Author: Dr Tim Coles

From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 16 No 6 (Dec 2022)

In the book Devil’s Game, Robert Dreyfuss documents how the US and Britain have created, organised, and enabled terrorist networks, most of them purporting to be Islamic, for over a century. The aims are to crush domestic dissidents, use the groups as proxies to fight enemies, and outrage Western audiences with terrorism to get them to support wars for oil in the Middle East.

Today, we may ask: Whatever happened to the ‘war on terror’, which seems to have disappeared when COVID came along? We are left with a legacy of ‘war on terror’ legislation.

MANUFACTURING TERRORISM

A few years ago, former FBI agent Michael German said that the agency was “manufacturing terrorism cases” to justify its existence. The FBI does this, says German, by taking vulnerable Arab Americans and other Americans from ethnic and religious minorities, and guiding them via agents (called handlers) to commit terrorism. Often, just before the given act of terror occurs, the FBI steps in to save the day. Journalist and author Trevor Aaronson says:

more than 150 people… caught in sting operations never had the means and, in some cases, never had the idea for the terrorism plot… [I]t was the FBI that provided them with everything – the bomb, the transportation, everything they needed to move forward in a terrorism plot that on their own, they never would have been able to do. And certainly evidence suggests that in most of these cases, they never had any specific connections to terrorism.

In 2011, the University of California-Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program teamed up with Mother Jones magazine to report on criminal prosecution statistics involving terrorism and other charges. They found that by that year, of the 508 defendants brought to court by the FBI, 48% were targeted by informants, 31% were arrested in sting operations and 10% were provoked by a handler/informant. Amazingly, 41% were not connected to a terrorist group, raising questions about how and why they came to allegedly want to commit terrorism. Only 21% were linked to ‘al-Qaeda’. Twenty-nine per cent were linked to other Islamic groups, and 9% to non-Islamic groups.

Likewise, in the UK, by 2013, 18% of British terrorism cases were connected to the group al-Muhajiroun (the Emigrants), according to the Henry Jackson Society (HJS). The HJS doesn’t bother reporting that al-Muhajiroun’s co-founder, Omar Bakri, was an MI5 informant. Bakri’s partner was Anjem Choudary. By August 2016, 850 Britons were fighting for the Islamic State in Libya, Syria and elsewhere. Commander Dean Haydon, head of the Metropolitan Police’s counterterrorism unit, confirmed to the media that Choudary had recruited Britons for the Islamic State. Choudary, who was jailed, was connected to 500 of the 850 jihadis.

For years, the Metropolitan Police were prevented from acting against Choudary by MI5. A source told the Telegraph: “While the police might have had lots of evidence they were pulled back by the security service because he [Choudary] was one of the people they were monitoring. It was very frustrating and did cause some tension but we were told we had to consider the bigger picture.” The ‘bigger picture’ was that the secret services wanted to create a jihadi network in Libya and Syria to overthrow the regimes of Muammar Qadhafi and Bashar al-Assad, respectively, as they had in Afghanistan and Pakistan to fight the Soviets beginning 1978.

Back in 2002 after the 9/11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration’s Defense Science Board recommended establishing a $100m per year sub-agency called the Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group (P2OG). Under the heading “Aggressive Proactive, Preemptive Operations,” the report describes influence warfare and information operations (‘IW/IO’), “Covert action,” “Cover & Deception,” psychological operations (‘PSYOPS’) and the use of special operations forces (‘SOF’). The doctrine “[i]mproves information collection by stimulating reactions,” i.e., provoking terrorists and setting traps, as the FBI has done for decades. It recommends: “Vest responsibility and accountability for the P20G to a ‘Special Operations Executive’ in the NSC [National Security Council].”

North Africa specialist and hostage negotiator Professor Jeremy Keenan writes:

The first P2OG operation was in the Algerian Sahara in 2003, when Algeria’s security and intelligence service, the Département du Renseignement et de la Sécurité (DRS), now working with the Pentagon and US intelligence services, kidnapped and took hostage 32 European tourists. Although the operation was managed by a DRS agent, the Bush administration was able to proclaim that the kidnap had been carried out by “Bin Laden’s man in the Sahara,” justifying the US’s launch in 2004 of a second front or Sahara-Sahel front in the GWOT [global ‘war on terror’].

CASE STUDY

In May 2017, 22 people were reportedly murdered when one, Salman Abedi, allegedly detonated a suicide bomb in the foyer of the Manchester Arena as people were leaving a pop concert. Abedi’s father, Ramadan, was a paid MI6 operative who was allowed to live in the UK under successive governments, including under then-Home Secretary Theresa May, who was PM when the bombing occurred. He left the UK in 2011, the same year that MI6 had helped organise a terrorist takeover of Libya.

In 1994, after fighting in Afghanistan, one Abd al-Baset Azzouz left Libya, his home country, to live in London, where the British government protected him. In 1995, MI6 learned of a coup plot against Libya’s leader, Muammar Qadhafi. The plot appears to have been readied for February 1996 and devised by secular colonels within Qadhafi’s military circle. A leaked MI6 report says: “It would begin with attacks on a number of military and security installations including the military installation at Tarhuna. There would also be orchestrated civil unrest in Benghazi, Misratah and Tripoli.” The report notes that “[c]oup plotters are not associated with Islamic fundamentalists,” like Azzouz, “who were fermenting unrest in Benghazi.” However, the coup plotters “had had some limited contact with the fundamentalists, whom [MI6 informant ‘Tunworth’] described as a mix of Libya veterans who served in Afghanistan,” i.e., old CIA-MI6 contacts, “and Libyan students.”

