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?
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. . . .”
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. . . .”
Supplementing the observations Mr. Emory has made concerning the Ukraine War and the attendant media coverage as a “philosopher’s stone” alchemically turning the West, both as individuals and institutions, into the same fabric as the Ukraine Institute of National Memory, we [again] highlight a commentary on Ukraine 24–one of the country’s premier television outlets. The announcer quotes Adolf Eichmann verbatim in this video from UKRAINE 24. WFMU-FM is podcasting For The Record–You can subscribe to the podcast HERE. Mr. Emory emphatically recommends that listeners/readers get the 32GB flash drive containing all of Mr. Emory’s 43 years on the air, plus a library of old anti-fascist books on easy-to-download PDF files.
A subsidiary of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency oversees 14 Pentagon-financed “Veterinary” Labs in Ukraine. DTRA deeply involved with Pentagon-financed EcoHealth Alliance’s gain-of-function research on bat-borne coronaviruses at what Mr. Emory calls “The Oswald Institute of Virology.” WFMU-FM is podcasting For The Record–You can subscribe to the podcast HERE. Mr. Emory emphatically recommends that listeners/readers get the 32GB flash drive containing all of Mr. Emory’s 43 years on the air, plus a library of old anti-fascist books on easy-to-download PDF files.
In a previous post, we noted collaboration between Josef Mengele–the infamous “Angel of Death” of Auschwitz–and the U.S. government, via Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner. Some of our discussion concerning “The Oswald Institute of Virology” might seem to some listeners to be “a long way from home,” so to speak. In FTR#1147, we noted that elements of U.S. intelligence appear to have protected Mengele, as part of their clandestine sponsorship of the postwar Nazi diaspora. We highlight this because Mengele was not an isolated example, but rather characteristic of a much larger and broad-based phenomenon. “. . . . By July 1945 Josef Mengele had been captured and identified at an allied prisoner-of-war camp. Forty years later an eyewitness told a congressional committee how guards knew Mengele’s name, and also the general nature of his crimes as doctor, experimenter, and executioner at Auschwitz.’ Also in 1985, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles released documents obtained from the U.S. Army under the Freedom of Information Act, according to which Mengele “may have been arrested by U.S. authorities in Austria in 1947 and subsequently released. ’ . . . .” In FTR#664, we noted testimony at the Nuremberg trials to the effect that Mengele filled out paperwork before his infamous experiments on twins, a copy of which went to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, which received a great deal of funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. Mengele’s posting at Auschwitz was due to a superior/colleague at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, who suggested that it would be a good career move, as highlighted in, among other programs, FTR#908. WFMU-FM is podcasting For The Record–You can subscribe to the podcast HERE. Mr. Emory emphatically recommends that listeners/readers get the 32GB flash drive containing all of Mr. Emory’s 43 years on the air, plus a library of old anti-fascist books on easy-to-download PDF files.
This program concludes the series.
Introducing the expansion of American experience with Chiang and his Kuomintang fascists into U.S. Cold War policy in Asia, we present Sterling Seagrave’s rumination about Stanley Hornbeck, a State Department flack who became: “. . . . the doyen of State’s Far Eastern Division. . . .”
Hornbeck “ . . . . had only the most abbreviated and stilted knowledge of China, and had been out of touch personally for many years. . . . He withheld cables from the Secretary of State that were critical of Chiang, and once stated that ‘the United States Far Eastern policy is like a train running on a railroad track. It has been clearly laid out and where it is going is plain to all.’ It was in fact bound for Saigon in 1975, with whistle stops along the way at Peking, Quemoy, Matsu, and the Yalu River. . . .”
Next, the program highlights key aspects of the career of Ching-Ling Soong, aka Mme. Sun Yat-sen.
Sister of Ai-Ling (aka Mme. H.H. Kung), Mae-ling (aka Mme. Chiang Kai-shek) and T.V., T.A. and T.L. Soong, she had a long and remarkable career.
For the purposes of this description, we re-print material from FTR#1202.
The fate of the Third Force or Third Option formed by Mme. Sun Yat-sen (nee Ching-ling Soong) and Teng Yen-ta, a persistent critic of Chiang Kai-shek, was predictable.
