https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gw8o_BXrSg&t=2s
Sunday, May 8, 2022
Fascist militia leader Stewart Rhodes sought Trump's approval on January 6
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/05/06/rnah-m06.html
Fascist militia leader Stewart Rhodes sought Trump's approval on January 6 for more violent attacks
Jacob Crosse
12 hours ago
In court documents filed Wednesday by the US Department of Justice (DoJ), federal prosecutors allege that in the early evening of January 6, 2021, far-right militia leader Stewart Rhodes called an intermediary of Donald Trump’s and requested to speak with the then president. The Yale-educated lawyer and former US Army paratrooper, according to prosecutors, wanted Trump to “call upon groups like the Oath Keepers and forcibly oppose the transfer of power.”
While fighting was still taking place on Capitol Hill, Rhodes and his armed paramilitaries were seeking permission from Trump to make more violent attacks. Rhodes allegedly had a high-level contact he thought could get him on the phone with Trump directly. This explodes claims advanced by Trump, his allies in the Republican Party and the pseudo-left that the January 6 coup was simply a “spontaneous riot” or a misplaced but organic expression of “working class” outrage. Rather, it was a pre-planned, multi-pronged attack, organized months in advance from inside the Oval Office of the White House in coordination between Republican politicians and their fascist supporters.
This damming revelation was included in a Wednesday plea deal unveiled by the DoJ. In the plea agreement, William Wilson, 44, a “military and law enforcement veteran and a member of the Oath Keepers since 2016,” agreed to turn state’s evidence and plead guilty to one count of seditious conspiracy and one count of obstructing an official proceeding. He could spend decades in prison but likely will not, given his cooperation with the government.
Wilson is the third member of the Oath Keeper militia group, comprised of current and former military members, police officers and far-right nationalists, to plead guilty to seditious conspiracy and obstruction charges. Joshua James, 34, of Arab, Alabama, and Brian Ulrich, 44, of Guyton, Georgia, both pleaded guilty earlier this year to the same crimes.
According to the court documents, Rhodes, Wilson and other Oath Keepers, after the storming of the Capitol, gathered at a private suite at the Phoenix Park Hotel in Washington D.C. after 5 p.m. on January 6, where they continued to plot to stop the certification of Biden.
Wilson, “a county leader for the North Carolina chapter of the Oath Keepers,” claims that he was present while Rhodes made the phone call to the close contact of Trump’s. On the call, Rhodes demanded that Trump unleash his Brownshirts, telling his fellow fascists after the call ended, “I just want to fight.”
The Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, III Percenters and Christian-fascist Moonie cult were among the far-right militia groups summoned by Trump and his Republican co-conspirators to violently block the certification of President-elect Joe Biden and overturn what remains of bourgeois democracy in the United States.
Prior to January 6, the above groups participated in and promoted far-right “Stop the Steal” rallies throughout the country, publicizing Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen while building support among far-right elements for forcibly stopping the certification as the only way to prevent a “socialist takeover” of the US government.
The “Stop the Steal” movement was funded by right-wing billionaires and organized and promoted by “America First” fascist congressmen including Arizona Reps. Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs and Alabama’s Rep. Mo Brooks, none of whom, like Trump, have been charged or arrested 16 months after the failed coup.
In addition to the aforementioned Republican legislators, it is possible that Rhodes was communicating with Trump’s long-time political crony Roger Stone, an honorary Proud Boy member. In addition to working closely with admitted FBI informant and Proud Boy leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, Stone frequently employed Oath Keeper militia members as “body guards,” including the aforementioned Joshua James.
That these fascist groups would be summoned by Trump in an attempt to overturn the election was revealed by Trump himself in a September 2020 debate with Biden. After moderator Chris Wallace asked Trump “to condemn white supremacists,” Trump refused, claiming that violence emanated from “the left wing.”
Biden, revealing that the Democratic Party was at the time, and still is, acutely aware of the innumerable connections between Trump and the Republican Party and fascist militia groups, offered the Proud Boys as an example of a racist street gang for Trump to condemn. Trump took the opportunity, instead, to issue a military order to his foot-soldiers, saying, “Proud Boys stand back and stand by.”
Following Trump’s declaration to the fascist paramilitaries, and the FBI revelation of a far-right assassination plot against Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer a week later, the World Socialist Web Site warned in an October 9 perspective: “The Michigan conspiracy, Trump, and the 2020 election”:
Trump’s plan for election day is no longer a matter of conjecture. In battleground states that support Biden, Trump will falsely proclaim himself the victim of election fraud, deploy violent groups to intimidate voters, seize statehouses and eliminate political opponents. Armed supporters will declare the vote invalid or compel state legislatures to certify pro-Trump slates of electors. Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have Democratic governors and Republican-controlled legislatures and will therefore be the central target of this plot.
This is very nearly what transpired less than three months later.
In his plea deal, Wilson admits that he, Rhodes and other unnamed Oath Keepers began planning to violently overturn the election in the event Trump lost, even before the election was declared for Biden.
In a Signal chat group titled “Leadership Intel Chat” which Wilson was a part of, Rhodes is alleged to have instructed the group on November 5, 2020, “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war. Too late for that. Prepare your mind, body, spirit.”
By December 31, 2020, Wilson was included in an Oath Keeper chat group titled “DC OP: Jan 6 21.” Over the next few days Wilson and other Oath Keepers plotted their trek to Washington D.C.
On January 5, 2021, on orders from Rhodes, Wilson drove to the capital and “brought with him,” per the DoJ, “…an AR-15-style rifle, a 9-millimeter pistol, approximately 200 rounds of ammunition, body armor, a camouflaged combat uniform, pepper spray, a large walking stick intended for use as a weapon, and a pocketknife.” Wilson has admitted to being armed with the knife when he attempted to enter the House chamber inside the Capitol on January 6.
While driving to D.C., Wilson texted the “DC OP: Jan 6 21” Signal group, “It’s going to hit the fan tonight,” and that he had “all my gear with me.”
Upon arriving at the Hilton Garden Inn hotel in Vienna, Virginia, on January 5, Rhodes, Wilson and “other leading Oath Keeper members and affiliates” finalized their plans, the plea deal states.
Wilson said he met with Rhodes and other “Quick Reaction Force” teams that were “expected to participate on January 6.” Wilson, prosecutors write, “believed that, if called upon, the QRF would provide firearms or cover to co-conspirators (such as himself) operating inside of Washington D.C.”
Wilson claims he heard Rhodes “discuss the potential need for Rhodes and co-conspirators to engage in force, up to and including lethal violence, in order to stop the transfer of power. With this understanding, Wilson agreed to take part in a plan developed by Rhodes to use any means necessary, up to and including the use of force, to achieve this objective.”
Further revealing the intimate ties between the fascist militia groups and the Republican Party, two weeks ago, the January 6 House Select Committee “investigating” the attack on the Capitol requested voluntary testimony from three Republican House members, one of whom, Ronny Jackson, is the former White House physician under Trump and Barack Obama and a current Texas representative.
In their letter requesting Jackson’s voluntary testimony, which he has since rejected, the committee revealed text messages that were exchanged between Oath Keepers during the attack on the Capitol. In one message thread, the militia members discuss the urgency of protecting Jackson during their siege on Congress.
