Politics & Stuff

[Fulham Broadway 16,831]

63 Tory MPs not contesting their seats at next election, they know theyre fucked.

Still they've reamed the country, stolen billions of public money, and will doubtless get finance 'jobs' of a day a month for 100k.

They've served their billionaire masters whose fortunes have increased between 25 and 40% at the bottom level, some tory donors have seen their fortunes increase by 4000% with public service 'contracts'.

As their corporate media billionaires daily get the public to attack migrants, over the boat people 'crisis', several tory run companies are using it to print money

Apart from the 500m to Macron and 620 million to Rwanda it is also costing us taxpayers 9m a day for the hotels. Three large firms have contracts to run the hotels. Serco, Mears, and Calder. All are tory donors and have seen their profits trebled with their CEOs pay increase from 250 000 to 2.5 million each. Just another way the tories steal public money. One, Serco, provides some 109 hotels in England, according to a High Court judgement from December 2022, mostly in the Midlands, East and North West.

Serco, which also provides other services on behalf of the government, references "growth" in its immigration work in its 2022 annual report. 

Another firm, Mears Group, which court documents revealed is running 80 hotels in north-east England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, increased its annual revenue by 22% in 2021. The company's annual report said the increase was "largely driven" by its work finding hotel accommodation for asylum seekers.

No wonder they have no incentive to solve the 'crisis'.  

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It’s time we talked about the fall of Kyiv

Far from this being a frozen conflict, a nightmare scenario is edging into view because the West is failing to send arms

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/its-time-we-talked-about-the-fall-of-kyiv-6l3vrxbhf

Itis July and the Russian army is at the gates of Kyiv. President Zelensky delivers an emergency broadcast to repeat his defiant words, first uttered in February 2022, that he does not need a ride out of Ukraine. No, he needs ammunition to stay and fight the Russians.

If only the West had listened and done more when the brave Ukrainians were pleading for help, that might have made the difference. While the allies squabbled and the United States eventually provided another $60 billion in aid, as spring turned to summer, Putin’s troops broke through the lines in the south and east. Retreating Ukrainian forces were able only to slow the advance. When the Russians closed in on the capital, a new wave of refugees fled Ukraine seeking safety from incessant bombardment.

This is the nightmare scenario now being contemplated by western policymakers. Events are forcing military and civilian leaders in London, Washington, Paris and Brussels to map out the catastrophic collapse of Ukrainian forces denied the weapons and munitions they need.

Contrary to the predominant view that this is a perpetual “frozen conflict”, with neither side able to win a decisive advantage, the front line is bitterly contested and there is a real risk of Ukrainian forces being pushed back. Nato leaders must hope their gathering in Washington in July for a summit celebrating the 75th anniversary of the alliance is not consumed by such a crisis.

Only a year ago, it was all very different. The hope then was of a Ukrainian spring offensive that would reclaim territory. That didn’t work and, as the American magazine Foreign Affairs put it this week, “Ukraine is bleeding. Without new US military assistance, Ukrainian ground forces may not be able to hold the line against a relentless Russian military.”

The governments who support Ukraine most strongly are clearly worried and considering even the worst scenarios. The US Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, has issued several warnings that Ukraine is running out of money, while urging Congress to pass the aid bill that is stuck amid legislative infighting. The US risked being responsible for Ukraine’s defeat, she said.

A Russian advance would obviously be disastrous for the Ukrainians. It would also confront the West with all manner of tough challenges. Would the allies send troops to defend Kyiv? President Macron has clearly sensed the danger and is trying to steer the West towards a more muscular approach by raising the possibility of ground troops. Other countries, such as Germany, strongly object. When will the message be finally understood that peace for European populations is guaranteed only by strength? When Ukraine falls and Putin moves on to menacing the Baltics, Poland, Finland, Sweden or Norway?

• Russia is ready for nuclear war over Ukraine, says Putin

No one who is a supporter of Ukrainian self-determination against Russian barbarism wants this nightmare scenario to come true. Yet the stakes are so high. We have to be aware of the terrible price of defeat.

I’m for maximum military support on the basis that Ukraine must win. The consequences of a partial or complete defeat would be calamitous in ways western populations have barely begun to understand. But we have a lazy habit in the comfortable West — away from Europe’s front line in east and south Ukraine — of wishful thinking and being unprepared for bad surprises.
Indeed, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a surprise to most countries. The US and British governments ran a public campaign in the run-up to warn their allies. Few listened, apart from Finland, Poland and the Baltic states, where they know what it means to live next door to an expansionist Russia. Elsewhere, it was fashionable to dismiss this as the Americans and the Brits getting it wrong again. Remember Iraq?

Ahead of Ukraine, the Biden administration was scarred by having failed to foresee the instant collapse of the Afghan government in August 2021 when US forces left. Then the early phases of the war produced another extraordinary surprise. Zelensky’s refusal to leave Kyiv demonstrated the power of the individual in history to set an example of resistance that is followed by his fellow citizens.

Those are three enormous surprises in less than three years and it can happen again. Yet, weary western public opinion appears to have settled into a view that although we’re helping the Ukrainians to defend their homeland, they are stuck in an impossible stalemate before what is most likely to be some kind of “peace” deal fixing the current lines of combat. And then we can think about something else.

Polling conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations in January in 12 countries suggested that only 10 per cent of voters think Ukraine can win. Some 37 per cent thought that a compromise was most likely and 19.5 per cent thought that Russia would win in the end.
Scenarios other than military defeat are available, of course. There could be a coup in Russia or a newly elected President Trump might seek to impose a ceasefire and de facto Ukrainian surrender. Perhaps Ukraine holds on and Europe gets its act together, using the clout of a GDP ten times bigger than Russia with a population three and a half times larger.

As it is, we are in danger of losing sight of one of the main lessons of Ukraine’s war. Retreating to the post-Cold War complacency about European security is not an option. We need to think entirely differently about how dangerous the threats are, arm ourselves accordingly, prepare for the worst and at best hope to be pleasantly surprised.

[Fernando 6,453]

Yes as I said before I was more surprised that Ukraine lasted this long. But they can't go on like that forever. 

Sadly for the Ukrainian people but the world don't want to do more. They done all they could and that's it for them. 

Another lose for the UN? 

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How Biden Boxed Himself In on Gaza

The president draws on 50 years of unflagging support for Israel, and not even a humanitarian crisis can dislodge him from that viewpoint.

https://prospect.org/world/2024-03-28-how-biden-boxed-himself-in-on-gaza/

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a knack for making world leaders do the jobs of their subordinates. President Joe Biden had to call Netanyahu himself in October—in the first weeks of Israel’s brutal assault on the occupied territory of Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas attacks of October 7—to urge that Israel allow more than 100 trucks of relief aid a day into Gaza. Normally, that’s a task a low-level economic officer at the embassy might handle.

Five months later, the situation has only gotten more humiliating, with Palestinians suffering from an Israeli-sponsored famine. In mid-February, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan was expressing desperation that flour paid for by U.S. taxpayers reach Palestinians in Gaza. USAID Administrator Samantha Power was visiting stockpiles of humanitarian assistance in Jordan that were also held up. Then the Biden administration floated the idea of air-dropping aid into Gaza, a tactic of colossal expense and little value when Israel could just speed inspections and open up more entry points.

The next day, Israeli troops launched what became known as the “flour massacre,” opening fire on Palestinians in Gaza waiting in a bread line, killing over 100 people and injuring hundreds more. The U.S. went ahead with the airdrop. Now the administration is planning to build a makeshift port near Gaza City to prevent Israeli forces from stopping U.S. aid with U.S.-made weapons.

More from Jonathan Guyer

The U.S. looks powerless. Biden initially warned Israel not to perpetuate the mistakes the U.S. made after the September 11 attacks. “While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it,” he said to Israelis in October, though now Israel very much has done that and has not faced consequences. If nothing changes, the destruction of Palestine will be a major piece of Biden’s legacy.

Since October 7, the Biden administration has not applied pressure on Netanyahu to stop a widespread humanitarian crisis, but rather has transferred more weapons (often sidestepping Congress to do so), used its veto power at the United Nations to shield Israel from resolutions in support of a cease-fire, and played the role of technocratic fixer, trying to distribute aid that Israel is obligated under international law to provide to Palestinian civilians.

Experts are almost unanimous about what policy changes are needed to save lives today: securing an immediate cease-fire, conditioning weapons transfers on following the laws of war, and withholding diplomatic cover in forums like the U.N. Security Council. Biden’s team has tinkered with its rhetoric incrementally to acknowledge the suffering of Palestinians and call for what they now call a cease-fire (previously, it was a “humanitarian pause”; both would only last six weeks). It has introduced some policy mechanisms that could in the future hold Israel accountable for what have been credibly described as war crimes.

But for all of the outcry from voters, officials who have resigned in protest, and Democratic politicians, as well as anonymous, leaked criticisms from Biden’s own team, there has been no re-evaluation of the policy course. Beyond being unable or unwilling to stop Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians or the leveling of Gaza, Biden has not even been able to enforce the United States’ own laws on Israel.

The reason for Joe Biden’s particular brand of Israel policy is Joe Biden. People who worked with him throughout his 45-year career as senator and then vice president say that on this issue, he is Zionist and pro-Israel, and he means it. He’s been close with every Israeli prime minister since Golda Meir, as he reminds audiences, and his go-to one-liner is “If Israel didn’t exist, we would have to invent it.”

A willingness to buck the foreign-policy establishment has given Biden confidence in the face of outside criticism, and an allergy to changing course.

For Biden, Israel is not just a foreign-policy issue. As Haim Saban, the Israeli American businessman who’s raising millions for the re-election campaign, put it, Biden is pro-Israel in his gut. “It’s in his kishkes.”

Biden has at times been forward-thinking on domestic policy and flexible in updating his old-school thinking when it comes to anti-monopoly policy or reproductive rights. As a retail politician, he’s eager to listen to workers on the issues they care about.

On foreign policy, he has often strayed from the Washington establishment, withdrawing from Afghanistan and avoiding knee-jerk hawkishness on China. Not so on Israel and Palestine. And that willingness to buck the establishment has given him confidence in the face of outside criticism, and an allergy to changing course.

Biden is stuck in a box of his own creation. He has watched while Netanyahu runs a war campaign so ruthless, lethal, and indiscriminate that the International Court of Justice is investigating it for charges of genocide. And still, Biden appears oblivious to how much the U.S. electorate has moved in its support of Palestinians. Several recent surveys show that a majority of Americans, especially Democrats, disagree with his approach to Israel. American voters’ support for Palestinians has been steadily increasing for a decade.