Disillusioned with Communism after a sojourn in Moscow, Mme. Sun Yat-sen partnered with Teng Yen-ta, who recognized Chiang’s fascism and, yet, felt that the Chinese Communist Party (at that point in time) was overly loyal to Moscow and wasn’t doing enough for the Chinese peasantry.
Both Ching-ling and Teng Yen-ta sought an alternative to both Kuomintang fascism and the Chinese Communist Party.
Finding the democratic socialism proposed by Ching-ling and Teng Yen-ta unacceptable, Chiang had the British and American police authorities arrest him in the International Concession in Shanghai, after which he was tortured for many months.
Ching-ling was reported to have visited Chiang to plead for Teng Yen-ta’s release. Chiang had already dealt with him in characteristic fashion: “ . . . . Days earlier, on November 29, 1931, nearly a year after his arrest, Ten Yen-ta had been taken from his cell at Chiang’s command and was slowly strangled with a wire. The executioner was said to be famous for keeping victims alive for half an hour while he tightened his grip. In his office, Chiang had remained silent while Ching-ling pleaded for a man already dead, enjoying the spectacle of her momentary vulnerability. . . .”
Next, we recount Mme. Sun’s encounter with a Kuomintang/Green Gang agent.
After rebuffing his political approach, Mme. Sun Yat-sen demolished his political persona.
. . . . “Soong: ‘There is only one way to silence me, Mr. Tai. Shoot me or imprison me. If you don’t then it simply means that you admit you are not wrongly accused. But whatever you do, do it openly like me, don’t . . . surround me with spies.’
Tai: ‘I shall call again upon my return from Nanking.
Soong: ‘Further conversations would be useless—the gulf between us is too wide.’
As Tai Ch’i‑tao and his wife left, the old man turned and—his tongue flicking over dry lips (he was a very nervous man)—hissed out a parting bit of venom: ‘If you were anyone but Madame Sun, we would cut your head off.’
Ching-ling smiled. ‘If you were the revolutionaries you pretend to be, you’d cut it off anyway.’. . .”
Information presented by Sterling Seagrave–of which Mr. Emory was not previously aware–indicates that the CCP is more nuanced than Americans have been led to believe.
Although resisting membership in the Communist Party and attempting to re-start the Third Option on the eve of Chiang’s capitulation and flight to Taiwan, Mme. Sun Yat-sen was installed as one of three Vice-Chairmen of the government.
Again, this is not something of which Mr. Emory was aware until reading this book.
“ . . . . Ching-ling sold many of her remaining possessions to support programs of the China Welfare League she had founded. In 1948, with the Chiang regime ready to flee and the Communists on their way to victory, she took part in a last attempt to organize an alternative to both communism and fascism—a new version of the Third Force. It was called the Revolutionary Committee, and Ching-ling was named its honorary chairman. Its constituency was the powerless. . . .”
“ . . . . When the People’s Republic came into existence, Ching-ling became one of the three non-Communist political leaders chosen as Vice-Chairmen of the Central Government in Peking. . . .”
Mme. Sun (Ching-ling Soong) manifested a strongly independent ideological stance, which, while anti-fascist and anti-imperialist, sought (as we have seen) a “Third Force” or “Third Option” between Communism and Chiang’s narco-fascism.
That independence of mind, demonstrated through decades of social struggle, plus outright jealousy on the part of Madame Mao led to defamation and persecution during the disastrous Cultural Revolution, with Mme. Sun narrowly escaping the ravages of the Red Guard.
“ . . . . During the Red Guard rampages of the 1960’s, the job of protecting Madame Sun became nerve-racking. Posters appeared denouncing her, and it was not safe for her to go anywhere. . . .”
“ . . . . In the summer of 1966, Premier Chou En-lai was forced to warn the Red Guards to cease their verbal attacks on Madame Sun, and to stop putting up posters accusing her of being a bourgeois reactionary. On September 21, 1966, in Shanghai where the Red Guard movement frequently got out of control, a mob stormed Ching-ling’s house on the Avenue Joffre and looted it. Ching-ling was not in Shanghai at the time. She let the incident pass without comment. Her chief adversary was the wife of Chairman Mao, who apparently resented the fact that Ching-ling was always mentioned as the woman of highest rank in China.