“Dr. Ronnie Jackson—on the move,” an unidentified Oath Keeper wrote during the attack. The message continued: “Needs protection. If anyone inside cover him. He has critical data to protect.”
The fascist Rhodes responded, “Give him my cell.”
Interview with the creator of the World Mortality Dataset
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/05/05/rsuy-m05.html
Interview with Ariel Karlinsky, the creator of the World Mortality Dataset and member of the WHO COVID-19 Mortality Assessment Groups
Benjamin Mateus
16 hours ago
Ariel Karlinsky is a graduate student in economics at the Hebrew University whose primary research interests are labor economics, data science, economics of conflict, health economics, economics of Israel and economic history. He is also the creator and maintainer of the World Mortality Dataset, specializing in all-cause mortality, excess mortality and vital registration.
In March 2021 he joined the World Health Organization’s (WHO) COVID-19 Mortality Assessment Groups, established by the international health organization and the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs to “focus on methods and data for estimating total number of deaths attributable to COVID-19 and for assessing the direct and indirect impacts of the pandemic on mortality by age and sex at the national, regional, and global levels.”
The interview was conducted on April 24, 2022 and is published after the WHO released its long-awaited report on excess deaths associated with COVID-19, which found there were almost 15 million excess deaths through 2021, a figure 2.75 times higher than officially reported global COVID deaths.
Benjamin Mateus [BM]: Good morning. Thank you for taking the interview.
Ariel Karlinsky [AK]: Of course. Thank you.
BM: As a way of beginning, could you introduce yourself and tell us the work you are involved in?
AK: I’m an economist and a statistician. I have degrees in economics and statistics from the Hebrew University. When I started working on this project [COVID-19 and World Mortality Dataset], I was a master’s student. And now I’m a PhD student in economics.
I was interested in the question whether COVID was causing excess mortality and by how much. After looking at the original data from the US, the UK and Italy when the first COVID wave came through, people acknowledged that COVID was certainly causing excess mortality. But I wasn’t keen on how this was being reported and compared.
For instance, they would say that when the US reports there were 2,000 COVID deaths then it’s like there were 2,000 excess mortalities. And when Egypt reports 2,000 COVID deaths, they said it is also 2,000 excess mortalities.
[According to Our World in Data, “Excess mortality is a term used in epidemiology and public health that refers to the number of deaths from all causes during a crisis above and beyond what we would have expected to see under normal conditions. In this case, we are interested in how the number of deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic compares to the deaths we would have expected had the pandemic not occurred—a crucial quantity that cannot be known but can be estimated in several ways.”
They add, “Excess mortality is a more comprehensive measure of the total impact of the pandemic on deaths than the confirmed COVID-19 death count alone. It captures not only the confirmed deaths, but also COVID-19 deaths that were not correctly diagnosed or reported as well as deaths from other causes that are attributable to the overall crisis conditions.”]
And that seemed just wrong, because I do a lot of international comparisons and I know that all countries are different, especially on the development scale, and I wasn’t sure that you can make such straightforward comparisons. There were a lot of epidemiological anomalies in much of that data that weren’t being considered from many countries like Belarus that were reporting cases or deaths.
For instance, the COVID fatality rate being reported out of Egypt was 30 percent because they were reporting so few cases.
So, I started looking for the data. I hoped it would be published by the World Health Organization (WHO) or the World Bank, but I realized they were publishing these statistics only annually. So, for 2020, this was no good. I then turned to searching the internet looking at websites of national statistics offices, vital registries, and ministries of health all over the world and found a lot of this data hidden in plain sight. I decided to begin compiling the dataset, which was non-existent.
I then started working with my colleague, Dr. [Dmitry] Kobak from Germany, and we put the data publicly on GitHub and the paper on a preprint and then we sent it to eLife. They peer-reviewed the paper and published it. And now I’m working as part of the expert working group of the WHO hoping in the next week or two to finally publish the WHO excess mortality estimate at least up to December of 2021. [Karlinsky is one of the authors of the report and his dataset was a primary source for the analysis.]
[Note 1: Dr. Dmitry Kobak is a research scientist at Tübingen University (Berens lab) who has used his skills to examine the accuracy of COVID-19 death reporting by various countries. His report on undercounting of COVID deaths is linked here for reader’s review.]
[Note 2: Dispute over the WHO’s methodology and figures for excess COVID deaths in India has stalled an upcoming report on global excess deaths through December 2021. The international health agency estimated that almost 15 million people had died in the period since the pandemic was first declared, which is two-and-half times more than the reported tally. Of the additional nine million deaths, more than one-third have occurred in India. Some say this may be due to the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi attempting to suppress this analysis because of political calculations.
The New York Times wrote, “The release of the staggering estimate—the result of more than a year of research and analysis by experts around the world and the most comprehensive look at the lethality of the pandemic to date—has been delayed for months because of objections from India, which disputes the calculation of how many of its citizens died and has tried to keep it from becoming public.”]
BM: You touched on some of the initial questions I had for you. But to continue in this vein, there was an obvious need for the “World Mortality Database” that you built, because there was no international real-time dataset that could provide these figures.
What logistical issues did you face creating it? What hurdles remain and what are the long-term goals for the project?
AK: That’s a very good question.
Again, I’m an economist and I have dealt with some health economics, but that wasn’t really my field. My hopes and goals are that starting from now, just as countries report their GDP and unemployment figures regularly to the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and similar organizations, hopefully all-cause mortality will be reported to the WHO in a timely and consistent manner. Many countries already do, but most of them are highly developed.
But that leaves tons of gaps … Maybe I should say there are two major issues playing here. There are countries, many in Africa, but also places in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, where there are essentially no vital registries. Maybe 100 people die but only one death gets counted in their national statistics. It is similar but less so for births. And these are very highly correlated with economic development. This is also true within countries, such as in rural regions. For instance, in rural areas of Latin America, the chances that a death will be registered are much lower than in urban areas.
So, there are countries where the data doesn’t exist. There’s simply none.
We noted this in our paper as well. We had this very frank response from Liberia when we asked for this data and they said, “We just don’t have it. We are currently working very hard on modernizing and improving our vital registration system, but there’s no data. It’s not coming out soon. It just doesn’t exist.”
And, under the auspices of WHO and the World Bank, what they have are these national household surveys conducted every five or 10 years where they ask about births and deaths, which are only estimates of fertility and mortality. It’s better than nothing, but it’s not very good when you think about an issue like excess mortality or if you have a large crisis such as the COVID pandemic or some other natural disaster or conflict for that matter.
Of note, Latin American countries—Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and others—have been undergoing, in the last five years, significant improvements in their vital registries. Had COVID-19 happened five years ago, our knowledge about excess mortality in Latin America, which has been really disheartening and massive, would have been much less.
The second issue is that there are countries where this information exists, but they’re not keen on sharing it. I think probably the best example is Pakistan, where they recently had a considerable improvement in vital registration … supposedly, or at least that is what they reported to the WHO.
But that data is completely opaque. Not annually, not monthly, not nothing. Every couple of years they may report something like, “We registered eight million deaths when we would have expected maybe nine million.” And the vital registration is almost full, but they are not sharing any data. I’ve approached them and I have had my colleagues approach them but they’re not sharing their data because they don’t want to.
And then there are countries where the data used to be shared, but now they’re not sharing it because I think they are afraid it exposes the fact that the real toll of COVID has been much heavier than they had reported. These include countries like Turkey, El Salvador and Belarus.