Can Biden climb out of the box? The self-made trap preceded the war, says Yousef Munayyer, a researcher with the Arab Center Washington DC. “U.S. policy toward this issue was fundamentally flawed on October 6,” he told me. “And that really put the U.S. in a horrible position in terms of responding to this crisis once it started.”

The driving force behind Biden’s Middle East policy, before the war, was that “Palestine is just not that important anymore,” Munayyer explained. “That turned out to be catastrophically flawed.”

Remembrance of Things Past

As a child, Biden lived in a world without the State of Israel. As a politician, his approach to Israel was shaped in the era of the country’s founding, by events that happened before many of his advisers were even born. He speaks about the Jewish state with the flourish of a vintage AIPAC speech. “You know, the miracle of Israel is Israel. It’s Israel itself—the hope it inspires, the light it represents to the world,” Biden said on October 11.

“I truly believe, were there no Israel, no Jew in the world would be ultimately safe. It’s the only ultimate guarantee,” Biden added, another phrase from his usual repertoire. On that day, many American Jews wondered why America isn’t that place.

He so regularly recounts his 1973 meeting with Golda Meir, and her admonition to him that “We Jews have a secret weapon in the battle with the Arabs … we have no place else to go,” that it clearly still informs his thinking. Biden has been even to the right of the ultra-hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, founder of the Likud party, which Netanyahu today leads. In 1982, Biden told Begin that he fervently backed Israel’s war on Lebanon, even if it involved Israel killing women and children. “I disassociated myself from these remarks,” Begin told reporters upon returning to Israel. “I said to him: No, sir; attention must be paid. According to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war.”

He’s long been a favorite on the pro-Israel circuit. “I don’t think there’s any senator who’s ever done more fundraisers for AIPAC or gone around the country more for AIPAC,” Biden told their policy conference in 1992. He even lashed out at the George H.W. Bush administration for pushing Israel too hard in its diplomatic efforts that laid the groundwork for a peace process.

When the Israeli government embarrassed Biden—and the U.S.—by announcing the construction of new settlements in the West Bank during the vice president’s Middle East trip in 2010, Biden nonetheless defended Netanyahu.

He has ideological blinders, says Khaled Elgindy of the Middle East Institute. Israel for him is a kind of moral touchstone that transcends history and geopolitics, he told me. “Most presidents have had this Israel-centric view of the region, but even they were able to see when Israel went too far. Biden is not able to see that, and that’s the part that’s really astonishing.”

And he’s missed opportunities to engage with Israel through his term so far.

At least half of the buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, according to researchers.

Biden is hugely popular in Israel, especially after his public bear hug after October 7. Inside the country, there are portraits and murals and graffiti of Biden on street corners, all coming from a place of true goodwill toward the president. But he is unwilling to use what should be a tremendous amount of earned leverage to draw firm red lines in Israel’s military operations and the transfer of humanitarian assistance to Palestinians—or else cut off weapons to Israel.

No one has been able to convince him otherwise. “This is Biden’s personal project, this is his decision,” Sarah Yager, Washington director of Human Rights Watch, told me. “Nobody can touch it except Biden. He is the one that is holding reins of this policy of arming Israel.”

Israel is no longer a small, defenseless state. It is a nuclear-armed regional power whose politics has been shaped by the endless occupation of Palestinian lands, policies that Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups have documented as apartheid, and now the incredible lethality that characterizes the ongoing systemic violence in Gaza.

The Israeli center has been pulled to the right by Netanyahu’s Likud party, with extremist settlers in Bibi’s cabinet like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Emboldened by this fundamentalist flank, West Bank settlers have accelerated attacks against Palestinians—notably in a rampage in the village of Huwara that burned 30 Palestinian homes, with the Israeli military standing by.

Now, Netanyahu’s extremist allies are using the pretext of Hamas’s attacks to fundamentally reshape Gaza and Palestine. “Israel this time has a different set of objectives,” Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace told me. “They want to take this moment to fundamentally change the paradigm and erase Gaza.”

Throughout, Biden has held steady, refusing to look outside of this side of the box.

Adviser “Groupthink”

“The Middle East is quieter than it has been for decades,” Jake Sullivan, the White House’s foreign-policy gatekeeper, proclaimed a week before Hamas’s attacks in October. He was confident enough to commit that to writing in a cover story for Foreign Affairs magazine.

Biden was the first Democratic president in a generation to not show a serious effort toward a Palestinian state. The idea was to keep the Middle East, a perennial career-killer, off the president’s desk. That led to a diplomatic void and the further disenfranchisement of Palestinians, which likely contributed to the current war. There were a handful of minor economic summits between Israel, the U.S., and Arab states, while settler violence surged in the West Bank. Even before the October attacks, Israeli human rights watchdog Yesh Din called 2023 “the most violent year in settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank in both the number of incidents and their severity,” which highlights just how late the Biden administration has been in its sanctioning of Israeli settlers.

“I don’t want to finger one person, but it’s groupthink,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founding president of J Street, which has sought to be a liberal, but still pro-Israel, counterweight to AIPAC.

Running point from the White House is Brett McGurk, the National Security Council’s coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, who worked on Iraq in the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. McGurk said early on that Biden was pursuing a “back to basics” approach to the Middle East, but it’s unclear where the U.S. would be going back to. (McGurk worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq during the U.S. occupation in 2003, so hopefully not back there!)

In contrast, experts say that deputy national security adviser Jon Finer gets it. Finer, who started his career as a Middle East journalist for The Washington Post and worked in the Obama White House, is one of the administration’s progressive voices on foreign policy. In advance of the Michigan primary in February, he was dispatched to meet with frustrated Arab American voters in Dearborn. Other advisers include Amos Hochstein, a U.S.-Israeli dual citizen who has served in the Israeli military; despite holding an energy investment portfolio, Hochstein has been a key voice on national security. There are also two respected Middle East specialists, Philip Gordon and Ilan Goldenberg, who work in Vice President Kamala Harris’s office.

Biden doesn’t seem to get the Arab world, where the cause of Palestine remains popular and galvanizing.

The White House aide who most clearly articulates the president’s perspective is, not surprisingly, spokesperson John Kirby. His defenses of seemingly indefensible Israeli actions from the podium have now become viral memes. A typical line: When Israel had already killed 7,000 Palestinians in Gaza on October 27, Kirby said, “We’re not drawing red lines for Israel.”

Washington insiders say the White House is directing Israel-Palestine policy, not the State Department.

Still, the top officials at State, including those who have met with Israel’s war cabinet, largely share Biden’s pro-Israel ideology, chief among them Secretary of State Antony Blinken. As Biden’s longtime aide, he pushed Biden’s pro-Israel viewpoints and continues to, to this day. The special envoy for humanitarian issues, David Satterfield, has longtime links to the Israel lobby and managed to avoid any Department of Justice prosecution for handing off confidential information to AIPAC in 2005. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew served as an informal emissary to the American Jewish community when he was Obama’s chief of staff, and Democratic Majority for Israel applauded his new appointment. Counselor Derek Chollet also worked as a senior national-security official in the Obama administration, where he shepherded advanced weapons transfers to Israel that were unprecedented. Barbara Leaf, the assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, hails from the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy. When she co-authored a 2020 essay about U.S. policy toward Israel, she didn’t mention Palestinians.

“There is no debate, and criticism of Israel is so hard to express within the administration,” Josh Paul, who resigned in protest from a State Department security assistance job in October, told me.

Very few Arab or Muslim Americans serve at high levels of Biden foreign policy. Hady Amr, the special representative for Palestinian affairs, has been noticeably absent from press briefings, high-level meetings, and public appearances.

The U.S. military, for its part, may be the most skeptical if not downright critical of this whole approach, as epitomized by airman Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington.

But many of Biden’s appointees to the Pentagon, naturally, share the president’s view. Of note is Daniel Shapiro, the top civilian for Middle East policy at the Department of Defense, who served as Obama’s ambassador to Israel and then stayed on in the country, working as an adviser to Israeli companies like the notorious spyware-maker NSO Group.

Still, Biden’s most important adviser is Biden. He believes in his own foreign-policy judgment and won’t be easily swayed by others. Meanwhile, Biden’s advisers say that they are working tirelessly to tinker with policies, but there is no major reassessment in the works.

“Every time their policy has shown to not be working, instead of changing course or adjusting, they double down on it,” Elgindy told me. “At this point they are so heavily invested in what is a catastrophically failed approach, and to change course in anything but rhetoric would mean conceding that they were wrong from the beginning.”

A Shifting Electorate

Biden’s formative years in Washington were a time when being reflexively pro-Israel was good politics. From his perspective, you never pay a price for being too supportive of Israel.

“The group of people around him in his close political circle went by the rulebook of the 1990s,” Ben-Ami told me. “And God forbid you do something that gets you on the wrong side of the Jewish community.”

That may have been true when Biden was a junior senator, but today he speaks for a much narrower constituency. While many older voters share his views, he has grown out of touch with younger voters, minority voters, and Arab voters. Those groups happen to increasingly occupy positions in Democratic campaigns and as political appointees.

Tariq Habash, a Palestinian American appointee, was the first member of the Biden administration to resign over Gaza. Habash told me Biden has been willing to “embrace innovative policies on domestic issues,” like in forgiving student loans, which Habash was leading in the Department of Education. Habash says Biden has been on the “forefront of listening to working Americans.” But on Palestine, Biden won’t move from his “unrelenting support and unrestricted military funding.”

“They have not been listening for the past four and a half months” to Arab Americans, Habash told me. “If you’re not willing to take tiny steps to exert any kind of pressure, why would you expect Arabs to come out and vote for you?”

This also contributes to the experience of many Arab Americans who feel that Biden lacks humanity and empathy for them.

Arab American protesters in Dearborn, Michigan. The Uncommitted campaign received 13 percent of the primary vote in the state.

Hundreds of members of Biden’s own campaign staff have spoken out, and members of the White House have begun organizing protests. “Islamophobia is not being taken seriously,” a current White House official with the group Staffers for Ceasefire told me.

In response to the electoral realities of the Democratic Party in 2024, Biden’s team has slightly changed its message and amped up its humanitarian efforts. But those tonal shifts haven’t come with significant policy changes. And that was not enough to win over the 100,000 voters in Michigan who rebuked Biden with an uncommitted vote in the primary. While that accounted for a little over 13 percent of the primary vote, in Minnesota the next week, nearly 19 percent of the vote cast an uncommitted ballot.

