Rus­sia.

 In the ongo­ing series on the Ukraine war, Mr. Emory has advanced the metaphor of the war and its atten­dant cov­er­age as some­thing akin to the myth­i­cal Philoso­pher’s Stone of the alchemists. Instead of chang­ing lead into gold, it is chang­ing indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions in the West into the same fab­ric as Volodomyr Via­tro­vy­ch’s Ukrain­ian Insti­tute of Nation­al Mem­o­ry.

Recent­ly, Yahoo News has begun reg­u­lar­ly post­ing arti­cles from Ukrain­s­ka Prav­da.

This is part of a U.S.-funded media array in Ukraine, designed to com­mu­ni­cate open­ly pro­pa­gan­dized cov­er­age of things Ukrain­ian.

Yahoo’s pre­sen­ta­tion of Ukrayin­s­ka Prav­da exem­pli­fies Mr. Emory’s metaphor.

Part and par­cel to the white­wash­ing of the Nazi affil­i­a­tion of the Azov for­ma­tions in Ukraine, the Ukrain­ian Kalush Orchestra–winner of t he 2022 Euro­vi­sion song quest–capped off their per­for­mance with a call to release the Azov com­bat­ants holed up in the tun­nels beneath the Azovstal steel mill.

The absence of com­men­tary on the Nazi ori­en­ta­tion of the Azov units is rou­tine in the West at this point.

Also exem­pli­fy­ing the ide­o­log­i­cal and jour­nal­is­tic per­ver­sion of West­ern cov­er­age of Azov for­ma­tions is the New York Times piece about Azov wives req­ui­si­tion­ing inter­na­tion­al aid for the Azovstal com­bat­ants.

The arti­cle fea­tured mer­cy pleas from Katery­na Prokopenko–the wife of Azov com­man­der Colonel Denys Prokopenko.

Colonel Prokopenko’s per­spec­tive on the pos­si­ble “false flag” explo­sion on the Mar­i­upol Dra­ma The­ater is inter­est­ing. We can but won­der what he might dis­close to Russ­ian intel­li­gence offi­cers about the inci­dent.

1.–“ . . . . On March 7, an Azov Bat­tal­ion com­man­der named Denis Prokopenko appeared on cam­era from Mar­i­upol with an urgent mes­sage. Pub­lished on Azov’s offi­cial YouTube chan­nel and deliv­ered in Eng­lish over the sound of occa­sion­al artillery launch­es, Prokopenko declared that the Russ­ian mil­i­tary was car­ry­ing out a ‘geno­cide’ against the pop­u­la­tion of Mar­i­upol, which hap­pens to be 40 per­cent eth­nic Russ­ian. . . .”
2.–“ . . . . Prokopenko then demand­ed that West­ern nations ‘cre­ate a no fly zone over Ukraine support[ed] with the mod­ern weapons.’ It was clear from Prokopenko’s plea that Azov’s posi­tion was grow­ing more dire by the day. . . .”

Joe Biden man­i­fest­ed con­sum­mate hypocrisy with his con­dem­na­tion of Pay­ton Gen­dron, the appar­ent Buf­fa­lo shoot­er. Endors­ing the 14 words mint­ed by David Lane and uti­liz­ing the Sun Wheel sym­bol embraced by the Azov Bat­tal­ion, Gen­dron was align­ing him­self with the same forces the U.S. backs in Ukraine.

As dis­cussed in FTR #780, Svo­bo­da main­tains a street-fight­ing cadre called Com­bat 14. ” . . . . the name points to the num­ber ‘14.’ In fas­cist cir­cles this refers to the ‘four­teen word’ slo­gans of com­mit­ment to the ‘white race.’ As the leader of Svoboda’s ally ‘C14’ explained, his orga­ni­za­tion is in a ‘strug­gle’ with ‘eth­nic groups’ that are wield­ing, among oth­er things, ‘eco­nomic and polit­i­cal pow­er.’ The ‘eth­nic groups’ he is refer­ring to are ‘Rus­sians and Jews.’[6] . . . .”

Com­bat 14’s name derives from “the four­teen words” mint­ed by David Lane, a mem­ber of the Order that killed talk show host Alan Berg. (See excerpt below.) The words are: “We must secure the exis­tence of our peo­ple and a future for white chil­dren.”

Gen­dron’s man­i­festo ref­er­enced Bren­ton Tar­rant, the Christchurch, NZ shoot­er, who had appar­ent­ly vis­it­ed Ukraine and alleged­ly net­worked with the Azov Bat­tal­ion.