This is a very hot political issue and I try not to get involved in the politics. But one of the fields that I’m very interested in is political economy. And I do think that in a sense, this large difference between excess mortality and COVID mortality that we saw in many countries is especially pronounced in authoritarian countries. It’s even sort of a measure of obfuscation or information manipulation.
When I tell people that Russia fudged their COVID numbers everybody says, “Of course, what’s new?” But I think it’s very telling that you see this again and again, and mostly from authoritarian countries, regardless of their level of development.
BM: But the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been fudging its numbers too. In March they slashed their pediatric COVID-19 deaths by almost a quarter and eliminated more than 70,000 deaths previously attributed to COVID. Now they are trying to say people died with COVID and not from COVID. The CDC is politicizing these statistics.
AK: The US … and this is not in the research I’m doing with the WHO, but like other research that I’m currently doing focused on 2020 … the US and Brazil under Trump and Bolsonaro are very clear examples of countries where the leaders would have loved to say that “COVID was over, there’s no COVID, let’s get on with it, there are no deaths, it’s inflated, it’s manipulated …” They made public speeches about this; they’re not hiding the fact that they're trying to hide it, in a sense.
But because democracies are still strong and the institutions are still independent, there may be some undercounting, but it isn’t Russia level, it isn’t Uzbekistan levels. It’s nowhere near these levels.
Like I told you in my email, I’m a capitalist and I lean very conservative, but between Trump and Clinton, I’m with Clinton because she’s more of a conservative. And between Biden and Trump, I was pro-Biden. But it saddens me that it seems like under Biden there may be somehow more cohesion between the institutions of the US when suddenly it is okay to downplay COVID. But it isn’t on the level in authoritarian countries. It’s a whole other scale. [Excess deaths versus COVID deaths: United States—1.13 million vs. 966,308; Russia—1.21 million vs. 369,064; Brazil—764,000 vs. 659,000. Source: World Mortality Dataset]
It’s true that in the US and Spain, in these two developed countries the gaps between excess deaths and COVID deaths are the highest. It is significant. It is 20 to 30 percent, which means tens of thousands of deaths higher. But it isn’t five times or 10 times or 20 times higher. In Tajikistan it is 100 times higher.
BM: To clarify, when you say there is an undercounting of COVID deaths you are looking at the ratio of excess deaths to reported COVID deaths? That is the ratio you are referencing when you say 20 to 30 percent above COVID deaths? And in Russia …
AK: Yes. And in Russia that is at 3.5 times higher. [1.21 million/0.369 million =3.28]. In Uzbekistan it is 30 times higher and Tajikistan it is 100 times, as I mentioned previously. Yeah, that’s what I am referring to.
In the US, we have good evidence that some of the excess mortality is strictly non-COVID. There is increasing homicide, increasing traffic accident deaths. But in most countries, that’s not the case. In most countries, homicides, even in very violent countries such as Latin America and South Africa, homicides were lower than previous years for 2020. Traffic accidents, the same again, were down due to lockdowns and other social restriction measures.
In this regard, the US is an outlier. This also goes with alcohol-induced deaths and opioid overdoses. This is true for Canada.
So, [excluding the US and Canada] if you just look at deaths say at slightly younger ages, which you can do mostly just in developed countries because the data does not exist for less developed countries ... If you look at deaths between 25 to 44 or 44 to 60, and so on, people that supposedly shouldn’t be dying of COVID in large amounts, you can see that excess mortality tracks COVID reported mortality for these ages almost completely.
So, what I think is going on there is that these countries have some vulnerabilities among younger ages. For instance, a 50-year-old in India that has COVID has a much higher chance of dying from it than if it was in the UK. We have a lot of evidence to that effect. [Ariel Karlinsky didn’t specify if these vulnerabilities were intrinsic to the health of the individual or extrinsic, related to the socioeconomic factors such as access to health care systems.]
There is probably some increase in self destructive or violent behavior during the pandemic in the US. I’m not certain that 100 percent of excess deaths are attributable to COVID [in the younger ages]. But in most other countries it’s very close to 100 percent. We find no evidence of lockdown deaths or deaths of despair and or even indirect COVID deaths.
[The Pew Research Center found that the US murder rate rose 30 percent between 2019 and 2020, jumping from six to 7.8 homicides for every 100,000 people. The CDC reports that during a 12-month period ending April 2021, drug overdose deaths had climbed over 100,000, an almost 30 percent increase from the prior year.]
When people died from cardiac arrest, they would say that’s not COVID because COVID is a respiratory disease. But we did see that COVID has exacerbated the mortality even in countries which are significantly deflating their COVID numbers like Nicaragua. In Nicaragua there is a large increase in cardiovascular deaths, because COVID, unfortunately, basically attacks everything—the brain, the heart, the immune system and not just the respiratory systems.
BM: Before moving on to the issues surrounding the World Health Organization and their soon-to-be-published report on excess deaths, could you speak about the excess homicide rates in the US.
AK: I haven’t looked at them recently, but in 2020 I think it was around a 30 percent increase, which I think was the largest annual increase since the seventies. The US had been on a decreasing trend in homicide rates up to 2014 or 2015 after which it began to increase a bit. But then in 2020 we saw a significant increase. And 2021 has stayed on the same trend as 2020.
The absolute increase in numbers is not very big, but every one of these is a tragedy, especially because it is usually very young people involved in these deaths. Before COVID, if I recall the numbers correctly, about 50,000 to 65,000 people died each week from all causes, depending on the season. But during COVID, weekly deaths were numbering from 70,000 to 90,000 each week.
So, if you look at all homicides it is an increase of about 6,000, which brings the total to about 26,000 for the year. The excess homicide rate for the year is barely 10 percent of all excess deaths in just one week. Homicides are important to track but they don’t account for a huge shift in the numbers.
As you had previously mentioned, maybe 70 percent of the excess deaths are COVID and 30 percent other causes. But this doesn’t mean that if there are 10,000 excess deaths, 7,000 are from COVID and 3,000 deaths are unrelated to COVID. A lot of these deaths that you didn’t code as COVID could very well be.
I gave testimony to the Texas legislature some months back on the power outage in February 2021 [during winter storm Uri]. And you can see there in Texas, during the power outage, excess mortality peaks. The number that Texas authorities said that had died from the cold weather and the power outage was around 200 people. But my estimate and other independent estimates placed that figure closer to 1,000.
BM: That is a huge number.
AK: it is astronomical, and I do hope that the Texas legislators … the issue should be completely disconnected from politics. The question again is then what do you do about it? There may be a lot more leftist solution or there may be right-wing solutions, but first we need to get to understand what the hell happened.
And Puerto Rico did that with Hurricane Maria. There were initial claims that only 64 people had died. But that figure increased massively following an official report back in 2018. I did a short testimony then and I believe the excess deaths figure was around 3,000. [Analysis by several independent institutions placed excess mortality due to the hurricane between 3,000 and 5,000.]
Excess mortality can convincingly show you, by zooming in on a time window and looking at the pattern of deaths, what happened. And what we find is not what right-wing media is saying, that the 30 percent rise in excess deaths during COVID was due to lockdowns. That is simply not true. We found a similar gap in Florida during 2021 with zero lockdown. These excess deaths are, by all accounts, related to COVID, which are not counted, just as much as the excess deaths during the power outage and in Puerto Rico due to the impact of the hurricane were not counted.