This side of the box may be the one that Biden may be forced to confront head on. He might lose the election over this issue. But for now, Biden’s team is helping him avoid pro-Palestine protests on the campaign trail rather than address the root of the dissent.

Misunderstanding the Middle East

Arab cartoonists are already skewering President Biden’s callousness for licking an ice-cream cone while prognosticating about a temporary cease-fire (a prediction that didn’t come true). Does the Biden administration grasp how detested its policies are in the Arab Middle East?

Biden doesn’t seem to get the Arab world, where the cause of Palestine remains popular and galvanizing. And he has lost a lot of Arabs who were on his side. As Emile Hokayem of the British think tank IISS said, “the disaster in Gaza has completely disabused a large segment of liberals and professionals in the Arab world about Western claims of upholding and caring about values in the conduct of foreign policy.” That will detract from the United States’ ability to assert its interests, in the Middle East and beyond.

United Nations votes show America isolated from the world, with just a few countries on its side.

At the same time, Biden’s concept of the U.S. as an indispensable superpower requires huge costs and major risks—especially to U.S. personnel, as evidenced by the killing of three U.S. troops in Jordan in January. Thousands of service members continue to participate in endless wars in Iraq, Syria, and a network of bases in the Middle East and Africa, and run the risk of getting drawn into this war. For all of Biden’s enthusiasm to end the war in Afghanistan, no such commitment has been shown for these forever wars. So the U.S. is caught fighting old, irrelevant conflicts under the guise of countering ISIS or Iran or continuing the war on terrorism, and coming under fire at a time when militant groups see the U.S. as complicit in Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians.

In that climate, Biden’s advisers thought they could clinch a long-shot deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and just set aside Palestinians. The concept is an extension of the “Abraham Accords,” an initiative of President Trump. Even now, Biden’s team has kept in place Jared Kushner’s formula of casting away Palestinian aspirations in service of pushing to normalize relations between Israel and Arab countries. In doing so, Biden kept in place most of Trump’s Mideast policies. (Only in February, four and a half months into the war, did the Biden administration overturn the Pompeo Doctrine of not viewing Israeli settlements as against international law.)

The administration is clinging to the triple bank shot of a policy that: (a) Saudi Arabia would at long last normalize diplomatic relations with Israel, in exchange for (b) an Israeli pledge toward the establishment of a Palestinian state and (c) U.S. inducements for Saudi Arabia that might include nuclear technology and even an American security guarantee for the kingdom, which polling shows Americans don’t support. This would require so many contingencies—the buy-in of Israel’s extreme right-wing government, congressional approval, and fast-moving politics in an election year—that it’s difficult to take it seriously.

The idea is reminiscent of another Biden fantasy solution, the three-way partition of Iraq along ethnic lines that he dreamed up with the late foreign-policy strategist Leslie Gelb. It was a ridiculous and incendiary idea that didn’t take into account how U.S. foreign policy affects actual people. By the way, as an undergraduate, Sullivan worked as Gelb’s intern at the Council on Foreign Relations, and now at the White House, he continues to channel that Great Game mentality of U.S. exceptionalism in the world.

In a Box With Biden

Unless President Biden is willing to kick down the sides of the box—checking his own assumptions about Israel, facing down the realities of the electorate, turning to new advisers with a broader perspective, and seeing the Middle East as it is—he will remain constrained.

Many policies to ensure human rights and accountability are already enshrined in law. They are lying in wait, unused. “If we’re going to keep arming Israel then there’s not that much to talk about,” Yager told me.

On most topics in any presidential administration, credit or blame can be broadly distributed. But in this case, the pro-Israel directives are coming from the president himself, with his instincts from another era. “Biden has a multi-decade career where he has proudly stood with Israel at every turn,” Zaha Hassan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told me. “The idea that now, in his later years, he is going to want to distract from that legacy is unlikely.”

The most powerful foreign-policy officials in the Biden administration are negotiating with Israel about getting more flour into Gaza, tweaking rhetoric in press conferences, urging their boss to adjust small policies on the margin, like holding Israeli settlers to account, while failing to make the bigger adjustments needed to deal with the gravity of the crisis at hand. The story is not really one of foreign policy, but of the ideology and psychology of President Biden.

[Fulham Broadway 16,831]

If anyone did any cursory research into the Israeli lobby of Western governments, the 'donations', the immediate shutting down of dissenting voices, it becomes crystal clear how the genocide, mass starvation, is 'acceptable' to so many

[MoroccanBlue 5,296]

12 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

If anyone did any cursory research into the Israeli lobby of Western governments, the 'donations', the immediate shutting down of dissenting voices, it becomes crystal clear how the genocide, mass starvation, is 'acceptable' to so many

In Hollywood, merely calling for a ceasefire will get you blacklisted. 

See Melissa Barrera in the Scream franchise. 

[cosmicway 1,323]

The objective in Ukraine is to defeat Russia in a conventional war, without opening other fronts.
Is this impossible for NATO ?
I don't buy.
I believe all of NATO's arsenal shoud be thrown against the Russians.
Where is the air force ? The navy ?

[Vesper 28,768]

DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson resigns after sex offence charges

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-68686691

Sir Jeffrey Donaldson has been charged with historical sexual offences and has resigned as Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader.

A 57-year-old woman has also been charged with aiding and abetting in connection with the alleged offences.

They were both arrested on Thursday morning by PSNI detectives and were questioned before being charged on Thursday night.

They are now due to appear in court next month.

In a statement the DUP said: "The Party Chairman has received a letter from Sir Jeffrey Donaldson MP confirming that he has been charged with allegations of an historical nature and indicating that he is stepping down as Leader of the Democratic Unionist Party with immediate effect.

"In accordance with the Party Rules, the Party Officers have suspended Mr Donaldson from membership, pending the outcome of a judicial process.

"The Party Officers have this morning unanimously appointed Mr Gavin Robinson MP as the Interim Party Leader."

Police issued a statement on Friday morning, but did not disclose the identity of those charged.

The statement said a 61-year-old man had been charged with "non-recent sexual offences" adding that a 57-year-old woman was also arrested at the same time and charged with "aiding and abetting additional offences".

The statement also confirmed the pair would appear before Newry Magistrates' Court on 24 April.

It is understood DUP officers met on Friday morning after details of the charges emerged.

Sir Jeffrey's social media accounts, including on X, were deleted overnight.

Sir Jeffrey Donaldson was elected leader of the DUP in 2021.

He is also the longest serving MP in Northern Ireland having been first elected to Parliament in 1997.

Sir Jeffrey recently steered his party back in to government in Northern Ireland ending a two year boycott of the Stormont institutions.

The DUP had walked out of government in protest at the Northern Ireland Protocol, claiming the post-Brexit arrangements had undermined their place in the UK.

Sir Jeffrey was first elected to parliament in 1997 as a representative of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP).

In 2003, following long-standing opposition to the Good Friday Agreement and the leadership of David Trimble, he announced he would leave the UUP, later joining the DUP.

He was awarded a knighthood in 2016 for political service.

[Vesper 28,768]

'That's insane': Trump slammed for 'comparing his plight to that of Jesus' before Easter

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-jesus-easter-comparison/

 

Donald Trump just shared an article comparing himself to Jesus, one day before Easter celebrations.

Trump, who has long been accused of narcissism that equates to blasphemy for some Christians, on Saturday posted an article to his Truth Social platform that makes the religious comparison. Truth Social is the ex-president's social media company, which recently went public but is expected by some experts to tank.

The article that Trump shared is titled, "The Crucifixion of Donald Trump."

"One of the basic tenets of the law is determining who the victim is. There quite literally doesn’t appear to be one in the New York case, but the judge rendered a guilty verdict anyway. The judge determined a penalty in the staggering amount of $455 million. With interest, Trump was told he had to pay $464 million within 30 days, regardless of whether he intended to appeal. If he failed to secure payment or a bond to guarantee the amount, New York would seize Trump-owned properties," according to the article published on March 28. "Much like Pilate tried to placate the mob by merely beating Jesus nearly to death, the judge 'relented' by lowering the bond required to a paltry $175 million and gave Trump an additional 10 days to secure it."

Conservative Army Iraq War Veteran Peter Henlein flagged the share by the ex-president.

"Trump just shared an article comparing his plight to that of Jesus," Henlein wrote before quoting the name of the piece. "That's insane."

Henlein goes on to suggest that Christians shouldn't vote for Trump over President Joe Biden in the upcoming presidential election later this year.

"But please, go on about how Christians must vote for this guy," he wrote on Saturday.

[Vesper 28,768]

Unraveling Havana Syndrome: New evidence links the GRU's assassination Unit 29155 to mysterious attacks on Americans, at home and abroad

https://theins.ru/en/politics/270425

A yearlong investigation by The Insider, in collaboration with 60 Minutes and Der Spiegel, has uncovered evidence suggesting that unexplained anomalous health incidents, also known as Havana Syndrome, may have their origin in the use of directed energy weapons wielded by members of Russian GRU Unit 29155. Members of the Kremlin’s infamous military intelligence sabotage squad have been placed at the scene of suspected attacks on overseas U.S. government personnel and their family members, leading victims to question what Washington knows about the origins of Havana Syndrome, and what an appropriate Western response might entail.

 

Tbilisi

He was tall, certainly taller than Joy’s neighbors and the Georgians she’d come to know in eight months of living in Dighomi, an upscale residential community in Tbilisi. He was young and thin and blonde and well-dressed — as if headed to the theater, or perhaps a wedding.

Minutes earlier on October 7, 2021, Joy, an American nurse and the wife of a U.S. Embassy official, had been taking her laundry out of the dryer when she was completely consumed by an acute ringing sound that reminded her of what someone in the movies experiences after a bomb has gone off. “It just pierced my ears, came in my left side, felt like it came through the window, into my left ear,” Joy remembers. “I immediately felt fullness in my head, and just a piercing headache.” She ran out of the laundry room on the second floor of her house and into the bathroom adjoining the master bedroom. Then she vomited.

Joy and her husband, Hunter, a Justice Department attaché in the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi, had only arrived in Georgia in Feb. 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 lockdown. Despite the “all-consuming” noise in her head, Joy called Hunter. (Both their names have been changed for this article to protect their identities.) As the spouse of a U.S. official serving abroad, she’d undergone overseas survival training and remembered that if something didn’t feel right, the first thing you do is “get off the X” – leave the location. Joy checked the house’s security camera at the front door to see if anyone was outside.