There were two coup plots: a secular one led by Qadhafi’s inner circle and an Islamic one led by extremists in Benghazi. The MI6 report on the 1996 coup said that the plotters wanted to see Libya decentralised and federally run.

Richard Bartlett and David Watson were MI6 agents involved in the operations. Watson worked with the Libya contact, ‘Tunworth’, who provided information from within the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), the organisation referred to in the MI6 report as the Benghazi-based extremist group. Manchester bomber Abedi’s father was associated with the LIFG. In 1995, MI6 chose to work with the extremists in Benghazi, who had close connections with Osama bin Laden through their leaders, Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq (a.k.a. Belhaj) and Anas al-Liby. The British government protected al-Liby, who is described by the US Congress as “the builder of al-Qaeda’s network in Libya.”In 1992, al-Liby trained with a CIA operative, Ali Mohamed, in Osama bin Laden’s house in Hyatabad, Pakistan. In 1996, MI6 financed the anti-Qadhafi LIFG to the tune of £100,000.

In 2013, Salman Abedi – the 2017 Manchester bomber – travelled to Libya and met the Islamic State-linked Katibat al-Battar al-Libi. The KBL was indirectly getting money from MI5 via informants. It quickly emerged that Abedi was Ramadan’s son. It later transpired that British police did not believe he acted alone; America’s FBI had warned the UK about Abedi; that Abedi had been on a MI5 watch list as he travelled from Manchester to Libya and back; and that police very quickly dropped investigations into co-conspirators.

SOCIAL CONTROL

After 9/11, the Bush administration imposed upon Americans the Patriot Act 2001. The Act criminalises providing “material support” to terrorists, including “expert advice or assistance.” Section 215 made it easier for agencies (notably the FBI) to gather internet users’ metadata in a boon to the hi-tech industry which won more contracts. Patriot made it easier for the FBI to break into suspects’ homes and copy their computer files and take DNA samples. Section 411 allows the government to expel or refuse entry to non-citizens on the grounds of their use of prominence “to endorse or espouse terrorist activity” or persuade others to do so. Dr Tariq Ramadan’s teaching visa was revoked under the Act, despite him being a well-known moderate. Presumably, the aim was to silence other prominent Muslims living in America from criticising the “war on terror.”

Britain’s Labour government (1997-2010) was one of the worst offenders when it came to using counterterror legislation to control society. The Terrorism Act 2000 made it an offence to supply material to individuals accused of property damage. When then-82-year-old German-Jewish Labour supporter and later National Executive Committee-member, Walter Wolfgang, heckled the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw at the party conference in Brighton (2005), Wolfgang was forcibly removed by security guards and prevented from re-entering under the Terrorism Act. Section 44 ballooned the number of arbitrary stops and searches by police of innocent citizens (many of them ethnic minorities, of course). Lord Carlile’s annual review concluded that Section 44 actions “could be cut by at least 50 per cent without significant risk to the public or detriment to policing.” In 2003, peace protestors were prevented from demonstrating under the Act against an arms fair in London.

The post-9/11 Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001 sought to allow for extended detention of non-citizens in the country. The Law Lords declared it unlawful, with Lord Hoffmann telling media: “The real threat to the life of the nation… comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these.” The Terrorism Bill sought to extend detention from 14 to 90 days. It was rejected by MPs. The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 banned political protest within 1km of Parliament. Max Hill QC is the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation. Following the vehicle rammings in Barcelona in 2017, Hill warned against “thought crime” and said that many counterterrorism laws were “unnecessary.”

Under General Franco, Spain was a terror state. When the country transitioned to parliamentary representation, degrees of freedom were won. However, terrorist groups including GRAPO (First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups, inactive since 2007) and ETA (Basque Homeland Liberty, now disarmed,) led to antiterrorism measures being included in the Penal Code. Controversially, Article 18.1 potentially criminalises “apology” for terrorism, which could include anything from giving legal advice to terrorists to making satirical observations. As of 2007, “apology” was criminalised only after a judge deemed the offence to constitute “direct incitement.”

Organic Law No. 7/2000 penalised “glorification of terrorism,” which includes actions “to discredit, demean or humiliate the victims of terrorist offences or their families.” This is important because genuine efforts to determine if a given attack was a false flag by the state or a simulated event that the media believe to be real could be punished as glorifying terrorism.

Even more important than persecuting people who believe in false flags and hoaxes, the Spanish government has suppressed freedom of thought and expression and, ultimately, criticism of government policy. Amnesty International writes of Spain: “An exponential increase in the number of people falling foul of [the] draconian law banning the ‘glorification of terrorism’ or ‘humiliating victims of terrorism’ is part of a sustained attack on freedom of expression.” Under Article 578, the definitions were broadened to the point where charges jumped from three in 2011 to 38 in 2017. Terror attacks in one country, like the Hebdo killings in Paris in 2015, have knock-on effects in that Spain, in this case, responded by further broadening the definitions of incitement. Musicians César Strawberry (of Def Con Dos) and Valtonyc (a rapper) were sentenced under Article 578: Strawberry for tweeting a joke about a cake bomb and Valtonyc for insulting the crown, threatening a politician and glorifying violence.

In addition to attacking freedom, the Spanish government has bolstered its cyber security and budget and aided the hi-tech security sector with programmes like the Spider Operations, which were a series of arrests of social media users, many of them had simply tweeted bad-taste jokes. For example, the niece of a man who died in a terror attack defended the woman tried for making a sick joke about her late uncle, but astonishingly the court ruled that the law is effective regardless of what alleged victims think!