BM: Thank you for these clarifications and interesting points.
Can you speak on your work with the WHO? I understand that they are putting together this excess death report, but it’s been on hold primarily because India is challenging the methodology of the study. Maybe if you could speak if other countries challenged the report?
AK: I’m not sure about other countries. There are probably other countries there. Not every country said, “Okay, this is great.” Many countries have not responded. But, yes, India is a very vocal opponent.
Our excess mortality estimates for India place it somewhere in the middle. They’re not the best and they’re not the worst. They’re a large country with over a billion people. Our estimates placed excess deaths during COVID at several million. However, when you look at the figures on a per capita basis then you see they are somewhere in the middle.
India finds itself in a peculiar position. It’s not like the US and it’s not like Peru where the data is completely out there, official national level data showing deaths by day, week, or month, which you can have a very good estimate for how many deaths you would expect. And then how many deaths actually occurred and then calculate a very sound estimate of excess mortality.
For India, what you have is a huge federation with many states and union territories which are essentially like states and each one of them has its own vital registration systems and they differ very widely in just the number of deaths they are able to register. The more developed states can register 100 percent of deaths like in developed countries while less developed states register a third or 50 percent of total deaths.
All this means that for India we don’t have national level data from 2020 onwards. We have state level data, but from a lot of states. I think by now we have covered 60 to 70 percent of the total deaths in the Indian population. It’s not from some small village.
We have data from multiple large states and from cities like Calcutta and Chennai and Delhi and Mumbai. A lot of excess mortality has been observed just in these regions. And if you look just at these states and cities it already surpasses the official reported COVID deaths by a large amount.
We do some sort of projection to other states where we also have a lot of other evidence from other disparate systems or surveys that Indian researchers have done. The findings note that excess mortality is very high in India, higher than reported. I can’t give you an exact number until we publish, but it’s much higher than reported.
India finds itself in this sort of peculiar position because neighboring Pakistan, which—we have very preliminary evidence from journalists about this—also has excess mortality at much higher levels than reported COVID-19 mortality. But in Pakistan we have access to zero data.
The Indian officials are irate that they are not being treated like a developed country with a full, complete vital registration database. But they are also irate that they aren’t being treated like countries with zero data like Pakistan.
The evidence for India in terms of certainty, it is less certain than the US but it’s much more certain than Pakistan. And they kept throwing these pretty nonsensical arguments but none of them were very convincing. [Press coverage of the subject has alluded to major Indian state elections that took place in February and March as a factor in these disputes with the WHO.]
BM: I understand that there are independent scientists that are upset with the WHO for conceding to India’s stall tactics. And they are saying that if the report isn’t published by April that they will move to publish it without the WHO’s endorsement. This places them in a difficult position.
AK: We, the researchers are uncomfortable with this, but we are giving it a few more days. It was supposed to be released on May 2, 2022, but it would conflict with Eid al-Fitr (Muslim holiday). So, it keeps getting pushed back for other mundane reasons.
The previous delays have been helpful to get the model better, to improve the write-up, time to respond to critiques, which ultimately means our research is better. But we have completed all the corrective actions and could have had it published by the end of April. Everything’s in order.
BM: To avoid the confusion behind what defines a COVID death, why doesn’t the WHO provide a clear definition for it so that everybody uses the same metric? That would help standardize some of the reporting by various countries.
AK: It did. And there are standard guidelines. But again, you must remember that in many countries a lot of people die at home. The doctors never even see them, or they aren’t well equipped or well-trained. And in many countries, there is political pressure to downplay the number of deaths.
In Moscow, for example, which again has all the equipment, has all the development level, there was this guideline which I’m not sure if it’s still in place or not. But it said that you certify a COVID death only if after an autopsy it is beyond any doubt that this is the primary cause of death.
And you can imagine, what are the chances of doing autopsies for thousands of people dying en masse? The chance is zero, meaning you can downplay COVID by supposedly being much more thorough and saying, “No, we’re going to get to the bottom of each and every death.” The WHO definition is broader because the pathogen is a new contagion and we’re trying to understand how it spreads, understand how to fight it. We’re going to err on the other side. Maybe even if COVID is just a contributory factor you list it and not just if it’s the primary factor.
So, the standard guidelines exist. The issue is that a lot of countries either can’t or don’t want to follow them. It’s not an issue of devising regulations and then it’s done. In a lot of countries like India or Egypt, even before COVID, there are tons of garbage codes in death certifications that people don’t know what they died from, but they know that they died. A stricter guideline, that’s not the issue here.
BM: Is the methodology of the WHO report different than that used by the Economist or IHME? And to what extent is this report more comprehensive?
AK: The main difference I think is data. We collected even more data and data is much better than estimates. If you would have asked me, for example, if I didn’t have Belarussian data, you would have asked me and I would have said they are probably undercounting by 50 or 100 percent similar to countries like Ukraine or Poland, similar countries that have similar ethnicity and economies and are nearby.
But then you get actual data from the Belarusian government, and you see that it’s 12 times higher. The data defies imagination in the sense which a model by its nature would aim for like a mean, or median, or ratio as observed in other countries.
The fact that we have more data from states in India, from Jakarta in Indonesia, from China, from Turkey, etc., it makes the model better just because more data is better in the sense that the models are more transparent.
We have also made the data more accessible by having an interactive web application where anyone can look at the estimates and plot them and see where they go, how they go, meaning it’s not just going to be some report in a scientific journal that’s very opaque.
It is a complicated model because the data quality varies greatly. You need to treat each data point in a bit of a different way. It depends on the quality. The main methodological issue is similar across all these methods. You need to figure out what would be the number of deaths in that country in the absence of COVID and then you have the observed number of deaths and excess death is simply subtracting the two numbers.
So, there is some uncertainty there. But, unfortunately, in many countries, the signal, the increase in mortality, is so large, it doesn’t really matter if you account for this trend or that trend. It changes some of the numbers, but it won’t lead you to conclude that excess mortality has been null, it’s not like a statistical exercise.
In that sense, I’m glad that the IHME and the Economist estimates are there. They were able to put it out very quickly. But they didn’t have to go through a committee and have every revision go through all these people, which slows down stuff considerably.
But then WHO can say with pride, and there’s truth in that, that we did the estimates. They went through several iterations between a large panel of experts. Countries responded to these estimates. Then some countries also found or gave more data, which was very helpful. So, it was more like a holistic process. But it causes it to be delayed, even if there was no political pressure.
BM: You are speaking about the peer-review process.
AK: It certainly takes longer and we are all doing it in our spare time. We are not WHO employees. We are researchers in academia and that’s just one of our many academia things that we do.
BM: There was a study that came up that was done by Professor Patrick Heuveline from UCLA titled “Global and national declines in life expectancy: An end-of-2021 assessment.” He noted that global life expectancy fell 0.92 years between 2019 and 2020, and then 0.72 years between 2020 and 2021. In the 70 years that the UN has tracked such figures it is the first time we’d seen these kinds of declines. Do you care to comment on what this means to society, to the globe? What’s the implication of having this kind of massive decline in life expectancy?
AK: I’m not an expert on life expectancy. I just know that it’s an unfortunate term. It gives a sense that at my age now I have maybe 50 more years to live.