A black Mercedes crossover was parked just beyond the gate of her property, directly opposite her laundry room. Joy went outside, and that’s when she saw the tall, thin man. She raised her phone to photograph him.

“It was like he locked eyes with me. He knew what I was doing.” Then he got into the Mercedes, and it drove off. Joy took a picture of the car and its license plate as it pulled away. She says she didn’t see the man again until three years later, when she was shown a photograph of Albert Averyanov, a Russian operative attached to Unit 29155, a notorious assassination and sabotage squad of the GRU, Moscow’s military intelligence service.

Albert is not an ordinary Russian spy. Aged only 23 when this encounter took place, he was the son of the founding commander of Unit 29155, Gen. Andrei Averyanov, 56, who is now the powerful deputy director of the GRU, tasked with running the Kremlin’s foreign policy in Africa. To the public, he was a fresh graduate of Moscow State University, where he had earned a masters’ in “management of migration processes,” a topic in which his father took a keen interest. Even within the nepotistic GRU, Albert’s trajectory was unusually steep — a young cadet who was being groomed for a bright career in espionage. In 2019, only 20, he’d even interned in Geneva with the rezidentura of Unit 29155, disguising his visit to the international Swiss capital as legions of other Russian intelligence officers have: as an English language-learning trip. Such was Andrey’s desire to see his son follow in his footsteps that the GRU had to ignore its own rules of recruitment, which mandate officers blend in with their surroundings. As a 6’2” young blonde, Albert was conspicuous in any crowd, let alone a tony suburb of Tbilisi.

When Joy saw Albert’s face three years later, she had a “visceral” reaction. “I can absolutely say that this looks like the man that I saw in the street.”

'Non-lethal Acoustic Weapons'

A yearlong investigation by The Insider, in collaboration with 60 Minutes and Der Spiegel, has uncovered evidence suggesting that unexplained anonymous health incidents, also known as Havana Syndrome, may have their origin in the use of directed energy weapons wielded by members of Unit 29155.

Among this investigation’s core findings is the fact that senior members of the unit received awards and political promotions for work related to the development of “non-lethal acoustic weapons,” a term used in Russian military-scientific literature to describe both sound- and radiofrequency-based directed energy devices, as both would result in acoustic artifacts in the victim’s brain.

These and other operatives attached to Unit 29155, traveling undercover, have been geolocated to places around the world just before or at the time of reported anomalous health incidents — or AHIs, as the U.S. government formally refers to Havana Syndrome. Furthermore, Joy is not the only victim to identify a known member of this Russian black ops squad lurking around her home.

The first sighting may have happened exactly seven years earlier. Contrary to the information that has been made public about Havana Syndrome — that it began in the eponymous Cuban capital in 2016 — there were likely attacks two years earlier in Frankfurt, Germany, when a U.S. government employee stationed at the consulate there was knocked unconscious by something akin to a strong energy beam. The victim was later diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury, and was also able to identify a Geneva-based Unit 29155 operative. (The incident occurred within months of Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, in which a stealthy, nearly bloodless seizure of the Crimean peninsula in Feb. and Mar. 2014 gave way to a roiling eight-year-long dirty war in the eastern industrial heartland of Donbas, close to Ukraine’s border with Russia.)

The Insider, 60 Minutes and Der Spiegel have uncovered documentary evidence that Unit 29155 has been experimenting with exactly the kind of weaponized technology experts suggest is a plausible cause for the mysterious medical condition that has to date affected over a hundred far-flung U.S. spies and diplomats, as well as several Canadian officials. Many are seasoned subject matter specialists on Russia, fluent in the language; others have expertise in different fields, such as the Middle East or Latin America, but were assigned after the takeover of Crimea to sensitive U.S. government roles aimed at countermanning Russian aggression and intelligence operations across Europe and North America.

Unit 29155, moreover, is infamous within the U.S. intelligence community. “Their scope is global for conducting lethal operations and acts of sabotage,” a former high-ranking CIA officer with subject matter expertise in Russia told The Insider. “Their mission is to find, fix, and finish, all in support of Vladimir Putin’s imperial dreams.”

“Unit 29155's scope is global for conducting lethal operations and acts of sabotage. Their mission is to find, fix, and finish, all in support of Vladimir Putin’s imperial dreams.”

Originally conceived as a training unit within the GRU, it was reorganized and expanded in 2008 as an operations team devoted to assassination, sabotage, and political destabilization campaigns across the world. Three members of this unit, Col. Alexander Mishkin, Col. Anatoliy Chepiga and Maj. Gen. Denis Sergeev, were responsible for poisoning British double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia with the military-grade nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury, England in 2018. In 2015, Denis Sergeev and other unit members twice poisoned Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev with a similar organophosphate weapon, almost certainly because Gebrev’s company, EMCO, was selling ammunition to Georgia and Ukraine, two countries that had recently been at war with Russia. Unit 29155 also used Serbian mercenaries to orchestrate a failed coup in Montenegro on the eve of that nation’s accession to NATO in 2016. As The Insider was the first to report, the unit was responsible for a series of explosions at ammunition and weapons depots across Bulgaria and Czechia — explosions which began in 2011, two years after Unit 29155’s reconstitution as a black ops squad and right in the middle of the Obama administration’s “reset” with Moscow. (These operations injured or killed dozens of innocent bystanders; their exposures have led to the expulsion of 19 Russian diplomats from Sofia and Prague, respectively, as well as indictments by the Bulgarian government of all the Unit 29155 saboteurs implicated in bombings in that country.) More recently, members of the unit were deployed as an advanced sabotage-and-kill team in Ukraine in the days ahead of Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country, in late Feb. 2022.

Unlike other teams within Russia’s sprawling intelligence apparatus, this one doesn’t spy on people, at least not for the sake of gathering information. It is devoted exclusively to so-called kinetic — i.e. violent — military operations. Its predecessor and analog was the Soviet KGB’s department devoted to “special tasks,” which conducted assassinations and acts of terrorism abroad. Its most sinister spadework included killing Ukrainian nationalists in Europe with bombs and cyanide guns and plunging an ice-axe into the skull of exiled revolutionary Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940.

Havana Syndrome, itself long thought to be the accrued biological effect caused by a different kind of unique weapon, encompasses a variation of symptoms including: chronic headaches, vertigo, tinnitus, insomnia, nausea, lasting psychophysiological impairment, and, in some cases, blindness or hearing loss. Many victims have said they were fine one minute, then stricken with an intense pain or pressure in their skull the next — usually localized to one side of the head, as if they were caught in a beam of concentrated energy. A good number have been diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injuries. Others have suffered such severe long-term cognitive and vestibular aftereffects that they can no longer function on a day-to-day basis and have been medically retired from government service.

Joy has suffered from headaches every day for the past three years. She has also undergone two surgeries for semicircular canal dehiscence (the appearance of holes in the bony walls that encase her inner ears). She will need a third surgery to address the rapid deterioration of her temporal bone, a condition she says her neurosurgeon cannot explain.

Havana Syndrome first gained public attention in 2017 in connection with strange ailments affecting more than twenty CIA and State Department officials posted to Cuba in the wake of revivified diplomatic relations between the Obama administration and the government headed by Fidel Castro’s brother Raúl.

Havana Syndrome first gained public attention in 2017 in connection with strange ailments affecting more than twenty CIA and State Department officials posted to Cuba in the wake of revivified diplomatic relations between the Obama administration and the government headed by Fidel Castro’s brother Raúl. The cases were recorded in Havana between May 2016 and September 2017, when the Trump administration radically reduced the State Department’s presence on the Caribbean island and the CIA withdrew all of its personnel from the reopened U.S. Embassy there. But few in the intelligence community believed the Cubans were behind the phenomenon. Given Moscow’s outsize influence on the Communist-run nation, the prevailing theory was that the Russians had carried out the attacks as part of an effort to hamper the U.S.-Cuban rapprochement.

Well over 100 AHI cases have been cited worldwide, affecting American spies, diplomats, military officers, contractors, and, in some instances, their spouses, children, and even household pets. Medically confirmed symptoms have been reported as far afield as Guangzhou, China, and as close to home as Washington, D.C. One victim was a senior official in the Trump-era National Security Council who became temporarily asphasic and whose body went numb right outside the Eisenhower Executive Building in mid-November 2020. Another was CIA Director Bill Burns’s then-deputy chief of staff, who was hit in Delhi in September 2021, causing Burns to cut short official visits to India and Pakistan. That same year, the Biden Administration signed into law the Havana Act, which provides six-figure compensation for confirmed victims of AHIs.

There is a reason why the Havana Act only came into force in 2021: for the past eight years, Havana Syndrome has been the subject of intense controversy. Sociologists have suggested it is little more than a mass psychogenic illness, or perhaps the outbreak of mass hysteria. Such arguments have been undercut by multiple medical studies, including one conducted by an expert panel convened by the U.S. intelligence community. The final assessment of that investigation found that AHIs had “a unique combination of core characteristics that cannot be explained by known environmental or medical conditions and could be due to external stimuli.” Nevertheless, in Mar. 2023, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) issued a redacted report stating that it was “very unlikely” that AHIs were caused by a foreign adversary. This assessment has sent shockwaves among the hundreds of former and current intelligence officers and their family members who believe they have suffered significant and often irreversible health consequences at the hands of an enemy force. As a result, many of these victims feel betrayed by their government for neglecting to identify the culprit for their predicament.

The Insider and its investigative partners have uncovered new evidence — in the form of intercepted Russian intelligence documents, travel logs, and call metadata, along with eyewitness testimony — the totality of which challenges the assessment made by the ODNI. Adam, a pseudonym adopted by Patient Zero, the first CIA officer to be stricken with Havana Syndrome in Cuba, told The Insider, “What this long-term investigation has shown is that either the intelligence community is incapable of carrying out its most basic function, or it has worked to cover up the facts and gaslight injured employees and the public.”

Greg Edgreen, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, set up the working group investigating Havana Syndrome for the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, from 2020 to 2023. The role gave him access to classified intelligence compiled not just by the Pentagon, but by other agencies within the U.S. intelligence community. In response to this investigation, Edgreen told 60 Minutes: “If I'm wrong about Russia being behind anomalous health incidents, I will come onto your show. And I will eat my tie.”

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is currently investigating how U.S. spy agencies reached their nothing-to-see-here assessment in March 2023. Given the DIA working group’s contribution to the ODNI report, which acknowledges varying levels of confidence reached by different agencies, Edgreen’s unambiguous attribution of culpability to Moscow should raise eyebrows in the U.S. intelligence community and in Congress. Another organization said to be skeptical that a foreign adversary is not behind Havana Syndrome is the National Security Agency, which deals in signals intelligence, or intercepted communications.