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Footnotes

1. Eric Lichtblau (2016), ‘F.B.I. steps up use of stings in ISIS cases’, www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/us/fbi-isis-terrorism-stings.html?_r=0

2. Quoted in Heather Maher (2013), ‘How the FBI helps terrorists succeed’, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/02/how-the-fbi-helps-terrorists-succeed/273537

3. Mother Jones (2011), ‘Terror trials by the numbers’, www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/terror-trials-numbers

4. Tom Whitehead (2013), ‘Woolwich attack: Al Muhajiroun linked to one in five terrorist convictions’, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/10079827/Woolwich-attack-Al-Muhajiroun-linked-to-one-in-five-terrorist-convictions.html

5. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/16/radical-preacher-anjem-choudary-behind-bars-after-drumming-up-su

6. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/21/mi5-stopped-scotland-yard-taking-choudary-down-sources-claim

7. Federation of American Scientists (2002), ‘DOD examines “preemptive” intelligence operations’, Secrecy News, Issue 107, https://fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/2002/10/102802.html

8. Defense Science Board (2002), DSB Summer Study on Special Operations and Joint Forces in Support of Countering Terrorism, p. 21, https://fas.org/irp/agency/dod/dsbbrief.ppt

9. Jeremy H. Keenan (2017), ‘Review: T. J. Coles, Britain’s Secret Wars… ’, State Crime 6(2): 286-94. See also Jeremy H. Keenan (2009), The Dark Sahara: America’s War on Terror in Africa, Pluto Press

10. Sam Webb (2014), ‘Al-Qaeda leader in Libya was detained by British police on suspicion of ter-ror offences – but later released and fled the UK to train bombers’, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2772495/Al-Qaeda-leader-Libya-detained-British-police-suspicion-terror-offences-later-released-fled-UK-train-bombers.html. See also ‘Freed UK prisoner is al-Qaeda ringleader’, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/11125944/Freed-UK-prisoner-is-al-Qaeda-ringleader.html

11. Cryptome.org (2000), ‘The Qadahfi Assassination Plot’, http://cryptome.org/qadahfi-plot.htm

12. Martin Bright (2002), ‘MI6 “halted bid to arrest bin Laden”’, www.theguardian.com/politics/2002/nov/10/uk.davidshayler. See also, Annie Machon, ‘“Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers” – The Gaddafi Plot Chapters’, http://anniemachon.ch/spies-lies-and-whistleblowers-the-gaddafi-plot-chapters

13. http://fas.org/irp/world/para/aq-libya-loc.pdf

14. https://ctc.usma.edu/app/uploads/2011/06/Ali-Mohammed.pdf

15. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jul/06/manchester-bombing-police-believe-salman-abedi-did-not-act-alone

16. Ben Kentish (2017), ‘FBI “warned MI5 in January that Salman Abedi was planning terror attack in UK”’, www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/fbi-warned-mi5-january-manchester-attack-bomber-salman-abedi-manchester-arena-a7760756.html

17. Samuel Osborne (2017), ‘Salman Abedi: Manchester suicide bomber was known to MI5 but not under active investigation’, www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/salman-abedi-manchester-suicide-bomber-known-to-mi5-not-under-active-investigation-latest-updates-a7761156.html

18. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/may/31/police-believe-manchester-bomber-salman-abedi-acted-largely-alone

19. www.aclu.org/other/myths-and-realities-about-patriot-act

20. Michael Saward (2016), ‘The State and Civil Liberties in the Post-9/11 World’, Open University, http://oro.open.ac.uk/16198/1/StateAndCivil.pdf

21. Philip Johnston (2005), ‘The police must end their abuse of anti-terror legislation’, www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3620110/The-police-must-end-their-abuse-of-anti-terror-legislation.html

22. Johnston, op. cit.

23. www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2005/15/pdfs/ukpga_20050015_en.pdf

24. Lizzie Dearden (2017), ‘Terror laws should be scrapped, says Government’s independent re-viewer of terrorism legislation’, www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/terror-laws-uk-offences-abolish-max-hill-interview-independent-reviewer-legislation-isis-attack-a7883836.html

25. www.refworld.org/pdfid/46de9f8c16.pdf

26. www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/spain-counter-terror-law-used-to-crush-satire-and-creative-expression-online

27. www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/13/spanish-anti-terror-law-has-chilling-effect-on-satire-says-amnesty-international.

28. Amnesty op. cit.

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From New Dawn 175 (Jul-Aug 2019)

Weather modification is a reality. Every four years, the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organisation publishes a multi-hundred-page report on civilian weather modification undertaken by dozens and dozens of nations around the world. 

The two primary reasons for civilian weather modification are the inducement of rain in drought-stricken regions to help crop growth and the suppression of hailstones, which can damage crops. The chemicals used include dry ice and silver iodide. The most common and practical means of chemical dispersion are via small aeroplanes that fly into the troposphere where clouds form. 

Needless to say, the military have always been interested in weather modification. In the 1950s, the British Royal Air Force flooded the small twin towns of Lynton and Lynmouth when, as part of Operation Cumulus, they unleashed a deluge by dumping dry ice into clouds, killing 34 people. From the late-1960s to the 1970s, the US Defense Department used weather as a weapon in the Vietnam War (Project Popeye).