In countries where we are very certain of the data and there are good estimates of the age/sex deaths, life expectancy went down in 2020 in some countries. It went down even further in 2021. In some countries it bounced back up.
Patrick’s research and some other researchers in this area, they take data like mine on total deaths, and it has a very strong relationship with changes in life expectancy. And then from that, even if they don’t have the specific age/sex data, for example, for Bolivia, from this relationship you can estimate the changes in life expectancy in a country like Bolivia. And their life expectancy went down even further.
Again, I’m not an expert on how life expectancy looks across time and explain what that means. I can tell you that during World War I and II, life expectancy dropped because a lot of mostly young men died, especially as soldiers. But then it went completely back on trend.
A lot of people look at that and they say it means nothing really happened. Of course, things happened. People died; many people died. When things go back on trend, it doesn’t mean that nothing happened. But I’m not sure what reverberating implications these will have. I have a colleague in Copenhagen you can speak with who does a lot of work in this field.
He’s been doing a lot of work on life expectancy during COVID and what life expectancy means on a societal level and on a global level. But yes, COVID-19 has caused a decrease in life expectancy and that’s like the first time, absent some wars like in the Balkans, where we have observed that.
BM: With the introduction of the vaccines in early 2021, Israel rapidly moved to vaccinate its population. It then shifted to a vaccine-only strategy which has been adopted by almost every country but has proved problematic—in September 2021 and then February 2022, Israel faced Delta and Omicron. Maybe for someone who has lived there, you can share your perspective.
AK: Israel was close to eliminating COVID circulation several times. Unfortunately, it did not and besides the first lockdown in March-April 2020, it didn’t really stick to an elimination strategy, which has proven very good and doable in my opinion.
This lack of certainty and commitment made it harder to achieve elimination each passing day, eventually probably making it next to impossible. It might very well be that Israel’s will to try to balance fighting COVID with other aspects of normal life activities made us suffer on both ends, more so than eliminating COVID would have. In Hebrew we have a saying, “Half coffee and half tea,” meaning that in theory if you can’t decide you can mix and balance. But in practice the result is much worse than sticking to either one.
I do fault my own discipline (economics) here. Economics is all about trade-offs and that’s a very correct analytic method normally, but unsuitable (at least at the start) for pandemics or wars, where more of a war mentality I think is in order.
BM: We are well into the third year of the pandemic. Long COVID is affecting millions and it will have a detrimental impact on the quality of life for the populations of many countries. What are you expecting to see from the database as you continue with it?
I raise the question because in the UK we saw a trend to higher levels of excess deaths though there wasn’t much COVID community transmission. Some are attributing these deaths to the impact COVID has had on population health.
Data now indicates that even those who suffered only mild symptoms can expect a rise in their all-cause mortality.
AK: That’s a major issue that the UN’s World Population Prospects is dealing with right now. They do these projections on total deaths, total births, five years further, 20 years further … and they’re struggling with a lack of good data. And then it depends on assumptions. Again, I’m not a demographer but I’ve managed to learn a lot from my demography colleagues …
Consider a situation in the US, for example, where two million people die annually. Most of them are old, as is the case in other countries. Then say some pandemic hits and it kills most of the elderly. Assume then excess mortality in 2020 was 5 million people. Something massive and horrible.
You would be inclined to say, “Okay, but you can only die once, and these people will not die in the next year.” So, in the next year you would have like a deficit mortality in a sense because all the people that should have died in 2021, 2022, 2023 and on so on already died in 2020. On the other hand, like you said, if the fact that you contracted COVID means that you are more handicapped right now and your health went down, it might lead to higher mortality in the future.
And the direction right now is not clear.
There are countries where there was a large wave of infections and deaths such as Ireland in January and February 2021. But the mortality following that in the same year was lower than you would expect. So, I think that in Ireland, it’s clear. Probably a lot of the people that died of COVID were people that were close to dying regardless, in a sense.
But in most countries, 2021 mortality was even higher than 2020. There are some countries where they had very little excess mortality in 2020 and 2021, and then in 2022 a huge uptick, like Hong Kong.
It’s a huge question and the estimates of excess mortality are like the tip of the iceberg because we can’t account for all deaths. It’s easy to count deaths. You know when someone has died. Many people know when someone has died, even if it’s in a very rural area. But a lot of people don’t even know that they caught COVID.
They may know it like in five years from now. And that also depends on the exact strain that they caught. I am very careful with predictions and forecasting because it’s very hard. I really don’t know.
I think that if the COVID deniers were correct, what you would have seen is a large uptick in mortality in the start of 2020 in the US and the UK. But then mortality would have been much lower for the rest of the year. And then in 2021, you would see a rise in life expectancy. It didn’t happen.
Both in 2020 and in 2021 we saw very significant excess mortality. Possibly, some years from now, we might see mortality be lower, but that doesn’t mean that something good happened. Again, all the people that died in the world war did not die 80 years after that. So, mortality 80 years after it may be a bit lower, but that’s not a good thing. They died prematurely, very prematurely.
Even expert demographers are debating this because it depends on a lot of assumptions and data which is now quite scant. We can’t really say something convincing now as these studies are usually done decades later.
BM: Ariel Karlinsky, thank you for all your time. I look forward to reading the report when it is finally out.
AK: It was my pleasure. Please let me know if any questions come up.
COVID pandemic has 15 million across the globe
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/05/06/kdok-m06.html
The World Health Organization says the COVID pandemic has killed nearly 15 million across the globe
Benjamin Mateus
12 hours ago
The World Health Organization (WHO) released Thursday its much-awaited and anticipated report on global excess deaths associated with COVID-19 for the period from January 2020 to December 2021.
By the end of last December, officially reported global deaths had reached 5.42 million. However, the WHO study found that almost 15 million more people perished in the same period than usual, 2.75 times higher than the official total of COVID-19 deaths. The estimate of excess deaths gives a range from 13.3 million to 16.6 million.
The WHO defined excess death/mortality as “the difference between the total number of deaths and the number of deaths that would have been expected in the absence of the [COVID-19] pandemic.”
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, remarked, “These sobering data not only point to the impact of the pandemic but also to the need for all countries to invest in more resilient health systems that can sustain essential health services during crises, including stronger health information systems.”
A regional comparison of excess deaths to official COVID-19 deaths underscores the seriousness of these warnings. But more than recognizing the disparities, without understanding why these exist, little can be expected to bring about the changes advocated by the WHO. The disparities are ultimately a byproduct of global capitalism and its criminal policies that allowed the virus free rein to infect the most vulnerable and the disenfranchised.
In this sense, the New York Times attempts to cover the criminal policies perfected in 2021, precisely the vaccine-only strategy that forced the piecemeal and systematic return to normalcy. They wrote yesterday, “Much of the loss of life from the pandemic was concentrated in 2021 when new and more contagious variants drove surges of the virus even in countries that had fended off earlier outbreaks.”
Rather than making a straight year-to-year comparison, the Times only notes that roughly 18 percent, an extra 10 million people, died in 2021 than “would have been without the pandemic.” It is worth noting that when the 2020 excess death report was published, there were 3 million excess deaths and 1.8 million official COVID-19 deaths. The Economist’s estimate placed those figures at 5.6 million excess deaths and 1.8 million COVID-19 deaths.