The Son Also Rises

Joy’s identification of Albert Averyanov outside her home in Tbilisi is backed up by two U.S. government officials who told 60 Minutes that the Russian operative was indeed in the Georgian capital around the time of her attack.

Just a few short years before his graduation from Moscow State University in 2019, Albert was already being groomed by his father at 16 to take over Unit 29155. Albert unofficially “trained” in Geneva under the supervision of Col. Egor Gordienko, 45, who was then stationed in the city under diplomatic cover as Russia’s second trade representative at the World Trade Organization. Following his apprenticeship, Albert became an active member of Unit 29155, as evidenced by call data The Insider, 60 Minutes, and Der Spiegel obtained demonstrating his constant communication with other operatives from the group, as well as travel records showing his joint trips with known 29155 officers.

For a GRU operative, Albert lives a remarkably open life on social media. He plays basketball and soccer and travels by plane around the world under his legal name, posting updates of his game history with the Moscow-based amateur Evian soccer club (zero goals in 60 matches), and photos of himself with his girlfriend, Nastya, on joyrides in his Mercedes-Benz ML/GLE. But as has already been noted, Albert’s travels haven’t always been of the touristy kind. Leaked airline data shows that some of his most eyebrow-raising flights are booked by Unit 29155’s human resources department.

For example, both Albert and his father Andrey Averyanov left Moscow on September 30, 2021, eight days before Joy spotted the person she believes was Averyanov the younger outside her home in Tbilisi. Father and son flew to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and only returned to Moscow eleven days later, on October 10. But Tashkent was not their final destination.

Andrey turned off his phone in the Russian capital and never switched it back on until he had landed on October 10, calling his driver from the airport. Albert took his with him and did not immediately switch it off. He received a call from an unidentified Uzbek number at 8:04 a.m. on October 1, the morning after he and Andrey had arrived in Tashkent. Albert’s phone was then turned off. Thirty-six minutes later, at 8:40 a.m., a flight took off from Tashkent to Tbilisi. (There were no direct flights between Russia and the Georgian capital in 2021, owing to a diplomatic spat between the two countries, and members of Unit 29155 anyway use decoy transit destinations to avoid being traced to a particular attack or incident, as The Insider has as previously reported.)

Over the next ten days, Albert’s phone remained off, meaning that its geolocation metadata for this period cannot be obtained. What is visible is that the phone was roaming, and Albert’s cellular plan did not allow for him to receive incoming calls or connect to the internet. However, on the evening of October 9, the eve of the father-son duo’s return trip from Tashkent to Moscow, Albert evidently turned his phone back on because he received an automated message from his mobile operator, Beeline, welcoming him to Uzbekistan. That message indicates that Albert had been outside the country in the preceding days, and had only re-entered Uzbekistan on the day before his onward trip to Moscow.

When The Insider telephoned Albert to ask if he was in Tbilisi at the time of the alleged attacks on U.S. diplomats and their families, he listened to the question, then over-excitedly asked who was on the other end of the line. “Stop, stop, who’s calling me?” When told it was the editor-in-chief of The Insider, he immediately hung up.

The Frankfurt Attacks

Seven years earlier and almost two thousand miles to the West, in November 2014 in Frankfurt, Germany, two separate attacks had occurred one after the other, according to multiple sources. One of those sources, Mark Lenzi, 49, is a current State Department official.

Lenzi, his wife, son, and daughter, were all medevaced from Guangzhou, China in early June 2018 after they each failed brain injury tests. According to Lenzi, he and his family have been compensated by the U.S. government with “more than a million dollars because of our diagnosed traumatic brain injuries” in a combination of civil litigation settlements and Havana Act payments. In November 2014, Lenzi was working in the U.S. Consulate in Frankfurt as its regional security officer when his colleagues succumbed to the same health incident that he and his household would experience years later on another continent.

“The 2014 Frankfurt attacks were always key in that they came before the Cuba and China hits and should have received the most attention from the U.S. Government.”

“The 2014 Frankfurt attacks were always key in that they came before the Cuba and China hits and should have received the most attention from the U.S. Government,” Lenzi told The Insider, 60 Minutes, and Der Spiegel.

One victim, according to Lenzi and other sources, was a U.S. government employee at the consulate, whom The Insider will call Taylor. For Taylor, the symptoms began as an intense feeling of pressure, which started in the torso and radiated up to the head and neck. Then there was nausea, followed by a “high-pitched squeal.” Taylor raced to a bathroom to vomit before collapsing unconscious on the floor. At St. Marie Hospital, located within minutes of the consulate, Taylor was diagnosed by German doctors on November 4, 2014 with vestibular neuronitis, the sudden onset of vertigo, replete with nausea, vomiting, and a rise in blood pressure. Once back in the United States, Taylor was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury.

In the weeks leading up to the attack, Taylor remembers confronting a tall, muscular man with a military bearing acting suspiciously across the road from the consulate residential complex. The unknown man was dressed in casual street clothes, and was pacing the length of a housing unit while inspecting and photographing parked vehicles with U.S. diplomatic plates. After a brief exchange with Taylor, the man responded with a strong Russian accent, shutting down the encounter and running off.

Via a third party, The Insider, 60 Minutes and Der Spiegel was able to share with Taylor two photographs of Gordienko — later to become Albert Averyanov’s mentor — whom the investigative team has reason to believe had been in the Frankfurt area as part of an advance reconnaissance team just before the attack. One of the photographs was taken in 2015, the other in 2017. Taylor did not hesitate in confirming that Gordienko was the suspect skulking around outside U.S. consulate housing.

“Yes, that’s him,” Taylor said. “I’m getting goosebumps looking at him now.”

Euromaidan and the New Era of Special Tasks

2014 was a busy year for Unit 29155. In the last months of 2013, as street protests against Ukraine’s former president, Viktor Yanukovich, were reaching boiling point, several members of the unit had been dispatched under cover identities into Ukraine, arguably to thwart a pro-Western revolution. The spies' efforts had clearly failed in Ukraine, and they were redirected to disrupting or hurting Ukraine’s partners abroad.

One team of the unit’s operatives, traveling under fake identities to and from Europe, infiltrated a Czech Ministry of Defense-controlled munitions storage facility in the town of Vrbětice in the southeastern Moravian region of Czechia. They planted explosives and blew up a consignment of artillery ammunition, owned by Emilian Gebrev’s EMCO and believed by the GRU to have been bound for Ukraine. That same year, another Unit 29155 team made repeat trips to and from Germany. For instance, on January 26, 2014, Maj. Gen. Denis Sergeev and Alexander Mishkin landed in Prague. From there, travel data obtained by The Insider, 60 Minutes, and Der Spiegel show they took the train to Munich, where, on January 30, they rented a car. Sergeev and Mishkin’s whereabouts were lost for the next 40 hours, but they did return their rental car the next evening in Munich. Then they returned by train to Prague. Sergeev and Mishkin flew back to Moscow on February 2.

As a rule, spies always leave misleading traces in their air travel, avoiding trips directly to their destination of interest, and sometimes investing hours — or even days — in diversionary travel by train or car.

The use of a sinuous route is part of the GRU’s operational tradecraft — a means of throwing off counterintelligence services with false trails. As a rule, spies always leave misleading traces in their air travel, avoiding trips directly to their destination of interest, and sometimes investing hours — or even days — in diversionary travel by train or car. Additional motivation for the Russian spies to enter the common European space via a country different than the target destination was linked to the fact they had been issued visas by different European countries; the agents anticipated lesser scrutiny at the border if they entered through the country that had issued their visa.

What were Sergeev and Mishkin doing in Germany? Neither conducts pure espionage for the GRU, as their later operational activity makes clear. A year later, Sergeev would serve as the operational commander of Unit 29155 who oversaw the Gebrev poisonings – he’s even filmed on CCTV in the parking garage of Gebrev’s EMCO office building in Sofia, evidently searching for the target’s vehicle where, Bulgarian authorities believe, an organophosphate chemical weapon similar to Novichok was laced on the driver’s side door handle. Still later, Sergeev established an operational headquarters at a low-rent hotel in Paddington, London, while Mishkin, along with his Unit 29155 accomplice Antaoly Chepiga, took a train to Salisbury to slather Novichok contained in a false Nina Ricci perfume bottle on the front door handle of 47 Christie Miller Road, home to Sergei Skripal. Their travel to Central Europe strongly indicates they were on a similar mission, or laying the groundwork for one, such as reconnoitering a target.

Making this assumption even more persuasive is the fact that in late September 2014, members of Unit 29155 – Sergeev included – began a series of staggered trips to Central and Western Europe, trips which typically signify the preparatory phase for a major sabotage or assassination operation.

On September 25, Sergeev flew from Moscow to Milan. Several months earlier he had obtained an Italian-issued multi-entry Schengen visa, affording him easy access, absent any border control checks, to, at that time, 26 European countries including Switzerland. Yet, he preferred to enter the common European space via the country that had issued him the visa. That same day, Col. Evgeny Kalinin, another member of the unit, flew to Budapest posing as a Russian diplomatic mail courier. He returned to Moscow two days later. Finally, Gordienko, the Unit 29155 operative Taylor later saw milling about U.S. consulting housing in Frankfurt, arrived in Paris from Moscow on a French-issued Schengen visa.

Gordienko and Sergeev took trains from their respective decoy destinations to the same place, Geneva, where they checked into the Nash Airport hotel on the evening of September 26. Whether they stayed there or not is unknown but, on October 6, they registered new rooms at the Geneva Airport Novotel Suites — rooms they kept, according to receipts examined by The Insider, 60 Minutes and Der Spiegel, until October 13.

On September 27, the day after they checked into the Nash hotel, Gordienko rented a car from Sixt for five days. (A subsequent car rental on October 2 was canceled.) No further digital traces were left by him or Sergeev until their return to Moscow via separate routes on October 13.

But the timing of this trip is telling. It tracks with when Taylor saw Gordienko in Frankfurt, weeks before the attack. Once ensconced in a hotel near Geneva’s airport which they kept booked for a total of 18 days, Gordienko and Sergeev could have easily boarded flights to and from Frankfurt using fictitious identities, given they were in the Schengen zone and thus subject to no internal security checks (most European airlines do not check ID documents upon boarding for intra-Schengen destinations)

They weren’t the only GRU operatives flying to the region.