But climate modification is much bigger. Unlike weather modification, there is no concrete evidence that climate modification is happening on a large scale. But there are plenty of clues that covert planning and even operations could be underway. Weather control implies manipulating localised climates for a short period. Climate control implies altering global weather patterns and temperatures for months or even years. Like those involved in weather modification, there is overlap between civilian and military scientists. Like weather modification, the civilian and military tools used in the alteration of the climate – aircraft, chemicals, science, analysis – also overlap. Unlike weather modification, the existence of which few deny (though its effectiveness is still debated), authorities in science, government and the military deny that deliberate climate modification is happening. 

In more recent years, climate modification has been known as geoengineering. Since at least the early-1960s, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) expressed curiosity about geoengineering. This article charts the history of the CIA’s interest in the topic.

CIA in the ‘60s: “A Totally New Type Of Warfare”

In the context of the Cold War and the emerging science of climate change, individuals linked to the US military strategised the weaponisation of the climate. The earliest reference to the CIA’s interest in climate modification appears to date back to November 1960, when the Agency was forwarded a confidential report on the topic. The report states: “Militarily, a climatic control capability raises the possibility of a totally new type of warfare. This type of warfare may be termed ‘Geophysical Warfare’ in which our ability to control the weather environment can be used as a weapon.” 

Rear Admiral Luis de Florez was an aviation pioneer working for the US Navy. Florez forwarded the confidential report on climate modification to the CIA’s Deputy Director, Gen. Charles P. Cabell. The report was written by the Research Division of the Travellers Insurance Company, headed by the geophysicist, Dr Thomas F. Malone. Like de Florez, Malone was a military man, having served in the Air Force as a weather forecaster. Like Florez, Malone was connected to MIT, having graduated and then taught at the Institute. Malone’s report advocated “The Need for a Climate Control Study Program” and is worth quoting at length. It says, “Large scale climate control requires the modification of the global weather patterns by altering and interfering with the large-scale physical processes which are associated with the characteristic motions on the scale of the general circulation of the atmosphere.”

People who believe that stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) of particulate matter is occurring today note the whitening of our skies (albedo effect) by persistent trails left by high-altitude aircraft. The memo notes that “proposals have been made to alter the energy balance of large areas by altering the surface albedo. Proposals of this nature involve changing surface albedos by the use of substances of appropriate absorptive or reflective characteristics which differ from the natural surface.” Ergo, the concept of SAI dates back to at least the early-1960s. Conversely, “An example is the proposal that polar areas be covered with layers of soot” to cause warming. In the 1970s, Colorado University proposed modifying jet afterburner engines to release carbon black dust (soot) in order to stimulate precipitation. 

With regards to scientific climate control in general, the 1960 report notes, “Other proposals are made to alter the energy balance of the atmosphere by injecting dust and other particulate matter into the high atmosphere which might alter the input of solar energy to the atmosphere.” This is relevant to today’s proposed geoengineering because, what has just been quoted, describes modern SAI proposals/possible secret programs. Later, we shall examine the CIA’s contemporary interest in SAI. 

The memo adds, “Proposals for altering the normal energy cycle of the atmosphere extend also to the alteration of the chemistry of atmospheric substances especially in the high atmosphere which might also affect radiational balance (sic).” Instead of seeding hurricanes with silver iodide and other chemicals as previous researchers had, in an effort to weaken and even attempt to steer hurricanes, climate modification (“changes in circulation regimes”) could “affect the normal paths of destructive storms.” But for this, supercomputers were needed. Computers allow for “various physical processes” to “be studied under controlled conditions.” The memo notes that “it has now become feasible not only to speculate about the consequences of human intervention in the atmospheric processes but also to stimulate, test and study these consequences.” 

DARPA’S “Nile Blue” & the Origins of Climate Science

Formalised climate research began in the 1970s at the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) with Project Nile Blue. Climate research continues today at various civilian institutions. ARPA later tagged the prefix “Defense” to its name for good measure. It is now known as DARPA. In the 1990s, weather modifying military scientists instructed potential weather weaponisers to “look for the butterfly,” meaning look for small effects that can be used to trigger much bigger phenomena. The 1960s report says the same. It advises readers that “so-called ‘trigger mechanisms’ will probably require access to energy sources of immense magnitude for proper exploitation. In this atomic age, we now have available truly immense potential sources of power, and it is highly likely that our lifetime will see the harnessing of hydrogen fusion power.” It is relevant that US military agencies were interested in using nuclear energy to modify the climate because they feared that the Soviets were doing the same. In fact, fear of Soviet nuclear testing for climate modification stimulated the US military’s interest in climate change science.

In March 1971, the Soviet Union detonated three nuclear bombs in an effort to form a canal trench. US sensors detected the blasts and the US charged the Soviets with violating the Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963). The US considered this domestic irrigation operation to be an act of geoengineering (albeit land-based). The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was tasked with studying the climate to monitor any possible Soviet manipulations of the climate. Air Force Officer John Perry, who had a background in meteorology, was put in charge of the program, which was codenamed Nile Blue. The $3 million project (about $20 million in today’s money) was coordinated with the head of DARPA’s nuclear monitoring, Eric Willis.

(D)ARPA researchers created the ARPANET, which others developed into the Internet. (D)ARPA also ran ILLIAC IV, an early supercomputer. But ILLIAC IV was at risk of being de-funded, so it seemed the perfect fit for Nile Blue, which had a respectable budget and needed the services of a supercomputer. DARPA’s research concluded in 1976. But it helped establish a national climate change research program, later expanded by civilian agencies, including the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Into the 21^st Century: The CIA & Climate Change

In 2009, the CIA established the Center on Climate Change and National Security. (Congress closed it three years later.) The Center included representatives from the Directorate of Intelligence and the Directorate of Science and Technology. The Center aimed to “provide support to American policymakers as they negotiate, implement, and verify international agreements on environmental issues. That is something the CIA has done for years.” Then-CIA Director Leon Panetta said: “Decision makers need information and analysis on the effects climate change can have on security. The CIA is well positioned to deliver that intelligence.”