In other words, the number of excess deaths for 2021 is far more than twice the number that perished in 2020, despite having confirmed the efficacy of several COVID-19 vaccines and the recognition of the airborne nature of the virus, and the importance of respirators and high-efficiency ventilation to stem the tides of infection. It also became clear that the virus could mutate to forms with more virulent and contagious characteristics.
Instead, the de facto capitalist policy of vaccine nationalism and a vaccine-only strategy was used to begin the lifting of mask mandates and loosening of social restrictions and returning to “economic” normalcy that has cost the lives of millions more when every means to eliminate COVID-19 was available. That the scale of death doubled or tripled in 2021 only confirms that all remaining inhibitions for the social murder of the population had evaporated.
Twenty countries accounting for half of the global population saw more than 80 percent (11.9 million) of the estimated global excess mortality—Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, the Russian Federation, South Africa, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Turkey, Ukraine and the United States of America.
Ten countries accounted for 68 percent (10.1 million) of excess deaths—Brazil, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Turkey and the United States.
When these are sorted according to the World Bank income groups, lower-middle-income regions had the highest estimate of excess deaths with 7.87 million (52 percent) and the highest excess deaths per capita at 236 per 100,000 people. These regions also account for approximately 3.3 billion people and have a per capita GDP of only $2,217.
By comparison, upper-middle income regions saw 4.24 million excess deaths and high-income areas 2.16 million. But when compared on a per capita basis, they had similar excess death rates at 168 and 177 per 100,000, respectively. Low-income regions had only 0.64 million excess deaths, but the uncertainty bounds of the estimates are the largest because of poor registration systems for vital statistics.
Dr. Samira Asma, assistant director-general for data, analytics, and delivery at WHO, noted, “measurement of excess mortality is an essential component to understand the impact of the pandemic. Shifts in mortality trends provide decision-makers with information to guide policies to reduce mortality and effectively prevent future crises. Because of limited investments in data systems in many countries, the true extent of excess mortality often remains hidden.”
WHO experts told the New York Times, “About half of countries globally do not regularly report the number of deaths from all causes. Others supply only partial data. In the WHO African region, for example, the experts said that they had data from only six of 47 countries.”
By the WHO region categories, the population of Southeast Asia, which includes the Indian subcontinent, suffered the most significant number of excess deaths, with close to 6 million. With 4.7 million excess deaths, India accounted for nearly one-third of global excess deaths. The figure is almost 10 times higher than official COVID-19 deaths reported by Indian health officials. Most of these occurred during the explosive Delta wave that produced horrific scenes of burning piles of corpses across the country.
The delay in bringing out the report when it was completed in January was in large part due to objections raised by India on the methodology for estimating the excess deaths. According to several media reports, the complaints appear to be politically motivated to stall the release of the damning results until after elections in key Indian states were concluded in early March.
It also placed the WHO leadership in a precarious position. Many of the independent scientists working as technical advisors for the WHO and contributing extensively to the findings criticized the international agency for acquiescing to India’s delaying tactics. Though the report results are significant and now finally published, the delay underscores the politically explosive nature of the inconvenient truth.
The other country in Southeast Asia with a significant undercounting of COVID-19 deaths was Indonesia. More than 1 million people perished during the pandemic though official COVID-19 deaths stand at 156,000, a six-fold undercounting.
The case in Peru exemplifies that a robust vital registration system is not a substitute for investment in health systems and public health infrastructure. With a population of nearly 33 million, the excess deaths of 290,000 were only 1.4 times above the reported COVID-19 deaths. But on a per capita basis of 437 excess deaths for every 100,000 people, Peru is among the highest globally.
Dr. Elmer Huerta, an oncologist and public health expert in Peru, said, “When a health care system isn’t prepared to receive patients who are seriously ill with pneumonia when it can’t provide the oxygen they need to live, or even provide beds for them to lay in so they can have some peace, you get what you’ve gotten.”
In conjunction with the release of the WHO report on excess deaths, the mainstream press is acknowledging that the United States has reached the harrowing mark of 1 million COVID deaths. Though on an excess death per capita basis, the US stands in 40th place with 140 deaths per 100,000, the grim milestone is both substantively and symbolically a stain on the criminal policies that have been shaped initially by Trump and further carried out in the most criminal form by Biden.
Yesterday, new COVID-19 cases in the United States exceeded 100,000 again. Deaths sharply increased, with 1,929 deaths reported on May 4, 2022. Hospitalizations have also turned up sharply. And no preparations are underway to stem the seventh wave of infections.
United States seeks to provoke Russia into escalation in Ukraine
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/05/06/pers-m06.html
Andre Damon
@Andre__Damon
9 hours ago
The New York Times and NBC News have published reports, based on the statements of US officials, that amount to an attempt to deliberately escalate the conflict over Ukraine into a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia.
In its report published online Wednesday evening, the Times cited White House officials confirming that the US has provided intelligence to the Ukrainian military used to target and kill Russian generals, about 12 of whom have been killed during the war.
“The United States has focused on providing the location and other details about the Russian military’s mobile headquarters, which relocate frequently,” the Times wrote. This has allowed Ukrainian forces “to conduct artillery strikes and other attacks that have killed Russian officers.”
The intervention by the US has had a “decisive effect on the battlefield.” It added that the scale of “actionable intelligence on the movement of Russian troops that America has given Ukraine has few precedents.”
The next day, NBC News reported that the US was critically involved in coordinating the sinking of the cruiser Moskva, the flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet, in the greatest Russian military disaster in decades.
With increasing frequency, attacks are being directed inside Russian territory, with US assistance. The Wall Street Journal pointed to “a series of attacks inside Russian territory and unexplained explosions at Russian targets.”
The article cites Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, saying the strikes “could be a result of increased intelligence sharing between the West and Ukraine.”
Any notion that the NATO powers, above all the United States, are not direct participants in the conflict over Ukraine lies in tatters. The declaration by US President Joe Biden that it is “not true” the US is engaged in a war, or even a proxy war, is a bald-faced lie. The US and NATO are providing tens of billions of dollars in military equipment and, as these reports document, direct intelligence used by the Ukrainian military and far-right militia forces.
The reports in the US media have been clearly orchestrated by the White House.
The Times writes, “The administration has sought to keep much of the battlefield intelligence secret, out of fear it will be seen as an escalation and provoke President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia into a wider war.”
If that is the case, why is the administration now publicizing its direct involvement in the war?
The release of this information to the Times and NBC, based on off-the-record statements by multiple administration officials, is a deliberate effort on the part of the Biden administration to increase pressure on the Russian government to retaliate against NATO forces. This would create the context for further US escalation, up to and including the direct engagement of US troops or the invocation of Article 5 of NATO.
Just as the United States succeeded in provoking Russia into invading Ukraine by turning the country into an armed camp on its borders and refusing to negotiate over Ukraine’s relationship with NATO, so too it is seeking to place the “burden of escalation” onto Russia by carrying out attacks on the Russian military through Ukrainian forces under its effective control.
Evelyn Farkas, the former top Defense Department official for Russia and Ukraine in the Obama administration, is quoted by the Times as saying, “Clearly, we want the Russians to know on some level that we are helping the Ukrainians to this extent, and we will continue to do so.”