On October 11, a trio of seemingly unrelated Russian tourists began descending on Western Europe, all traveling under fake identities. All three were members of Unit 29155.

The most senior of them was Col. Ivan Terentiev, a deputy to unit commander Andrey Averyanov. Equipped with an Italian visa, Terentiev flew from Moscow to Milan. His aide, Lt. Col. Nikolay Ezhov, flew from Moscow to Vienna, also on October 11.

Three days later, on October 15, Terentiev and Ezhov were joined by a third colleague, Danil Kapralov, a member of Unit 29155 with a medical background. Kapralov flew to Amsterdam. But booking data obtained by The Insider, 60 Minutes and Der Spiegel shows that on 15 October he checked in to the Starling Hotel Residence in Geneva and paid 3,000 Swiss francs (about $3,300) for his room through November 3.

Whatever Terentiev, Ezhov and Kapralov were in Western Europe to do, they clearly had to be done by that date, as all three purchased return tickets back to Moscow, each traveling from the point of arrival in Europe.

Taylor was knocked unconscious the next day, November 4.

The Ghosts of Kyiv Station

The winter of 2014 was also a busy time for Ukrainians.

Incensed by then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s about-face on his campaign promise to move the country closer to the European Union, thousands of citizens participated in a months-long protest movement that turned Kyiv’s central square — the Maidan — into a barricaded encampment. Euromaidan, the name given to the demonstration, culminated in late Feb. 2014 in a series of seismic events. The first was a violent crackdown on the protestors, instigated by Yanukovych’s security forces at the prompting of Russian intelligence, that involved the deployment of snipers to kill or wound more than 100 protesters. Soon after the massacre, Yanukovych, again with the help of Russian operatives, fled from Ukraine to Russia. Vladimir Putin had already ordered his military to occupy Crimea — home to Sevastopol, the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet — and after an unfree, unfair, hastily organized “referendum,” the peninsula was illegally annexed by Russia on Mar. 18. But Russian forces did not stop there, unleashing a plausibly deniable proxy war in the eastern Ukrainian Donbas region in the guise of a “separatist” insurgency that, after a few months of heavy fighting, settled into a lower-level territorial standoff that simmered until Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in Feb. 2022.

Largely as a result of Russia’s aggressive actions, a new political consensus was forming in the unoccupied parts of Ukraine. Ukraine’s push for independence in 1991 may have precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union, but for the next two decades, Ukrainian society would remain divided between those who sought integration with Europe and those who favored a path that would keep the country closer to Russia — culturally and economically, if not politically. 2014 was a turning point. For the first time, polls showed a majority of Ukrainians favoring future membership in NATO, and even though Kyiv’s accession to the North Atlantic alliance likely remains years away, expanded intelligence cooperation does not require the consensus vote of NATO’s 32 member states.

As was recently reported by The New York Times, the CIA enormously expanded its cooperation with Ukraine’s military intelligence service, HUR, in the years following Euromaidan. Starting in 2015, that cooperation has transformed Kyiv into “one of Washington’s most important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today,” according to the Times. Ukrainian spies trained by the CIA would later be deployed to Russia, Europe, and even Cuba. Today they are capable of launching drones at oil refineries and strategic railways deep inside Russia, even at the Kremlin itself. They have also destroyed a third of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet without the benefit of a bona fide Ukrainian navy.

Cooperation with the CIA since 2015 has transformed Kyiv into “one of Washington’s most important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today,” according to the NYT

Distinguished HUR operatives, such as the service’s current director, Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, cut their teeth in a Ukrainian commando group, Unit 2245, trained by the CIA’s paramilitary force, or Ground Department. And Moscow was certainly aware of the collaboration. Russians blew up the car of Col. Maksim Shapoval, the head of Unit 2245, while he was on his way to meet with CIA officers from Kyiv Station, the agency’s office embedded within the U.S. Embassy.

The hyperactive CIA outpost in the Ukrainian capital was, as one former U.S. intelligence official put it, responsible for “installing the plumbing” within HUR. The Insider, 60 Minutes and Der Spiegel can now reveal for the first time the extent to which that CIA station was subsequently impacted by Havana Syndrome.

The hyperactive CIA outpost in the Ukrainian capital was, as one former U.S. intelligence official put it, responsible for “installing the plumbing” within HUR

Two CIA officers posted to Kyiv during that period of intense collaboration between U.S. and Ukrainian intelligence later experienced AHIs after being posted to new missions overseas. One, the incoming chief of station in Hanoi, Vietnam, was hit while domiciled in temporary housing at the Oakwood Residence Suites hotel in the Vietnamese capital in August 2021, amid lockdown conditions connected to the COVID-19 pandemic. Another officer, who became deputy chief of station in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, was hit in his apartment in that city in December 2020, along with his wife and child. He and his family had to be medevaced out of Tashkent and received treatment at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The incoming Hanoi chief of station was also medevaced out of Vietnam and received treatment at Walter Reed. Additionally, the wife of a third CIA officer who had served in Kyiv during the same critical time frame — roughly 2014 to 2017 — was hit in October 2021 in a cafe in London. She was treated locally in London and is also in the CIA.

The cluster of Havana Syndrome cases that emerged from veterans of the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv was so worrisome to one of its number that he opted to resign from the CIA altogether rather than risk becoming a fourth victim.

Of all the cases examined by The Insider, 60 Minutes and Der Spiegel, the most well-documented involve U.S. intelligence and diplomatic personnel with subject matter expertise in Russia or operational experience in countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, two post-Soviet states that have undergone pro-Western “color revolutions” in the past two decades. (Some of these personnel are still active and declined to speak for this article.)

Putin himself has not shied away from laying blame for these pro-democratic protest movements at the doorstep of Langley or Foggy Bottom — or both. As recently as his Feb. 9 interview with former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, Putin peddled the conspiracy theory that Euromaidan was not the work of discontented Ukrainians at all. “The CIA completed its job in implementing the coup d’état,” the Russian head of state told Carlson.

Putin would have every interest, in other words, in neutralizing scores of U.S. intelligence officers he deemed responsible for his loss of the former satellites or constituent pieces of the former Soviet empire. Ukraine is the lynchpin nation in Putin’s grand design to “reestablish the Soviet Union,” as President Biden phrased it on Feb. 24, 2022, the date of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Greg Edgreen, the former DIA investigator of Havana Syndrome, told 60 Minutes, that his working group pored through “a large body of data, ranging from signals intelligence, human intelligence, open-source reporting. Anything regarding the internet, travel records, financial records, you name it. And we kept on seeing a number of data points. This was happening to our top 5%, 10% performing officers across the Defense Intelligence Agency. Consistently there was a Russia nexus. There was some angle where they had worked against Russia, focused on Russia, and done extremely well.”

Marc Polymeropolous is a highly decorated former CIA officer, whose last title was Chief of Operation for the agency’s Europe and Eurasia Mission Center, which is in charge of all clandestine activity in over forty countries. Polymeropoulos, now an MSNBC contributor, is also one of the most outspoken victims of Havana Syndrome, and an advocate for healthcare for fellow CIA officers affected by it. He was hit at the height of his career, in December 2017, while in Moscow on an official CIA visit to liaise with Russian counterparts about counterterrorism cooperation between Washington and Moscow. (In tandem with this investigation, The Insider is publishing his first-hand account of that experience and its aftermath, which forced his retirement from the CIA. His memoir can be read here.)

“Assuming this is true, it certainly fits the pattern of the Russians seeking retribution for events they think we’re responsible for. As a former CIA case officer, I don’t believe in coincidences.”

The Insider, 60 Minutes and Der Spiegel presented Polymeropoulos with its findings: that multiple CIA officers who had worked cheek-by-jowl with HUR a decade or so ago were affected by Havana Syndrome later in their careers. “Assuming this is true, it certainly fits the pattern of the Russians seeking retribution for events they think we’re responsible for,” he said. “As a former CIA case officer, I don’t believe in coincidences.”

The GRUs Amazing Race

Just as reports of curious ailments experienced by U.S. officials working for the State and Commerce Departments began emerging from China in 2016 and 2017, one of Sergei Skripal’s poisoners crossed into the country, disguised among a group of Russian auto mechanics.

The Silk Way Rally, an off-road racing event, was founded in 2009 as a kind of intercontinental SCORE International. Originally limited to the expanse of Russia and Central Asia, by 2016 the course ran all the way from Moscow to Xi’an, an ancient city in China that once marked the easternmost end of the Silk Road. With legitimate sponsorship deals and celebrity offroad race car drivers — Vladimir Chagin, who holds the record for the most victories at the Dakar Rally, is director of Silk Way, and his number two is Frederic Lequien, the CEO of the FIA World Endurance Championship — the race covers a ground distance of nearly 4,400 miles. In other words, it’s a convenient conduit for moving people and hardware across the globe.

Which is maybe why the Silk Way Rally is a GRU front.

Bulat Yanborisov, its head, was awarded his second Order of Nevsky, a prestigious Russian military award, by GRU Deputy Director Gen. Vladimir Alexeev at an elaborate ceremony in Moscow in April 2023. (A video of that ceremony was obtained by The Insider.)

Internal documents pertaining to Silk Way Rally also explicitly state that the true purpose of this seemingly apolitical sports competition is to create a “universal platform for people’s diplomacy,” premised on the notion of “Russia’s soft power.” The Kremlin hoped to unite Russia, China, Iran, Qatar, Afghanistan, Syria, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan, and to construct “logistics terminals” in each of these countries — complete with storage facilities and 5G communications hubs. (Expanded routes for the rally were meant to bypass these countries, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 put paid to that ambition.)

However, this “soft power” mandate appears to have been simply a cover for the true functions of the Silk Way Rally. Yanborisov’s phone records show he was in constant communication with GRU spies, including members of Unit 29155. Using reverse face-search tools, The Insider was able to identify members of the unit who were disguised as staff working for the rally. The self-styled sports organization also purchased tickets for members traveling under false identities.

One of these was the man who turned a sleepy English cathedral city into a quarantine zone.

On July 6, 2016, Alexander Mishkin, one of Unit 29155’s medical doctors and one of the two hitmen tasked by Andrey Averyanov with killing Sergei and Yulia Skripal with Novichok, embedded with a convoy of Silk Way Rally cars and trucks. His racing companions included other members of Unit 29155: Alexey Kalinin, who took part in one of the Bulgaria bombings in 2015; Alexey Tolstopyatenko, who runs the unit’s Azerbaijani and Turkish operations, posing as an ethnic Tajik; and Roman Puntus, an explosives expert now working in occupied Crimea.