Two years later, two consultants working for the CIA, Michael Canes and Roger Lueken, asked the civilian climate scientist, Dr Alan Robock, some disturbing questions. They asked if: a) the US could be detected if it were to modify the climate, and b) if enemy states could be detected doing the same. Interestingly, Canes and Lueken asked whether a thin layer of cloud could be spotted by satellites or by other means. This confirms that if the US were to use aeroplanes in stratospheric geoengineering programs or experiments, such programs/experiments would produce thin stratospheric clouds. But thin stratospheric clouds are called cirrus. Aeroplanes naturally produce human-made cirrus in the form of persistent condensation trails. Many credible witnesses have long-reported unusual, persistent trails (known as “chemtrails”) in areas where commercial jets don’t usually fly. Could these observations have anything to do with the thin cloud cover noted by Canes and Lueken?

Robock responded to the CIA contractors, saying that “there’s no way to do [large-scale geoengineering] without the agreement of the rest of the world. I guess a country could do it over its own territory.” Robock also responded to the question of whether the US could detect others modifying its climate: “If somebody was creating a thin cloud in the lower stratosphere we could detect that with our current satellite and ground-based observational system. We can see the effects of various small volcanic eruptions.” He said, “If somebody were sailing ships around the ocean brightening clouds, we could see the lines in the clouds with satellite imagery. And we could see the airplanes or the ships that were doing it. So it would be impossible to do it in secret.” Robock told a journal: “Of course, what they were also asking is, ‘Can we control somebody else’s climate?’” 

Robock made another important statement: that the CIA had funded a major National Academy of Science conference which resulted in two reports. “It was funded mainly by the CIA. The CIA asked several other agencies, like NASA and NOAA, to help fund it, so that the report would look like a joint effort.” NOAA is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “I was told it was almost all the CIA, which goes by the ‘US intelligence community’ in the report. What’s wrong with this picture? The CIA wants to figure out how to control the globe’s weather.”

The conference produced two reports: Climate Intervention: Carbon Dioxide Removal and Reliable Sequestration and Climate Intervention: Reflecting Sunlight to Cool Earth. 

Consider the speech given in 2016 by then-CIA Director John Brennan to the US Council on Foreign Relations, which discusses atmospheric whitening and carbon removal, like the reports Robock mentioned. Brennan notes “the array of technologies, often referred to collectively as geoengineering, that potentially could help reverse the warming effects of global climate change.” Brennan goes on to say, “One that has gained my personal attention is stratospheric aerosol injection, or SAI.” Recall that the 1960s report passed onto the CIA was discussing SAI (then under a different name). Brennan describes SAI as “a method of seeding the stratosphere with particles that can help reflect the sun’s heat in much the same way that volcanic eruptions do.” Brennan goes on to note that, “An SAI program could limit global temperature increases, reducing some risks associated with higher temperatures, and providing the world economy additional time to transition from fossil fuels.” As Robock pointed out, the question is, could it be detected? Brennan adds, “This process is also relatively inexpensive. The National Research Council estimates that a fully deployed SAI program would cost about $10 billion yearly.”

“As promising as it may be, moving forward on SAI would also raise a number of challenges for our government and for the international community,” Brennan continues. “On the technical side, greenhouse gas emission reductions would still have to accompany SAI to address other climate change effects, such as ocean acidification, because SAI alone would not remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere…. On the geopolitical side, the technology’s potential to alter weather patterns and benefit certain regions of the world at the expense of other regions could trigger sharp opposition by some nations.” Brennan concludes: “Others might seize on SAI’s benefits and back away from their commitment to carbon dioxide reductions. And as with other breakthrough technologies, global norms and standards are lacking to guide the deployment and implementation of SAI and other geoengineering initiatives.” 

Conclusion

What other evidence exists for military interest in geoengineering? In a projection out to 2045, the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) writes:

“Theoretically plausible geoengineering methods (intentional, large-scale activities intended to counteract aspects of climate change) have been proposed for a number of years. Detailed studies on the environmental implications of different geoengineering activities have recently begun to appear, but large-scale testing and implementation of such methods has not occurred – in some cases due to public opposition.” 

The document adds:

“One theoretical ‘solar radiation management’ technique would aim to disperse sulphates into the upper atmosphere, reflecting the sun’s rays back out to space, producing a cooling effect. However, as with most geoengineering techniques, there are questions about how to maintain the intervention, and minimise the potentially harmful side-effects. For example, it is not known what the longterm effects of dispersing large quantities of sulphates into the atmosphere would be. Over-reliance on particular geoengineering technology to mitigate the effects of climate change could also render users vulnerable to catastrophic effects if equipment failed or was sabotaged. It is not clear therefore what, if any, role geoengineering will play by 2045 in countering the effects of climate change, and the extent to which it could heighten international tensions.” 

Another UK MoD report out to 2050 states:

“The cost of climate change to governments and societies will increase and, as time passes, mitigation measures will become increasingly complex and expensive to implement. The demand for a coordinated global campaign to address climate change will grow as acute effects are felt from an increasingly volatile climate and concerns develop about an approaching ecological ‘tipping point’. Geoengineering (deliberate, large-scale manipulation of an environmental process) could become a strategic geopolitical (and irreversible) choice for governments… Defence and security planning assumptions, not least access, basing routes, logistics and environmental envelope in which military capabilities will have to operate, will need to be reviewed.”