In other words, the US-backed attacks on Russian generals, on the Moskva, and attacks on Russian territory are designed to be maximally provocative, while remaining, in the words of the Times, “deniable.” The goal of the United States is exactly to “provoke President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia into a wider war.”
As the United States expands the goals and scope of the war, it is seeking to goad Russia into a response that would allow the propagandists of US imperialism to claim the United States’ offensive actions are defensive in nature.
While Russia has sought to carry out negotiations to conclude the war, the United States has made clear its opposition to any resolution to the conflict short of the total military defeat of Russia and the re-occupation of Crimea and the Donbas.
This is further demonstrated by an earlier article in the Times, which is co-authored by one of the same individuals who wrote the article posted Wednesday, which pondered why Putin was not being more aggressive.
The article “Why Isn’t Putin Hitting Harder on the Battlefield?” noted, “American and European officials also say that President Vladimir Putin’s tactics in recent weeks have appeared to be remarkably cautious, marked by a slow-moving offensive in eastern Ukraine, a restrained approach to taking out Ukrainian infrastructure and an avoidance of actions that could escalate the conflict with NATO.”
While Washington has publicly denounced Russia’s “total war,” privately US officials have been puzzled by Putin’s “remarkable caution.” Washington’s eyes are on May 9, the day that commemorates the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany, and it hopes to provoke Putin into escalatory measures in his speech and declarations.
The ultimate aim of the United States, as Biden made clear in March with his declaration that Putin “cannot remain in power,” is regime change in Russia and its total subordination to US imperialism.
But domestic pressures play an equal if not greater role. The United States is seeking to provoke a major escalation of the war in order to divert massive internal tensions outward. The cost of living is soaring. In order to head off a wages push by workers, the Federal Reserve is sharply increasing interest rates, likely leading to a recession. And the COVID-19 pandemic remains out of control.
The desperate efforts by the White House to escalate the war are the actions of a ruling class that sees itself as besieged and encircled by mass opposition. It seeks through war and its accompanying attacks on democratic rights to delegitimize domestic political opposition.
Working people must be on guard against the extreme dangers posed by the US military escalation. It is urgently necessary to develop a new and powerful movement against war, unifying the struggle against war with the fight against social inequality, poverty, the surging cost of living, the COVID-19 pandemic and the capitalist profit system.
Saturday, May 7, 2022
Report: FBI Searched The Data Of Americans Millions Of Times In 2021
https://popularresistance.org/national-intelligence-report-found-fbi-searched-the-data-of-americans-millions-of-times-in-2021/
By Kevin Reed, WSWS.
May 5, 2022
Educate!
Above Photo: FBI headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington D.C. cisko66.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) reported on Friday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) searched through the electronic data of Americans 3.4 million times in 2021.
The searches were revealed in the ODNI’s “Annual Statistical Transparency Report Regarding the Intelligence Community’s Use of National Security Surveillance Authorities” for calendar year 2021. The data shows that there was nearly a tripling of these unconstitutional searches from 1.3 million in 2020.
In typical fashion the ODNI report waives away this intensification of the surveillance state by claiming it was a technical matter related to vital national security matters, the details of which are never explained. The report says, “In the first half of the year, there were a number of large batch queries related to attempts to compromise U.S. critical infrastructure by foreign cyber actors.”
This is the ninth such annual report issued by the ODNI. As with everything associated with the Orwellian world of the US intelligence community (IC), there are a large number of acronyms and terms that can be generally understood to have the exact opposite meaning of what they purport to be about.
For example, this annual report was drafted by a subdepartment of the ODNI called the Office of Civil Liberties, Privacy and Transparency. However, the content of this document shows that civil liberties, privacy and transparency are nowhere to be found when it comes to the FBI and its use of US intelligence data.
Contrary to the misinformation spread by the political establishment and the media that the US government has stopped its unconstitutional dragnet of everyone’s electronic communications, the National Security Agency (NSA) is still vacuuming up and storing a massive repository of data under the authority of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA).
Under the terms of Section 702, US intelligence can routinely collect both upstream and downstream communications of both Americans and non-Americans without a warrant under the guise of “targeting” foreign intelligence. Even though the existence of this program was exposed to the world by former intelligence analyst Edward Snowden in 2013—and he has been threatened with prosecution under the Espionage Act for it—and promises were made by the Obama administration that it would be halted, mass surveillance continues.
Even when the Section 702 NSA program was officially “ended” in 2017, it was revived and renewed by Congress and signed back into the FISA law by President Donald Trump in 2018. According to Snowden, the program was never stopped, and it has only grown more comprehensive and invasive in the nine years since he made his exposures.
While the ODNI report acknowledges a massive number of searches of the NSA database by the FBI—3,394,053—it does not say that these “queries” were illegal or unconstitutional. Instead, the report presents these searches as being entirely consistent with FISA rules.
In response to public outrage over the ongoing illegal spying by the US government, several corporate media sources have claimed that more than half of the 3.4 million queries—about 1.9 million—were part of an FBI investigation into an alleged “cyber threat from Russia,” as though this makes it legitimate.
Although this detail is not in the ODNI report and no details have been provided about the purported Russian threat, it is reminiscent of justifications made by the Bush administration about mass domestic electronic surveillance that violated the democratic rights of Americans as part of the “war on terror.”
The FBI searches the NSA database for up to 10 US Person (USP) identifiers, including names, phone numbers, email addresses, social security numbers, passport numbers, company names and IP addresses. These identifier queries are combined with hundreds and thousands of other search terms to find and identify individuals, their whereabouts and communications. None of the thousands of search terms are disclosed in the report.
In a report by the Wall Street Journal, it is pointed out that the ODNI does not say that there are any “systemic problems” with the searches even though “judges have previously reprimanded the bureau for failing to comply with privacy rules.”
When the Journal asked the Biden administration about the information in the report, unnamed officials said that the actual number of searches is “likely far lower, citing complexities in counting and sorting foreign data from US data.” In other words, there is a massive number of queries being conducted by the FBI in which there is no way to distinguish between who is a “citizen” and who is a “foreigner.”
The ODNI was created in the aftermath of the 9/11 Commission Report, released on July 22, 2004, and was a central part of the assault on democratic rights associated with the illegal and aggressive wars launched by the administration of George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The officer, which was established based on a proposal from leading congressional Democrats in 2002, is a senior, cabinet-level government official who is essentially a figurehead who reports to the president but is not in charge of the primary departments of US intelligence, such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the NSA.
The Biden administration’s Director of National Intelligence is Avril Haines, the first woman to hold the position. Haines was the first Biden nominee confirmed by the Senate in an 84-10 vote on January 20, 2021 and was sworn in the next day by Vice President Kamala Harris.
Previously, Haines served as Deputy National Security Advisor and Deputy Director of the CIA under Obama. In 2015, as deputy CIA director, Haines protected the agency personnel who hacked the computers of Senate staffers during the investigation into CIA torture programs. Once the Senate issued its report, Haines was involved in redacting 6,200 of the 6,700 pages of the document.
Haines also worked closely with Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and CIA Director John Brennan on the extra-judicial targeted assassination program of the Democratic Party administration. According to a report in Newsweek in 2013, Haines was repeatedly called in the middle of the night to help make the decision as to whether a “suspected terrorist” could be “lawfully incinerated” in a drone strike.