Three days later, on July 9, the rally officially started, and any trace of the racers was lost for almost two weeks thereafter. Then, on July 25, Mishkin appeared on a flight from Beijing to Moscow, traveling on a joint booking together with Yanborisov, the Silk Way Rally head. Immediately upon his return, Mishkin traveled on to St. Petersburg to meet with Sergei Chepur, head of the Russian Defense Ministry’s Research Testing Institute of Military Medicine, the GRU’s entity for testing the effects of various types of toxic substances — such as the Novichok used to poison the Skripals — on the human body. Chepur is a consultant to Unit 29155 commander, Andrey Averyanov. Mishkin is one of Chepur’s former students.

In 2017 the Silk Way Rally returned to China along the same racing route. This time, another member of Unit 29155, Sergey Avdeenko, joined the convoy, masquerading as a car technician. Avdeenko entered China on July 12 and flew from Xi’an to the Siberian city of Novosibirsk on July 23.

The summer of 2017 is when Mark Lenzi, the State Department official in Guangzhou, first began experiencing strange health problems, as did Catherine Werner, a Commerce Department official in the city. Like Lenzi, Werner would be medevaced out of China. She was diagnosed with an “organic brain injury.” The State Department ultimately evacuated more than ten of its people from Guangzhou.

Another U.S. Commerce Department official stationed in Beijing began having symptoms and hearing strange sounds and feeling pressure in her head while at home in October of 2017, just before a visit to China by President Trump that November. She was also medevaced for treatment in the United States.

Lenzi is a fluent Russian speaker who studied in Lithuania on a Fulbright scholarship and has worked in official capacities as a diplomat in Russia. “I absolutely believe my background on Russia is why I was targeted,” Lenzi told The Insider.

“The U.S. government shrugs publicly about my family’s ordeal,” he said. “But U.S. government personnel behind closed doors have acknowledged to me that my and my family’s diagnosed traumatic brain injuries are due to exposure to high levels of pulsed microwave radiation.”

Pulsed microwave radiation is one of two technologies that scientists — including those assigned by the U.S. intelligence community to investigate Havana Syndrome — have theorized as the possible cause of the condition. The other is acoustic sound. Either of these approaches may result in the victim appearing to hear audible sounds, hums and clicks, through a phenomenon termed the Frey Effect, named for Allan H. Frey, the American scientist who first wrote about the microwave auditory effect.

Russia has been experimenting with both for decades.

In fact, in its corpus of scientific literature the two phenomena are conflated into a common category of “wave weapons.” A Soviet patent from 1974 was issued to a military unit that developed – and claimed to have successfully tested – a “non-lethal device inducing sleep in the target via the use of radio-waves.” A series of studies by Soviet and Russian scientists from 1991 to 2012 focused on the transmission of simulated auditory information to targets using ultra-high radio frequencies. And The Insider, 60 Minutes and Der Spiegel can now reveal, senior members of Unit 29155 were themselves tasked with, and rewarded for, successfully testing “non-lethal acoustic weapons.”

A Promotion – and a Prize

Col. Ivan Terentiev spent a decade as the deputy commander of the unit, and held an additional ominous title of «commander of group for special tasks of Unit 29155». In January 2024, the Bulgarian government issued a European Arrest Warrant for Terentiev owing to his personal involvement in the destruction of Bulgarian arms facilities beginning in 2011. When he wasn’t busy blowing up military depots in the Balkans, Terentiev, a trained engineer, also moonlighted as a research and development specialist for Russia’s Ministry of Defense. In that capacity he co-wrote dozens of military-scientific papers, including one on the “effectiveness of underwater shooting.” He’s also spent time exploring acoustic weapons.

In mid 2019, Terentiev was suddenly promoted to a Kremlin position. As part of the vetting process, he had to explain to the Kremlin why he had failed to declare a bank account into which he received an unaccounted-for transfer of funds in late 2017. Part of this disbursement had come from Terentiev’s handing over the intellectual property rights of his research and inventions to the Ministry of Defense. Namely, he had provided research work on developing a new weapon for the Foundation for Advanced Military Research. One of Vladimir Putin’s pet projects, the foundation was created in 2012 with a mandate for building “innovative weapons including [ones] based on new physical properties,” as its website states, and “to close a gap in advanced research with our Western partners after 20 years of stagnation in the Russian military science and defense industry overall.”

Terentiev’s prized research was focused on the “potential capabilities of non-lethal acoustic weapons in combat activities in urban settings,” according to an addendum The Insider obtained from an email account belonging to Nikolay Ezhov, Terentiev’s aide in Unit 29155 and his travel companion to Europe in 2014, just before Taylor’s attack.

Ezhov had emailed the addendum to the anti-corruption office in Putin’s Presidential Administration in an attempt to explain how 100,000 rubles – the equivalent of around $1,700 at the time – wound up in Terentiev’s checking account. That sum was symbolic; the real reward was Terentiev’s new job.

The reason for his financial vetting was that the GRU saboteur was being promoted to a prestigious political position, that of Putin’s federal inspector for the Far Eastern Sakhalin region. In Russia, a federal inspector has oversight over a regional governor, affording Terentiev ample opportunities for kickbacks and self-enrichment. Also, given his continued tenure in Unit 29155, Terentiev would have greater oversight over Sakhalin’s neighbors, Japan, China and South Korea. Ezhov, meanwhile, was named deputy director of Sakhalin before receiving his own plum assignment in 2020 as federal inspector for Yakutia, the largest republic in Russia, replete with natural resources such as oil, gas and 99% of the country’s diamond reserves.

Few Russian intelligence officers with no public profile, discernible bureaucratic profile or personal ties to Putin reach such dizzying heights. So what accounts for Terentiev and Ezhov’s elevation?

Operation Reduktor

The Insider, 60 Minutes and Der Spiegel have obtained a set of intelligence documents describing a classified Soviet-era program codenamed Reduktor, or “Gearbox.” Begun in 1984 at the Radio Technical Measurement Research Institute in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Reduktor’s central task was to study the uses of “electromagnetic radiation to influence the behavior and reactions of biological objects, [including] people.” The institute was subordinated to the Soviet Ministry of General Machine Building, which oversaw the Soviet Union’s space exploration program. (Today its successor is Russia’s Federal Space Agency, Roscosmos.) The head of the research institute, according to the documents, flew to Moscow almost weekly to report on the progress of his work.

In 1988, the institute initiated a top secret program for which a separate department, known as the Eighth Branch, was created. About 300 employees worked for the Eighth Branch, whose activities were kept secret from the rest of the institute. Most of its employees were scientists, either active in the Soviet military or retired from it. Engineers and biologists predominated the ranks. Also on staff were psychiatrists. There was strict compartmentalization of work within Eighth Branch, such that one team didn’t know what another was working on and all employees were forbidden from recruiting scientists from other departments within the Research Institute.

Eighth Branch scientists experimented with electromagnetic energy on rats and rhesus monkeys. Some of the animals died from exposure to thermal radiation; others developed brain damage. “The main goal,” according to one Reduktor document, “was to create a stable mechanism of information influence (i.e., forcing the object to take certain actions by influencing the brain and other organs) using a low-energy effect with a power flux density of no more than 10 microwatts per square centimeter.”

Coinciding with the end of the Soviet Union — and, with it, Ukraine’s independence — Reduktor’s entire scientific yield was transferred from Kharkiv to Moscow by the KGB for further development.

The Reduktor documents indicate that a blueprint model of an electromagnetic device was clunky and conspicuous: “a large dish on an automobile chassis with generators, antennas and other equipment.” Soviet experts were confident that a smaller, more mobile version of such a weapon could eventually be created, with an effective firing range of at least 100 meters.

Separately, in 2010, another scientific research institute in Russia carried out work on the “development of basic technologies for the creation of a new generation of sonar and acoustic weapons systems,” according to another document The Insider, 60 Minutes and Der Spiegel have obtained. Under this contemporary program, “an experimental model/prototype” of portable ultrasonic non-lethal weapons was constructed such that it could be mounted onto commercial vehicles. The radial range of this device was limited to between ten and twelve meters. In February-March 2014, the total yield of this study in sonar and acoustic systems – the technical documents and an experimental device – came into the possession of the GRU in Sevastopol, in concert with Russia’s takeover of Crimea.

In September 2022, the U.S. intelligence community released a classified report titled, “Anomalous Health Incidents: Analysis of Potential Causal Mechanisms,” a redacted copy of which was obtained under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by Mark Zaid, a lawyer for more than two dozen victims of Havana Syndrome. The report gives four “core characteristics” of AHIs: “the acute onset of audiovestibular sensory phenomena, including sound and/or pressure, sometimes in only one ear or on one side of the head; …other nearly simultaneous signs and symptoms such as vertigo, loss of balance, and ear pain; …a strong sense of locality or directionality; and…the absence of known environmental or medical conditions that could explain the reported signs and symptoms.”

One plausible cause for these symptoms, the report states, is microwave energy. Another is ultrasound, a high-frequency form of inaudible acoustic energy that can enter the body through the ear canal or other aspects of the head, causing potential disruption of the central nervous system — especially of the inner ear, where sound and balance are sensed. Both microwave and ultrasound energy can damage cells in the brain as well as open the blood-brain barrier, causing proteins from the damaged cells to leak into the spinal fluid and then into the bloodstream. These so-called biomarkers are metabolized by the body within hours to days, meaning that someone hit with an acoustic weapon would need to have their blood drawn almost immediately after an attack to detect this kind of evidence of injury.

The former Kyiv Station CIA officer who was hit in Hanoi in 2021 was one of only two victims of Havana Syndrome whose biomarkers had been measured before the attack, thus establishing an individualized baseline. In this officer’s case, the biomarker levels jumped from normal before the attack to far above normal hours after; they then returned to normal days later, clearly indicating brain injury at the time of the attack, according to multiple sources within the U.S. intelligence community. He was diagnosed with “neural network dysfunction and persistent dysautonomia due to traumatic brain injury.”

And yet it remains unclear exactly how the attacks were carried out, or whether multiple types of devices have been used. The limiting factor with ultrasound weapons is distance. Their soundwaves travel poorly through air and solid objects found in buildings, meaning any device of this type would have to get up close to its target, no more than 10 or 12 meters away.