The report concludes by noting the possibility of “unilateral adoption of geoengineering.” It would seem that the CIA’s interest in geoengineering, which dates back to at least the 1960s, has fuelled contemporary debates on the subject within military circles. The military origins of supercomputers and their uses in climate modelling have blurred the distinction between civilian and military climate change studies. Keep watching the skies!

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Footnotes

1. For a scholarly history, see James R. Fleming (2010) Fixing the Sky, Columbia University Press 

2. WMO Expert Team on Weather Modification’s website, www.wmo.int/pages/prog/arep/wwrp/new/weathermod_new.html

3. AIR 2/13343, “Rainfall of August 15th 1952: Flooding at Lynmouth, opened 18 August 1952.”

4. Memorandum From the Deputy Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (Kohler) to Secretary of State Rusk, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Vol. XXVIII, Laos, State Department, Office of the Historian, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v28/d274. For extended discussion, see Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation (1979) Weather Modification: Programs, Problems, Policy, and Potential, 9th Congress, 2nd Session, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, pp. 36, 428, 433

5. One report suggests that, unlike weather modification, geoengineering involves changing global temperatures. The Royal Society (2009), Geoengineering the climate Science, governance and uncertainty, London: RS, p. 4, https://royal
society.org/~/media/royal_society_content/policy/publications/2009/8693.pdf

6. The earliest scientific, in situ weather modification experiment, Project Cirrus (1940s), involved civilian scientists (researchers and theorists), the General Electric corporation (financiers), federal and local authorities (who authorised it), and the military (which provided equipment and share data). Barrington S. Havens (1952), History of Project Cirrus, Armed Services Technical Information Agency and General Electric Research Laboratory, Research Publication Services, https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/006880.pdf

7. For instance: “A coalition representing the most powerful academic, military, scientific and corporate interests has set its sights on vast potential profits … Notable among the group is David Whelan, a man who spent years in the US defence department working on the stealth bomber and nuclear weapons and who now leads a group of people as Boeing’s chief scientist.” John Vidal, “Big names behind US push for geoengineering,” Guardian, 6 October 2011, www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2011/oct/06/us-push-geoengineering

8. CIA (1960), “Climate control,” Memorandum, Executive Registry No. 60-9040, www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78-03425A002100020014-2.pdf

9. William M. Gray and William M. Frank (1974), Weather Modification by Carbon Dust Absorption of Solar Energy Atmospheric, Science Paper 225, Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University, https://
tropical.colostate.edu/media/sites/111/2016/10/225_Gray.pdf

10. This was Project Stormfury. See J.H. Chaffe, M.H. Stans, E.T. Harding and R.M. White (1969) Project Stormfury Annual Report 1969, ESSA-SP-NHRL-71-08, Springfield, National Technical Information Service, https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/717498.pdf

11. Arnold A. Barnes (1997) “Weather modification,” Technology Test Symposium ’97, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Weather Modification/PL/GPA/AAB/970402 21, https://r3zn8d.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/haarp-weather-modification-test-technology-symposium-1997-
usaf-dr-arnold-a-barnes-jr.pdf

12. Sharon Weinberger, “How Soviet Bomb Tests Paved the Way For U.S. Climate Science,” The Smithsonian Magazine, 7 May 2018, www.
smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-soviet-bomb-test-led-us-climate-science-180968890/

13. CIA, “CIA opens Center on climate change and national security,” Historical Document, 25 September 2009, www.cia.gov/news-information/press-releases-statements/center-on-climate-change-and-national-security.html

14. See, for instance, Robert J. Fitrakis (2005), The Fitrakis Files: Star Wars, Weather Mods & Full Spectrum Dominance, Columbus Alive, Inc.

15. Alan Robock, “Cloud control: Climatologist Alan Robock on the effects of geoengineering and nuclear war,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 71(3): 1-7

16. Council on Foreign Relations, “John Brennan on Transnational Threats to Global Security,” 29 June 2016, www.cfr.org/event/john-brennan-
transnational-threats-global-security

17. MoD (2014) Strategic Trends Programme Global Strategic Trends – Out to 2045, MoD, p. 38, https://espas.secure.europarl.europa.eu/orbis/sites/default/files/generated/document/en/MinofDef_Global%20Strategic%20Trends%20-%202045.pdf

18. Ministry of Defence (2018 (6th ed.)), Global Strategic Trends: The Future Starts Today, MoD, pp. 13, 57, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/771309/Global_Strategic_Trends_-_The_Future_Starts_Today.pdf

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

From New Dawn 189 (Nov-Dec 2021)

The Millennium was a time of spiritual reflection for many people. Objectively, it was an arbitrary date on the calendar, but psychologically people invested the occasion with hope and caution about the future. 

Media cited pseudo-science about Y2K, the fictional Millennium Bug painted as real that would shut down everything run by computers as soon as the digits exceeded 99 and reset to zero. Evangelicals preached doomsday, pointing to the Apocalypse foretold in the Book of Revelation. The prophecies of Nostradamus (Michel de Nostredame, 1503-66) were interpreted as such that the world would end. 

In the mid-1990s, the creators of The X Files introduced Millennium, a dark detective show about an investigator connected to a secret society, whose symbol was the ouroboros: the serpent eating its own tail, signifying eternal destruction and rebirth. In “Destination Eschaton,” a pop band, The Shamen, sang to a disposable beat that “Up out of the turbulence/A better order shall emerge.” A series of movies, including Ed TV (1999) and The Truman Show (1999), gave unthinking audiences their first taste of Gnosticism: that perhaps their “reality” is not real at all. Perhaps forces outside their immediate perception orchestrate their fate: secret societies, intelligence agencies, aliens, demons, or even gods. 