Even The New York Times not­ed the pos­si­ble con­tact between Azov and Tar­rant.

” . . . . In the wake of the New Zealand mosque attacks, links have emerged between the shoot­er, Brent Tar­rant, and a Ukrain­ian ultra-nation­al­ist, white suprema­cist para­mil­i­tary orga­ni­za­tion called the Azov Bat­tal­ion. . . .”

FTR#1244 How Many Lies Before You Belong to The Lie?, Part 17

First of a pro­ject­ed four-part dis­cus­sion of the deci­sive­ly impor­tant work of for­mer Swiss intel­li­gence offi­cer Jacques Baud, this pro­gram presents and details fun­da­men­tals of the Ukraine war and the his­to­ry lead­ing up to it. This analy­sis will be sup­ple­ment­ed in the remain­ing pro­grams in the series.

His CV is pre­sent­ed below, and will be sup­ple­ment­ed by more detail in an inter­view pre­sent­ed with him.

The read­ing of this arti­cle will be con­tin­ued in our next pro­gram. For the con­ve­nience and ben­e­fit of the audi­ence, the entire arti­cle is pre­sent­ed in this descrip­tion. 

Baud points out that the pre­sen­ta­tion of the war in the West is bad­ly skewed, with politi­cians and media pur­su­ing ide­ol­o­gized fan­tasies, rather than sub­stan­tive analy­sis com­ing from intel­li­gence agen­cies.

The essence of Baud’s war analy­sis is pre­sen­ta­tion of com­pelling doc­u­men­ta­tion that the Ukraine war was begun by the West—the U.S. and NATO in particular—in order to weak­en Rus­sia.

Facil­i­tat­ing a mur­der­ous pro­gram of sys­tem­at­ic atroc­i­ty com­mit­ted by Ukraine’s gov­ern­ment against the Russ­ian-speak­ing minor­i­ty of Ukraine, it is the West and the Biden admin­is­tra­tion in par­tic­u­lar, that bear respon­si­bil­i­ty for the con­flict.

As will be seen, analy­sis of the actu­al con­flict itself is fun­da­men­tal­ly skewed in the U.S. and Europe. Far from being “incom­pe­tent,” Rus­sia quick­ly exe­cut­ed maneu­ver war­fare to cut-off the bulk of the Ukrain­ian army, which was poised for a lethal offen­sive against the Russ­ian-speak­ing East.

Russia’s pri­ma­ry objective—completely mis­un­der­stood in the West and sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly mis­rep­re­sent­ed by polit­i­cal and media inter­ests alike—was large­ly achieved with­in a short peri­od.

The Russ­ian forces occu­pied ter­ri­to­ry rough­ly equiv­a­lent to the U.K in a mat­ter of days, fix­ing Ukrain­ian forces with a diver­sion­ary move toward Kiev, elim­i­nat­ing Ukraine’s abil­i­ty to move large num­bers of troops and trap­ping the pri­ma­ry Ukrain­ian forces in the East.

This will be more com­plete­ly dis­cussed, ana­lyzed and pre­sent­ed in the remain­ing pro­grams fea­tur­ing Baud’s work.