“ . . . . When the Red Guard movement abated, and Madame Mao and the celebrated Gang of Four were tried in a people’s court as counterrevolutionaries, Ching-ling’s life settled back into a tranquil twilight. . . .”
“ . . . . On May 16, 1981, Soong Ching-ling was named honorary President of China. . . . She succumbed to leukemia on May 29, 1981, in her Peking home. . . . But, in an interview once with writer Han Suyin, Ching-ling put into words the legacy she had learned most bitterly from the time of the Soongs:
The Soong Dynasty concludes with an epilogue which is noteworthy in several respects. The prose is of a character that one does not see anymore. Eloquent, poignant, passionate and yet, at the same time, bitingly, ironically humorous, Seagrave’s writing is remarkable in, and of, itself.
Beyond the prose, the epilogue is remarkable for the elaborate historical metaphor that it presents: discussion of the corruption and brutality of the late Manchu Dynasty and the Dowager Empress, whom Seagrave refers to as “The Old Buddha.” (He later published a volume about her reign titled The Dragon Lady.)
Seagrave’s discussion of the Dowager Empress’s intrigues and brutal murder of the Pearl Concubine constitutes a metaphor for the lethal, consummately corrupt government of Chiang Kai-shek and his puppet masters, the Soongs.
As foreign armies were approaching Peking during the Boxer Rebellion, “The Old Buddha” made arrangements to flee the palace known as The Forbidden City, donning a disguise and taking the Emperor with her.
When the Emperor sought to remain in Peking to negotiate with the foreign armies and enlisted the assistance of his favorite consort—the Pearl Concubine—in order to persuade the Dowager Empress.
The Pearl Concubine had resisted conforming to the will of the Dowager Empress, and “The Old Buddha” took this occasion to eliminate this element of resistance to her palace intrigues, a longtime obstacle to her political orders.
“ . . . . The Pearl Concubine had been a thorn in the Dowager’s side, interfering with palace intrigues by giving independent advice to the Emperor. It was time to dispose of her. The Dowager bellowed orders. Two eunuchs seized the Pearl Concubine. In terror, the Emperor went to his knees and begged for her life. But the eunuchs carried the struggling girl to the narrow well by the Palace of Peace and Longevity, turned her upside down in her shimmering cocoon of silks, and flung her shrieking into its maw. Because the well was so narrow, the eunuchs jumped on her to force her down. . . . .”
Sterling Seagrave then sets forth the murderous nature of the late Manchu rule of the Dowager Empress—a metaphor for the bloody corruption of Chiang’s fascist government.
“ . . . . The Forbidden City is a graveyard of souls, drowned, beheaded, throttled, flayed alive, to silence them in the interests of state. Here, murder was not an act of passion but an instrument of rule. Judicial murder. Imperial murder. Silence by assassination. To stifle those who would interfere, who would object, who would question, who would say no. . . .”
Sterling Seagrave then pivots to the Soong family: “ . . . . The others passed through life like a team of pickpockets through a carnival crowd, doing what they did best, while the rubes watched geeks bite heads off live chickens. There are those who insist that May-ling remained innocent throughout by virtue of her tunnel vision. It is not for me to say, except that these people also believe in virgin birth.
“They were a family that could stand together in front of a mirror (Ching-ling missing from the group by choice), all casting reflections except Ai-ling. She cast no reflection at all. What medieval conclusion can we draw? . . . .”
Seagrave concludes with a reference to Harry Truman’s launching of an FBI investigation of the Soong family. (We discussed this in FTR#1205 .)
“ . . . . Of all the people who might have acted, I wondered why Harry Truman did nothing. . . . . Perhaps he concluded that so many prominent people were involved it would not be good for the nation as they say. So nearly everyone stayed silent. Nobody spoke for the victims. Who, then, will speak for the concubine in the well? . . .”
The program reviews the death threats and intimidation that the authors of Gold Warriors received over the publication of this and other books.
“. . . . Many people told us this book was historically important and must be published—then warned us that if it were published, we would be murdered. An Australian economist who read it said, ” I hope they let you live.” He did not have to explain who “they” were. . . .