WHAT IS PREDICTIVE PROGRAMMING?

By far the most financially successful movie in the “waking up” triptych was The Matrix (1999), written and directed by the Wachowski brothers (now sisters). In the film, the protagonist Thomas Anderson learns that “reality” is a computer simulation and that humans are actually kept in vats so that machines can feed off their energy. Born on either 11 March 1962 or 13 September 1971, depending on which of Anderson’s records are viewed by the agents, his passport was first acquired on 12 September 1991 and expires on 11 September 2001. The odds of that date being a coincidence in the context of the millenarianism surrounding the film are astronomical. Passports typically need renewing every decade, so even sticking to the year 2001, the odds are 364 to 1 that that date was randomly selected. But why 1991 for Anderson’s first passport? Why not two, three, four years prior or later? 

Similarly, in the Coen Brothers’ classic The Big Lebowski (1998), the film consciously references the New World Order (NWO) first proposed by former CIA Director, President George H.W. Bush. In the movie, the protagonist watches Bush on a store TV talking about Iraq’s aggression against Kuwait, the context in which he mentioned a NWO in real life. The soundtrack is Bob Nolan’s “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” performed by Sons of Pioneers. Foreshadowing the collapse of the Twin Towers, it begins: “See them tumbling down/Pledging their love to the ground.” The second verse is cut so the third is prioritised in the movie: “I know when night has gone/That a new world’s born at dawn.” The date on the cheque the protagonist gives to the clerk is 11 September 1990: the date of the President’s NWO speech in real life. 

Shortly before the actual 9/11, an X Files spinoff called The Lone Gunman piloted (no pun intended) with an episode in which elements with the federal government turn a war-gamed crash of a large jet into the World Trade Center (“Scenario 12-D”) into the real thing to blame a Middle East country and boost the arms market. The only red herring in the script is that the real 9/11 was motivated by world domination, not just boosting arms sales. 

The conspiracy researcher Alan Watt, who died recently, popularised the above as “predictive programming.” In his theory, the elite (whom he believed to be members of ancient cults) socially engineer society by introducing shocking new concepts into the public psyche through entertainment, i.e., when the critical guard is down, so that social responses to the impending shock are lessened and do not result in revolutionary rejection. 

Others have taken Watt’s ideas further and suggested that occult groups operating at high levels of the entertainment industry and intelligence services reveal their plans to the uninitiated in order to attain spiritual “permission” and consent for their crimes. The theory goes that if the masses are too stupid to realise what is coming, that is their fault. They have been warned through entertainment. 

The later trajectory of the predictive programming theory has descended into lunacy and outright lying. For instance, proponents of the theory (perhaps “trolling” as people say these days) re-edited an episode of Family Guy (a Simpsons rip-off) to make it seem as if the show had predicted the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. 

What can be proven, however, and is the subject of this article, is that when the state starts the slow drumbeats of war, including new cold wars, elements of the entertainment industry – which are inexorably tied to the military – produce films and TV shows that demonise the future enemy and prime domestic audiences for conflict with the new “other”: Latin American revolutionaries in ‘80s action movies, Islamic terrorists in ‘90s blockbusters, evil Russian gangsters in millennium-era thrillers, and increasingly Asians, as China becomes the new theatre of battle. 

PROJECTING POWER: HOLLYWOOD’S WAR MACHINE

Corporate news media have by far the greatest influence in shaping public perceptions of foreign governments and peoples. Every day, millions of people are bombarded with negative messaging about “others” in countries that are strategically significant to the US Department of Defense (DoD, a.k.a. Pentagon). But the general cultural hegemony of mass media propaganda is boosted by popular television shows and cinema.

US military assistance to film producers dates back to at least 1915 when the Home Guard loaned equipment to D.W. Griffith for his racist silent movie, The Birth of a Nation (1915). The Hollywood-Pentagon alliance was cemented during the Second World War and Cold War. Communications expert Professor Tricia Jenkins noted more than a decade ago: “The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service, the National Institute of Health and the Department of Homeland Security are just a few bureaus that hire entertainment industry liaisons, and some have worked with Hollywood for over 50 years.”

In 1942, with the US entering the War, the Pentagon opened the Motion Picture Liaison Office. Hollywood producer Walter Wanger summarised the power of propaganda by describing his industry’s 120,000 movies as “American ambassadors.” As early as the 1920s, the US State Department’s Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce Motion Picture Section was using American embassies to facilitate Hollywood movies, but the practice really took off during the War. US President Roosevelt’s Office of Wartime Information, founded in 1942, acted as a censor. A 1944 State Department memo, “American Motion Pictures in the Post-War World,” offered assistance to Hollywood studios for shaping the pro-American world order, assuming that the Nazis would be defeated. 

In 1943, a memo by the Office of Strategic Services (the CIA forerunner) described cinema as “one of the most powerful propaganda weapons at the disposal of the United States.” OSS agents funded director John Ford’s company Argosy Pictures. In addition, Frank Wisner of the Office of Policy Coordination recruited the MGM agent producer Carlton Alsop. Part of his job included countering the Soviet narrative of racist America by placing into films “well dressed Negroes as a part of the American scene, without appearing too conspicuous or deliberate.” The western, Charles Marquis’s Arrowhead (1953), originally had realistic scenes of US officials abusing indigenous Americans. To make America look good, Alsop rewrote the script and even redubbed scenes. Alsop part acquired the rights to Animal Farm so that when the animated movie was made, critiques of capitalism could be minimised by the CIA’s Psychological Strategy Board. 