 Key Points of Analy­sis and Dis­cus­sion Include: Baud’s first-hand involve­ment in NATO train­ing of the Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary; Baud’s for­mer posi­tion as chief of Swiss intelligence’s divi­sion on War­saw pact forces dur­ing the Cold War; Baud’s exten­sive UN expe­ri­ence on pro­lif­er­a­tion of small arms, their dis­tri­b­u­tion to civil­ian pop­u­la­tions and the dele­te­ri­ous effects of that dis­tri­b­u­tion; The fun­da­men­tal, insti­tu­tion­al­ized dis­tor­tion of the conflict—politicians and media ignor­ing real­i­ty (includ­ing and espe­cial­ly that pre­sent­ed by intel­li­gence pro­fes­sion­als) and incul­cat­ing the pub­lic (and them­selves) with an inflam­ma­to­ry, demon­stra­bly false nar­ra­tive that engen­ders a dan­ger­ous pol­i­cy of esca­la­tion; The essen­tial mis­un­der­stand­ing of the gen­e­sis of the Ukrain­ian con­flict; The cen­tral issue of the post-Maid­an government’s ban­ning of the Russ­ian lan­guage in Ukraine’s East­ern dis­tricts; The fun­da­men­tal mis­un­der­stand­ing of, and mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of, the civ­il war in Ukraine’s East as a dynam­ic involv­ing “Russ­ian Sep­a­ratists” and “inter­fer­ence” by Putin; Putin’s advice to the Russ­ian-speak­ing East­ern dis­tricts NOT to seek a ref­er­en­dum on auton­o­my; The Ukrain­ian government’s launch of an ill-fat­ed mil­i­tary sup­pres­sion against those dis­tricts; The fun­da­men­tal cor­rup­tion and inep­ti­tude of the post-Maid­an Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary; The false nar­ra­tive dis­trib­uted in the west that Rus­sia was involved in any way with the civ­il war in East­ern Ukraine; The fail­ure of the civ­il war against the East­ern dis­tricts because of that inep­ti­tude; The defec­tion of large “maneu­ver” units of the Ukrain­ian armed forces—armor, artillery and mis­sile for­ma­tions; The mon­u­men­tal fail­ure to report for duty of the Ukrain­ian reserve per­son­nel; Ukraine’s piv­ot to NATO to form the Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary; Jacques Baud’s role in that attempt­ed for­ma­tion; NATO’s cre­ation of the fas­cist “reprisal units,” exem­pli­fied by the Azov Reg­i­ment; The Azov regiment’s sym­bol­ic, and his­tor­i­cal nos­tal­gia for the ”Das Reich” Division—2nd Waf­fen SS; The oper­a­tional strength of the NATO-cre­at­ed fas­cist ter­ri­to­r­i­al defense units—102,000; The real­i­ty behind a 2021” hijack­ing of a RyanAir flight in Belarus; the fact that the “journalist”—Roman Protassevitch—was a promi­nent mem­ber of the Azov reg­i­ment; the fact that the action was in keep­ing with the rules of force; The war’s gen­e­sis with a Ukrain­ian cam­paign to con­quer and dec­i­mate the Russ­ian-speak­ing regions of the East; the Duma’s advo­ca­cy of diplo­mat­ic recog­ni­tion for the Russ­ian-speak­ing regions; Putin’s ini­tial refusal to rec­og­nize the regions; France and the West’s refusal to imple­ment the Min­sk Agree­ments; France and the West’s insis­tence on direct con­fronta­tion between Ukraine and Rus­sia; The Ukraine’s ini­ti­a­tion of the con­flict by bom­bard­ing the Russ­ian-speak­ing dis­tricts and mass­ing their army for an all-out assault; Putin’s grant­i­ng of the Duma’s request and diplo­mat­ic recog­ni­tion of the inde­pen­dence of the Russ­ian-speak­ing regions; Those regions’ request for mil­i­tary assis­tance; Putin’s pos­i­tive response to that request, ini­ti­at­ing the con­flict; The Russ­ian strat­e­gy of using pres­sure on Kiev as a diver­sion, draw­ing Ukrain­ian forces around it and per­mit­ting the encir­clement of the bulk of the Ukrain­ian army in East­ern Ukraine; The West’s fun­da­men­tal mis­un­der­stand­ing of Putin’s and Russia’s war aims, due to their own strate­gic and oper­a­tional myopia; The “slow­down” of Russ­ian oper­a­tions, due to the fact that they have already achieved their objec­tive; The “reprisal” units’ delib­er­ate block­ing of civil­ian evac­u­a­tion cor­ri­dors, so that the civil­ians can be used to delib­er­ate­ly impede Russ­ian mil­i­tary progress; The West’s manip­u­la­tion of Zelen­sky and Ukraine, in essence brib­ing him with arms pur­chas­es to “bleed Rus­sia;” The dis­tri­b­u­tion of small arms to Ukrain­ian urban pop­u­la­tions, a devel­op­ment that Baud feels will lead to atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted against fel­low civil­ians; The strong prob­a­bil­i­ty that the Azov Reg­i­ment was using the Mar­i­upol mater­ni­ty hos­pi­tal as a strate­gic van­tage point, and that the Rus­sians fired on it as a legit­i­mate mil­i­tary tar­get; The West­’s using of that “War Crime” to jus­ti­fy fur­ther arms ship­ments; The West­’s sys­tem­at­ic dis­tor­tion and “weaponiza­tion” of war cov­er­age; The joint secu­ri­ty pro­vid­ed to the Cher­nobyl nuclear plant by BOTH Ukrain­ian and Russ­ian sol­diers to pre­vent sab­o­tage.