“. . . .
We have been threatened with murder before. When we published The Soong Dynasty we were warned by a senior CIA official that a hit team was being assembled in Taiwan to come murder us. He said, ‘I would take this very seriously, if I were you.’ We vanished for a year to an island off the coast of British Columbia. While we were gone, a Taiwan hit team arrived in San Francisco and shot dead the Chinese-American journalist Henry Liu.
When we published The Marcos Dynasty we expected trouble from the Marcos family and its cronies, but instead we were harassed by Washington. Others had investigated Marcos, but we were the first to show how the U.S. Government was secretly involved with Marcos gold deals. We came under attack from the U.S. Treasury Department and its Internal Revenue Service, whose agents made threatening midnight phone calls to our elderly parents. Arriving in New York for an author tour, one of us was intercepted at JFK airport, passport seized, and held incommunicado for three hours. Eventually the passport was returned, without a word of explanation. When we ran Freedom of Information queries to see what was behind it, we were grudgingly sent a copy of a telex message, on which every word was blacked out, including the date. The justification given for this censorship was the need to protect government sources, which are above the law.
During one harassing phone call from a U.S. Treasury agent, he said he was sitting in his office watching an interview we had done for a Japanese TV network—an interview broadcast only in Japanese, which we had never seen. After publishing The Yamato Dynasty, which briefly mentioned the discovery that is the basis for Gold Warriors, our phones and email were tapped. We know this because when one of us was in a European clinic briefly for a medical procedure, the head nurse reported that “someone posing as your American doctor” had been on the phone asking questions.
When a brief extract of this book was published in the South China Morning Post in August 2001, several phone calls from the editors were cut off suddenly. Emails from the newspaper took 72 hours to reach us, while copies sent to an associate nearby arrived instantly. In recent months, we began to receive veiled death threats.
What have we done to provoke murder? To borrow a phrase from Jean Ziegler, we are “combating official amnesia.” We live in dangerous times, like Germany in the 1930’s when anyone who makes inconvenient disclosures about hidden assets can be branded a “terrorist” or a “traitor. . . .”
Despite the best efforts of the American and Japanese governments to destroy, withhold, or lose documentation related to Golden Lily, we have accumulated thousands of documents, conducted thousands of hours of interviews, and we make all of these available to readers of this book on two compact discs, available from our website www.bowstring.net [no longer online–D.E.] so they can make up their own minds. We encourage others with knowledge of these events to come forward. When the top is corrupt, the truth will not come from the top. It will emerge in bits and pieces from people like Jean Ziegler and Christophe Meili, who decided they had to ‘do something.’ As a precaution, should anything odd happen, we have arranged for this book and all its documentation to be put up on the Internet at a number of sites. If we are murdered, readers will have no difficulty figuring out who ‘they’ are. . . .”
Sterling’s fears about Opus Dei and his and Peggy’s proximity to Spain–the seat of that organization’s power turned out to be prescient. On Christmas Day of 2011, he narrowly escaped assassination while returning home. He felt that the attempt on his life may well have been motivated by the publication of the Spanish language edition of Gold Warriors.
. . . . Seagrave will be remembered warmly by Verso staff for his lively correspondence. In a 2011 email, he described an attempt on his life that followed the Spanish publication of Gold Warriors:
“A hired thug tried to murder me on the serpentine road leading up to our isolated house on the ridge overlooking Banyuls-sur-Mer, and nearly succeeded. (We’ve had several serious death threats because of our books.) The road was very narrow in places, with tarmac barely the width of my tires. At 10 pm Christmas night, in 2011, after visiting Peggy at a clinic in Perpignan, as I turned the final hairpin, I clearly saw a guy sitting on a cement block path leading up to a shed for the uphill vineyard. He was obviously waiting for me because we were the only people living up there on that mountain shoulder. He jumped up, raised a long pole, and unfurled a black fabric that totally blocked the narrowest turn ahead of me. I tried to swerve to avoid him (not knowing whether he also had a gun), and my right front drive wheel went off the tarmac and lost traction in the rubble.