Another form of directed energy that travels farther and can penetrate through thicker substances, such as walls and metal barriers, is pulsed microwave energy. The shape of an electromagnetic pulse that could do the kind of physiological harm seen in AHI cases would show an extremely steep rise, with each pulse reaching peak energy within less than a nanosecond. A U.S. Intelligence Community expert panel tasked with assessing the potential causes of Havana Syndrome concluded that this type of energy could “fracture” membranes and capillaries, damaging the myelin sheaths that encase neurons and the blood-brain barrier.

As Operation Reduktor and Terentiev’s research shows, Moscow has been experimenting with both types of directed energy weapons for a long time.

As Operation Reduktor and Terentiev’s research shows, Moscow has been experimenting with both types of directed energy weapons for a long time.

Dr. David A. Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University and a co-chair of the expert panel assessment, told The Insider that elements of Reduktor as described in the documents “align with what we and others have hypothesized, and thus, are troubling in their implications. As we stated in the report, the kinds of injuries we proposed to be caused by special forms of pulsed microwave energy would not be expected necessarily to show up on brain imaging studies. These documents and their origins would appear to be clearly worth pursuing.”

Once that pursuit begins, there is the potential for it to lead to some very disturbing places. The Kirov Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg, Russia is headed by the aforementioned GRU consultant Sergei Chepur, a specialist in cholinesterase inhibitors like Novichok.

But it is Chepur’s research work that presents the greatest cause for concern. Judging from his publications, Chepur is not only a specialist in biochemistry, but also in the effects of radiation on the brain. The Kirov Academy he heads is one of the few institutions in Russia that has studied Minor’s syndrome, the extremely rare phenomenon that just happened to befall embassy wife Joy in Tbilisi following her encounter with Albert Averyanov.

Don't Say 'The Russians Are Trying to Hurt Us'

A consensus has formed among the growing community of AHI sufferers that the U.S. government — and the CIA in particular — is hiding the full extent of what it knows about the source of Havana Syndrome. The victims offer two general hypotheses as to why. The first is that releasing the full intelligence around Russian involvement might be so shocking as to convince the American people and their representatives that Moscow has committed an act of war against the United States, thereby raising thorny questions as to how a nuclear power fond of showing off its hypersonic missiles ought to be made to pay. The second is that acknowledging Havana Syndrome is caused by a foreign adversary could put a damper on recruitment to the CIA and State Department. After all, how many Americans would be willing to serve their country overseas in the full knowledge that their next load of laundry or morning jaunt to the embassy could result in permanent physical and mental ailments?

The State Department has walked a knife-edge in addressing that contingency. The Insider, 60 Minutes and Der Spiegel obtained a memo distributed to employees of the Tbilisi mission on December 29, 2021 — over two months after Joy’s attack. It references a task force responsible for coordinating response to AHIs and several pages of guidance on how to talk to children about the strange events, offering distinct advice for different age groups. For young kids who “don’t have enough life experience to understand some of the elements involved in complex, difficult topics like AHI,” the memo advises parents to catch their biases and limit the amount of information their children can access: “Don’t say things like ‘the Russians are trying to hurt or intimidate us’ or ‘if you hear a loud noise, you are probably going to feel dizzy and sick so make sure you get off the X, etc.’”

The implication here is that not only are AHIs real, but U.S. diplomats are all too aware of how they happen and who’s behind them.

Still, it remains unclear why it took American officials so long to acknowledge the problem, and why they still show no sign of having a plan to solve it. “I have spent more than a decade fighting for U.S. government employees and their families – sometimes small children and even pets – who have been victimized by AHIs overseas and domestically,” says attorney Mark Zaid. “It has been so distressing to see how much effort our government has undertaken to cover up the true details of these attacks, no doubt perpetrated by a foreign adversary.”

That adversary may even be boasting of the fact. Nikolai Patrushev, the Secretary of Russia’s Security Council and a former KGB officer wrote in September 2023 in the in-house magazine for the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service: “In recent years, hundreds of employees of foreign intelligence services, as well as other persons involved in organizing intelligence and subversive activities against our country and our strategic partners, have been identified and neutralized.”

Official attempts to push back against the accusation that Washington has not done enough to combat Havana Syndrome have been short on detail. In a statement to 60 Minutes regarding this investigation, the ODNI affirmed, “We continue to closely examine anomalous health incidents (AHIs), particularly in areas we have identified as requiring additional research and analysis.”

However, while recent reports have suggested that Havana Syndrome cases have ceased in recent years, multiple former and present U.S. officials told 60 Minutes that a senior U.S. Department of Defense official was targeted as recently as July 2023 at the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. That gathering of North American and European representatives, which at various points included U.S. President Joe Biden and his Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, was largely focused on the theme of Western military support for Ukraine in its ongoing defensive war against Russia.

Other reports have noted a proliferation of cases in Vienna in the latter half of 2021, months before the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Two veterans of the CIA’s Kyiv Station were posted to Vienna during that spate of reported attacks.

This is not the first time that U.S. personnel serving overseas have fallen victim to widespread adverse health consequences. In the decades since the Gulf War of 1991-1992, hundreds of thousands of Western and Iraqi veterans reported suffering from a common set of symptoms ranging from fatigue to terminal tumors. As Edgreen, the former DIA investigator, said, “It took 30 years to prove that the Gulf War Syndrome was a result of exposure to low levels of sarin. [Havana Syndrome] will be proven.”

Unlike Gulf War Syndrome, which resulted from a confluence of environmental factors rather than from the deliberate actions of a state, Havana Syndrome shows all the markings of a Russian hybrid warfare operation

It may be proven. But unlike Gulf War Syndrome, which resulted from a confluence of environmental factors rather than from the deliberate actions of a state actor, Havana Syndrome shows all the markings of a Russian hybrid warfare operation. If it is established that the Kremlin really is behind the attacks, then the provision of healthcare and monetary compensation for the victims will not be enough to solve the problem. Removing this many capable American spies and diplomats from active service without killing them and without your main adversary even admitting they’ve done so — such a sustained, decade-long campaign would easily count as one of Vladimir Putin’s greatest strategic victories against the United States.

With additional reporting by Michael Rey, Oriana Zill de Granados, Kit Ramgopal and Emily Gordon, Kato Kopaleishvili, Giorgi Tsikarishvili, Fidelius Schmid, Steffen Lüdke.

[Vesper 28,768]

Trump Posts Articles on Easter That He is "The Chosen One" by God

https://www.meidastouch.com/news/trump-posts-articles-on-easter-that-he-is-the-chosen-one-by-god

On Easter morning, Trump made 71 social media post. Only one of those referenced Easter, where he simply posted, "HAPPY EASTER."

The rest of Trump's posts included attacks on Judge Merchan's daughter, Mike Gallagher, Jon Stewart, Engoron, Biden, Maxine Watters, Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis, Obama, Hunter Biden and Marc Elias. 

He also made several posts citing favorable polls, an article about his retribution if elected, several of people endorsing him, an article claiming Russian collusion was a hoax, an article about migrant crime, and several repeating the lies about the Biden's White House's Easter Egg hunt and transgender proclamation.

But among this cesspool of deplorability, Trump made two posts attaching an article in Gateway Pundit and American Thinker from his pal, sports gambling tout Wayne Ally Root. In this sickening article, Root makes the case that Trump is a true miracle sent by God to save America. That Trump is 'The Chosen One' sent by God and blessed by God. 

It should be disgusting and repulsive for true Christians to see frauds like this use the most sacred holiday in the Christian faith to attack others, promote themselves and their ambition, and spread lies and hate. But this article might be the worst of everything that Trump posted. It also is part of a broader theme that Trump has been using at his rallies, where pastors begin each rally arguing that Trump has been chosen by God to save America. Truly sick stuff.

[Vesper 28,768]

It's Hitler or Grandpa

[Fulham Broadway 16,831]

Israeli forces have murdered 6,052 Palestinian schoolchildren says ministry

The Palestinian Ministry of Education says in a statement that another 10,219 school children have been injured in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip

The ministry says that the majority of the students, 5,994, were killed in the besieged coastal enclave, while the remaining 58 were killed in the West Bank.

At least 105 school children have been imprisoned  in the occupied West Bank since October 7, the ministry adds.

The IDF wouldnt be so brave without those 192 billion US tax payers dollars of Hi Tech weaponry

[MoroccanBlue 5,296]

18 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Israeli forces have murdered 6,052 Palestinian schoolchildren says ministry

The Palestinian Ministry of Education says in a statement that another 10,219 school children have been injured in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip

The ministry says that the majority of the students, 5,994, were killed in the besieged coastal enclave, while the remaining 58 were killed in the West Bank.

At least 105 school children have been imprisoned  in the occupied West Bank since October 7, the ministry adds.

The IDF wouldnt be so brave without those 192 billion US tax payers dollars of Hi Tech weaponry

Joe Biden and Nikki Haley are smirking somewhere. 

[MoroccanBlue 5,296]

Stop being so antisemtic @Fulham Broadway

@robsblubot doesn't like that. 

[robsblubot 3,502]

3 minutes ago, MoroccanBlue said:

Stop being so antisemtic @Fulham Broadway

@robsblubot doesn't like that. 

Not really, you have every right to be a bigot. 😉

If you don't get what I dislike about that post (which is something I've already discussed before), then nothing I can say will change that.

[MoroccanBlue 5,296]

6 minutes ago, robsblubot said:

Not really, you have every right to be a bigot. 😉

If you don't get what I dislike about that post (which is something I've already discussed before), then nothing I can say will change that.

You mean how you mentioned how this thread only focuses on what Israel is doing? It was rightfully laughed at. The USA and Europe give Israel a blank cheque to commit these crimes against oppressed people.

Rolling your eyes from comments which raise more awareness of state sponsored murder by Israel.

Bloody hell. 

[robsblubot 3,502]

20 minutes ago, MoroccanBlue said:

You mean how you mentioned how this thread only focuses on what Israel is doing? It was rightfully laughed at. The USA and Europe give Israel a blank cheque to commit these crimes against oppressed people.

Rolling your eyes from comments which raise more awareness of state sponsored murder by Israel.

Bloody hell. 

For the record, I don't really give a shit about people disagreeing with my opinions especially know-nothing kids parroting whatever they read on social media. They act as if this conflict is new, which it is not.

"Israeli forces have murdered 6,052 Palestinian schoolchildren says ministry" Who? when? where? Are you sure it wasn't 9,105 schoolchildren? and at a renovated Nazi camp? I mean why not go all the way? 😆

Bloody hell indeed... 🙄 

BTW, oppressed people, yes, but oppressed not only by the Israeli but also by their own leaders.

 

Edited April 3 by robsblubot