Like the lawyers working in the Bush White House who came up with the infamous legal justification for “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Haines specialized in establishing the legal framework and guidelines for the drone assassination program, which targeted individuals for death in Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan. According to a report in In These Times, Haines is responsible for policies that “made targeted killings all over the world a normal part of US policy.”
With such people in charge of auditing the activities of US intelligence and issuing reports that claim to “ensure compliance with the Constitution and laws of the United States” and “enhance public understanding of intelligence activities,” the only thing that is transparent is that they are engaged in covering up the criminality of US imperialism both within America and throughout the world.
German Parliamentarians Call To Stop Extradition Of Julian Assange
https://popularresistance.org/cross-party-group-of-37-german-parliamentarians-call-to-stop-extradition-of-julian-assange-on-world-press-freedom-day/
By Don't Extradite Assange.
May 5, 2022
Resist!
Cross Party group of 37 German parliamentarians call to stop extradition of Julian Assange on World Press Freedom day.
Members of the German Bundestag
To:
Mr Richard Burgon MP
Mr David Davis MP
Ms Diane Abbot MP
Ms Caroline Lucas MP
Mr Tommy Sheppard Mp
Mr John McDonnell MP
Mr Jeremy Corbyn MP
Mr Kenny MacAskill MP
Ms Apsana Begum MP
Mr Ian Byrne MP
Mr Neale Hanvey MP
Ms Bell Addy-Ribeiro MP
Ms Claudia Webbe MP
Ms Kate Osborne MP
Mr Ian Lavery MP
Ms Zarah Sultana MP
Ms Joanna Cherry MP
Mr Martyn Day MP
Mr Stuart C McDonald MP
Mr Hywel Williams MP
Mr Grahame Morris MP
Mr Ben Lake MP
Mr Tony Lloyd MP
Ms Rachael Maskell MP
Berlin, May 3, 2022
Subject: Concern for Julian Assange, founder of the platform Wikileaks
Dear honorable Members of Parliament,
Esteemed colleagues in the United Kingdom,
As a cross-party group of parliamentarians of the German Bundestag, we have the honor to reach out to you, and to ask for your attention in a case that is currently of great concern to us, knowing that we share a mutual concern for the protection as well as the implementation of internationally recognized human rights. We have closely followed the fate of Julian Assange in the past; however, the current developments in his case arouse our concern all the more.
Mr. Assange, founder of the platform Wikileaks, has not been granted to live in freedom for more than eleven years. Since April 2019 he has been imprisoned at HMP Belmarsh where he is waiting for the United Kingdom’s decision on his extradition requested by the United States of America. Because of his investigative journalistic work, including exposing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, he faces charges of up to 175 years in prison in the United States.
A free press, to which both the United Kingdom and Germany have committed, is a basic prerequisite for healthy democracies and a functioning rule of law. In line with several renowned human rights organizations, we are very concerned about the deterring effect that an extradition to and the persecution of Mr. Assange in the United States might have on freedom of the press, investigative journalism, and freedom of expression worldwide. As elected representatives in the German Bundestag we consider an extradition as a fatal symbol for journalists and media publishers all over the world. Thus, we respectfully request you to use the means at your disposal to ensure that these potentially serious implications are taken into account in the final decision-making that now lies with the Secretary of State for the Home Department, the Rt Hon Priti Patel.
Additionally, we fear for Mr. Assange’s health as he currently remains and likely will remain in detention and prolonged isolation. The UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Professor Nils Melzer, has long warned that Julian Assange is showing symptoms of “psychological torture” and must therefore be released immediately. Mr. Assange’s poor state of health was indeed the main argument of the British judiciary in its judgement of January 4, 2021, which prohibited extradition to an unforeseeably long U.S. custody. Yet, Mr. Assange remains in solitary confinement in HMP Belmarsh, because the U.S. government insists on the extradition to which the London High Court eventually agreed on December 10, 2021 neglecting the ongoing concerns for his health. The renewed appeal by Mr. Assange’s lawyers was not accepted.
We therefore kindly request you to ensure that the consequences an extradition might entail for Mr. Assange’s life and health continue to be carefully taken into account. Human rights and hence the obligations according to the European Convention on Human Right to which the United Kingdom has committed must lie at the core of the final decision.
Esteemed Members of Parliament, in acknowledgement of the Resolution 2317 of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and in the mutual recognition of our partnership and the bond of our shared values, we sincerely hope you will help building bridges in Julian Assange’s case. In your House and especially in your communication with the Secretary of State for the Home Department, the Rt Hon Priti Patel, we kindly ask you to underline the consequences – for Mr. Assange’s health as well as for freedom of the press worldwide – an extradition of Mr. Assange would have.
We are looking forward to engaging in a conversation with you on this matter.
Please accept the assurance of our most distinguished consideration.
Respectfully yours,
Max Lucks MP, Parliamentary Group Alliance 90/The Greens
Derya Türk-Nachbaur MP, SPD Parliamentary Group
Peter Heidt MP, FDP Parliamentary Group
Frank Schwabe MP, SPD Parliamentary Group
Sevim Dağdelen MP, Parliamentary Group The Left
Jürgen Trittin MP, Parliamentary Group Alliance 90/The Greens
Julian Pahlke MP, Parliamentary Group Alliance 90/The Greens
Manuel Höferlin MP, FDP Parliamentary Group
Fabian Funke MP, SPD Parliamentary Group
Dr Gregor Gysi MP, Parliamentary Group The Left
Deborah Düring MP, Parliamentary Group Alliance 90/The Greens
Boris Mijatovic MP, Parliamentary Group Alliance 90/The Greens
Erhard Grundl MP, Parliamentary Group Alliance 90/The Greens
Janine Wissler MP, Parliamentary Group The Left
Amira Mohamed Ali MP, Parliamentary Group The Left
Tabea Rößner MP, Parliamentary Group Alliance 90/The Greens
Axel Schäfer MP, SPD Parliamentary Group
Canan Bayram MP, Parliamentary Group Alliance 90/The Greens
Dr André Hahn MP, Parliamentary Group The Left
Dr Sahra Wagenknecht MP, Parliamentary Group The Left
Matthias W. Birkwald MP, Parliamentary Group The Left
Merle Spellerberg MP, Parliamentary Group Alliance 90/The Greens
Helge Lindh MP, SPD Parliamentary Group
Christian Görke MP, Parliamentary Group The Left
Misbah Khan MP, Parliamentary Group Alliance 90/The Greens
Andrej Hunko MP, Parliamentary Group The Left
Susanne Menge MP, Parliamentary Group Alliance 90/The Greens
Anke Domscheit-Berg MP, Parliamentary Group The Left
Dr Jan-Niclas Gesenhues MP, Parliamentary Group Alliance 90/The Greens
Ates Gürpinar MP, Parliamentary Group The Left
Johannes Wagner MP, Parliamentary Group Alliance 90/The Greens
Thomas Lutze MP, Parliamentary Group The Left
Kai Gehring MP, Parliamentary Group Alliance 90/The Greens
Sören Pellmann MP, Parliamentary Group The Left
Tobias Bacherle MP, Parliamentary Group Alliance 90/The Greens
Dr Petra Sitte MP, Parliamentary Group The Left
Nyke Slawik MP, Parliamentary Group Alliance 90/The Greens
Open Letter Assange – World Press Freedom Day 2022
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