The car teetered and then plunged down through a steep vineyard on my right side, rolling and bouncing front and rear, 100 meters into a ravine where it finally came to rest against a tree. Thanks to my seatbelt and air bag, I survived. I don’t know how many concussions I got on the way down, but I managed to squeeze out the driver’s door and fell onto the rubble. I got up on my left hand and knees, but my right shoulder caved in. (Turned out later that I had fractured my right shoulder, and all the ligaments there had torn loose.) I passed out and remained unconscious for 14 hours. After 12 hours, a vigneron driving up the next morning saw my wrecked car and body.
He called the Gendarmerie on his portable, and I was hoisted out unconscious by a chopper and flown to an old Victorian-era hospital in Perpignan where they did nothing but keep me doped on morphine for two weeks — no X‑rays or serious medical care. Finally, friends in Banyuls got me (and Peggy) transferred to a clinic on the beach there, where Peggy and I shared a room while we both recovered. I got my right shoulder ligaments fixed by an excellent surgeon in Perpignan. (Peggy did not know it then but she had an early stage of cancer.) I still have a hairline fracture in my right shoulder.
I attribute the event to staying too long in one place, so the spooks eventually tracked me down. We had been living for years on a sailboat, moving from Holland to Britain to Portugal to Spain and finally to France, where we found — in Catalonia — an ideal village at the Mediterranean end of the Pyrenees. In retrospect, I’m sorry I agreed to move ashore for Peggy’s sake, and sold the beautiful 43-foot boat I had built from a bare hull. It was very comfortable, but Peggy wanted a house. We never did find the right house in Banyuls — so we spent 18 years restoring a 13th century Templar ruin on the shoulder of the mountain. Made me an easy target. Definitely a bad decision. I think it was the Spanish edition of Gold Warriors that made me the easy target.
In FTR#‘s 1107, 1108 and 1111, we set forth the highly suspicious circumstances surrounding the death (and probable murder) of author Iris Chang. A ringing endorsement by Ms. Chang graces the cover of Gold Warriors.
Ms. Chang’s signature work–The Rape of Nanking–detailed one of the initial events in Japan’s looting of China during World War II, an act which the U.S. signed off on and profited from in the postwar years.
At the time of her altogether suspicious death, she was working on a book about the Bataan Death March, at the very time that survivors of that event and other Japanese World War II atrocities were suing Japanese zaibatsus that had employed U.S. POW’s as slave labor.
The suit was rebuffed by U.S. courts.
When Mr. Emory interviewed Sterling Seagrave in 2009, he declined to discuss Ms. Chang’s death, which he, too, believed to be murder.
This program undertakes a speculative look at the life and family history of Barack Obama, analyzed in the context of the American Deep State.
It was under Obama that the “pivot to Asia” took place, with his then Vice-President Joe Biden now pursuing the anti-China policy with a consuming vigor.
(We note, also, Avril Haines, who was Obama’s Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, then worked as a paid consultant for Peter Thiel’s Palantir firm, was a key participant in Event 201, served as a key member of Biden’s transition team and, ultimately, became Director of National Intelligence, a position from which she helped initiate the momentum to legitimize the “Lab-Leak Theory” of the origin of Covid.)
The central element in our analysis is the professional and political circumstances surrounding the Obama family’s involvement in Indonesia in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter.
The available information suggests that the benign interpretation of the Obama family’s circumstances is not accurate.
Those circumstances are encapsulated: Key Points of Discussion nd Analysis Include: Lolo Soetoro’s work as a civilian employee of the Indonesian Army at the East-West Institute in Hawaii (headed up at the time by Howard Jones, for years U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia); Soetoro’s meeting of (Stanley) Ann Dunham at the East-West Institute; Soetoro’s return to Indonesia in 1966; Soetoro’s work for the Indonesian army following the coup; Soetoro’s work for Unocal and Mobil, two of the key oil companies in Indonesia that faced possible nationalization by Sukarno; Ann Dunham’s work for USAID and Ford Foundation in Indonesia (both common covers for CIA work abroad); Soetoro’s account of having seen a man killed in “bloody” fashion; the dubious nature of claims by the Obama clan that Ms. Dunham learned of the slaughter that had just taken place through quiet asides and innuendo (numerous press accounts available through U.S. media outlets had reported the massacre); Ann Dunham’s subsequent work for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, under Peter Geithner (whose son Timothy Geithner became Obama’s Secretary of the Treasury); Barack Obama’s work for the Business International Corporation between college and graduate school (the company has, in the past, served as a “corporate cover” for CIA employees); Obama’s biological father’s meeting of Ann Dunham in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii in 1960, after entering the U.S. under a joint CIA-State Department program initiated under the auspices of Tom Mboya in Kenya (later assassinated because of his perceived/alleged links to CIA).
We are of the opinion that Obama is part of a Deep State, trans-generational intelligence network and his stewardship of the “pivot to Asia,” Avril Haines key position in the events surrounding the full-court press against China, and “Delaware Joe” [Biden]‘s pursuit of a vigorous anti-China policy are part of the straight railway line of Asian policy described by Stanley Hornbeck: “. . . . the doyen of State’s Far Eastern Division. . . . [Hornbeck] had only the most abbreviated and stilted knowledge of China, and had been out of touch personally for many years. . . . He withheld cables from the Secretary of State that were critical of Chiang, and once stated that ‘the United States Far Eastern policy is like a train running on a railroad track. It has been clearly laid out and where it is going is plain to all.’ It was in fact bound for Saigon in 1975, with whistle stops along the way at Peking, Quemoy, Matsu, and the Yalu River. . . .”
The program begins with discussion of the formation of the World Anti-Communist League in Taiwan under Chiang Kai-shek.
Key Points of Discussion and Analysis Include: Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang and their support for the Indonesian coup, including staging attacks on the Chinese embassy in Jakarta; Taiwan as the site for the merging of the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League with the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations to form the World Anti-Communist League; the role of Adrian Zenz in the fabrication of the Uighur genocide meme; Zenz’s association with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a derivative of the Captive Nations Committee, a subsidiary of the OUN/B and deeply involved with the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations; the role of elements of the Azov Battalion and Pravy Sektor in the “pro-democracy” movement in Hong Kong; the adoption by the “pro-Democracy movement” of a permutation of the “Glory to Ukraine, Glory to The Heroes” salute of the OUN/B; review of the networking between Ruzy Nazar and the Pan-Turkist and Nazi deep political forces at work in Xinjiang province; review of Nazar’s representation of the ABN at WACL’s conference in Dallas, Texas.
Following discussion of the formation of WACL, the program highlights the importance of the Indonesian oil companies to the U.S. and their Indonesian satraps.
Introducing the expansion of American experience with Chiang and his Kuomintang fascists into U.S. Cold War policy in Asia, we present Sterling Seagrave’s rumination about Stanley Hornbeck, a State Department flack who became: “. . . . the doyen of State’s Far Eastern Division. . . .”
Hornbeck “ . . . . had only the most abbreviated and stilted knowledge of China, and had been out of touch personally for many years. . . . He withheld cables from the Secretary of State that were critical of Chiang, and once stated that ‘the United States Far Eastern policy is like a train running on a railroad track. It has been clearly laid out and where it is going is plain to all.’ It was in fact bound for Saigon in 1975, with whistle stops along the way at Peking, Quemoy, Matsu, and the Yalu River. . . .”
This program chronicles the U.S. coup in Indonesia. In our landmark series of interviews with Jim DiEugenio, we noted that President Kennedy’s assassination put the railway described by Stanley Hornbeck back on schedule in Indonesia, as it had been put back on schedule in Vietnam.
“ . . . . The United States was part and parcel of the operation at every stage, starting well before the killings started, until the last body dropped and the last political prisoner emerged from jail, decades later, tortured, scarred, and bewildered. . . . the U.S. government helped spread the propaganda that made the killing possible, and engaged in constant conversations with the Army to make sure the military officers had everything they needed, from weapons to kill lists. . . . knowing full well that the method being employed to make this possible was to round up hundreds of thousands of people around the country, stab or strangle them, and throw their corpses into rivers. . . . Up to a million Indonesians, maybe more, were killed as part of Washington’s global anticommunist crusade. The U. S. government expended significant resources over years engineering the conditions for a violent clash, and then, when the violence broke out, assisted and guided its longtime partners to carry out the mass murder of civilians as a means of achieving US geopolitical goals. . . .”
Key Points of Discussion and Analysis Include: The Johnson Administration’s determination to wage a “major war against Indonesia; the inability of U.S. strategic planners to comprehend Indonesia’s status of non-alignment in the Cold War outside of the “either with us or against us” operational paradigm that was institutionalized in U.S. foreign and national security under the Dulles brothers during the Eisenhower administration; Pakistan’s ambassador to Paris sent a letter to foreign minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto: “ . . . . Western intelligence agencies were organizing a ‘premature communist coup.’ Indonesia, the NATO officer told him, ‘was ready to fall into the Western lap like a rotten apple.’. . .” The enthusiastic coverage of the Indonesian slaughter in the Western press, exemplified by The New York Times’ C.L. Sulzberger, who penned the piece “When a Nation Runs Amok”; the cultural chauvinism tinged with racism of the Western press coverage, embodied by Sulzberger’s piece: “ . . . . the killings occurred in ‘violent Asia, where life is cheap . . . . hidden behind their [Indonesians] smile is that strange Malay streak, that inner, frenzied blood-lust which has given to other languages one of their few Malay words: amok . . . .”; The fact that the main point of irritation in the U.S. about the PKI (Indonesia’s Communist Party) was not that they were undemocratic or trying to seize power through subversion, but that they “were popular;” the role of U.S. plantation managers and corporate personnel in submitting names to the Indonesian army and its allies for liquidation; Historian John Roosa’s encapsulation of the results of the slaughter: “ . . . . Almost overnight the Indonesian government went from being a fierce voice for cold war neutrality and anti-imperialism to a quiet, compliant partner of the US world order. . . .”; New York Times columnist James Reston’s characterization of the coup and resulting slaughter as “A Gleam of Light in Asia” that outweighed U.S. setbacks in Vietnam; he—by now—longstanding and well-recognized American tactic of “making the economy scream;” Suharto’s deliberate engineering of hyperinflation in order to restrict the supply of fundamentals needed by people to sustain their lives; “The U.S. government was intentionally destabilizing the economy;” Robert Kennedy’s criticism of the Indonesian coup; U.S. corporations finding Indonesia “open for business”; a business conference sponsored by James Linen, President of Time-Life (it was Time-Life that was–to a considerable extent–the eyes and ears of the U.S. on both Chiang Kai-shek and the assassination of J.F.K.; The slaughter that took place on the island of Bali, something of an iconic tropical paradise; analysis of the significance of machetes being used in the slaughter of scores of thousands on the beautiful Bali beaches–the machete is not a blade used by the Balinese, who use a thinner, domestic cutting tool caused the klewang; Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang and their support for the Indonesian coup, including staging attacks on the Chinese embassy in Jakarta; Taiwan as the site for the merging of the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League with the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations to form the World Anti-Communist League.
Epitomizing and encapsulating the coup was the butchery that transpired on the Island of Bali and its aftermath in the contemporary luxury resort economy that prevails there:
” . . . . Then he [Wayan Badra] heard what was happening on the beaches. They were bringing people from the city to the east to kill them on the sand. It was public property there, and empty at night. The bodies were abandoned there. . . . they found a field of bodies. . . .They began looking through bones, picking up skulls. . . . There were just ‘too many skulls, too many skeletons. . . . In total, at least 5 percent of the population of Bali was killed—that is, eighty thousand people . . . .”
” . . . . Wayan Bandra, the Hindu priest, lives on the street where he grew up, in Seminyak, Southwest Bali. But the neighborhood has changed drastically. The same beach he used to walk on for forty minutes every morning, as he headed to school down in Kuta, is certainly not empty. It’s packed wall to wall with luxury resorts and ‘beach clubs,’ a very common type of business on the island, where foreigners can sip cocktails all day, and take a dip in a pool, right on the sand. It’s the same sand, of course, where the military brought people from Kerobokan, a few miles east, to kill them at night. . . .”
” . . . . . . . . Over the years, Wayan Badra and his neighbors have found bones and skulls in the sand . . . . As the elder priest for this village, he takes it upon himself to give the bodies a proper Hindu funeral. . . .”
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