A December 1955 Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) meeting sought to use Hollywood as a way of informing the public about “the true conditions existing under Communism in simple terms and to explain the principles upon which the Free World way of life is based.” The culture war would “awaken free peoples to an understanding of the magnitude of the danger confronting the Free World; and to generate a motivation to combat this threat.” A year later, the JCS held meetings with director John Ford, producer Colonel Merian C. Cooper, actors Ward Bond and John Wayne. 

The OSS/CIA operative and US Air Force Officer Edward Lansdale developed a personal friendship with the South Vietnam puppet President, Ngô Đình Diệm. Graham Greene’s novel, The Quiet American, was rumoured to be based on the life of Lansdale. When director Joseph Mankiewicz wanted to adapt the novel, Lansdale suggested script rewrites omitting OSS/CIA involvement in aspects of the story. Robert Lantz, Vice President of the film production company Figaro Inc., met with CIA director Allen Dulles to secure the assistance of the South Vietnamese government in the production.

Was this predictive programming? Not in the strict sense of The Matrix etc., noted above, but radio host and academic Pearse Redmond says: “In a broader sense, the film achieved success in preparing the American public for what soon became one of their longest and bloodiest wars.”

In 1965, John Wayne wrote to US President Lyndon B. Johnson about his intention to make a Vietnam movie, Ray Kellogg’s The Green Berets (1968). “[It is] extremely important that not only the people of the United States but those all over the world should know why it is necessary for us to be there” in Vietnam, wrote Wayne. “The most effective way to accomplish this is through the motion picture medium.” Johnson’s adviser, Jack Valenti, later President of the Motion Picture Association of America, persuaded the President: “If [Wayne] made the picture he would say the things we want said.” The buried lead here is that the President green-lighted a film, rather like in the Soviet Union where art was approved or rejected by committee. The spate of Vietnam movies began as late as 1975 at War’s end, making Wayne a pioneer of propaganda.

HOLLYWOOD’S WAR ON TERROR 

Valenti later said: “[I]f things get tough [for the pro-war US image], the Democrats and Republicans know precisely what to do: Call Steven Spielberg or Arnold Schwarzenegger.” The first Hollywood movie depicting Arabs as terrorists was Sirocco (1951). The theme continues to the present and has been documented by Jack Shaheen in his book, Reel Bad Arabs (2003).

“Circa 1995,” the CIA created a new position: the Entertainment Industry Liaison (EIL), first headed by ex-covert operations officer Chase Brandon whose work is credited in Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State (1998), Tim Matheson’s In the Company of Spies (1999), Roger Donaldson’s The Recruit (2003), and Phil Alden Robinson’s Sum of All Fears (2003). Brandon’s cousin is actor Tommy Lee Jones. The EIL follows the CIA’s Strategic Intent doctrine: to project its professed values and drive recruitment. Jenkins interviewed Brandon’s successor, Paul Barry (also ex-special ops), who explained that the Agency had a public image problem that Hollywood could fix. Barry says: “In most instances, Hollywood is the only way the public learns about the Agency and Americans frequently shape their judgments about us based on films.” He added: “The problem is compounded when we are depicted as killers and rogues in the movies.”

Established in 1999, California University’s Institute for Creative Technology was funded by the US Army. After 9/11, a three-day summit was held in which 30 anonymous directors, screenwriters, and producers “brainstormed” ideas. Leaked names included Danny Bilson, David Engelbach, David Fincher, Spike Jonze, Randal Kleiser, Mary Lambert, Paul De Meo, and Steven E. de Souza. Supposedly, the Pentagon wanted to cull the ideas of storytellers to see if any scenarios might happen in real life. In October 2001, the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs was given $15 million to create entertainment that counters the “poor perception” of the US in the third world.

Today, the DoD has a Film Liaison Office. Its former head, Colonel Phil Strub (ret.), describes the relationship with Hollywood as one of “mutual exploitation.” Typically, a producer seeking access to military hardware or personnel to include in a movie will approach the DoD Project Office and sign a Production Assistance Agreement to lease tanks, aircraft, or even soldiers. Films that have been turned down for portraying the DoD in a bad light include Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1987, too antiwar), Rob Rainer’s A Few Good Men (1992, internal killing and cover-up), Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump (1994, implies that only idiots join the military), Terrence Malick’s Thin Red Line (1998, too antiwar), David O. Russell’s Three Kings (1999, negative portrayal of soldiers), and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008, makes bomb disposal units seem unprofessional).

Following exposure that the Pentagon was “controlling” Hollywood, the Liaison Office developed a 10 percent doctrine: if just 10 percent of the script is questionable from the military’s viewpoint, the Defense Department will assist the filmmakers. After 9/11, the Defense Department’s PR manager Victoria Clarke pioneered embedding producers with soldiers for the show Profiles from the Frontline. The technique was later adopted, infamously, by journalists; a practice that led to many doubting the independence of war correspondents. 

Professor Tom Pollard noted the Obama administration’s planned “pivot” to Asia and examined the Hollywood stereotypes of peoples from the region as a form of predictive programming. WWII and post-WWII Asian stereotypes included the yellow peril (criminals), perpetual foreigners (unassimilated), geishas (sex objects), and model citizens (polite nerds). Pollard gives no indication that he believes in a predictive programming conspiracy, but in the context of anti-Japan propaganda, notes that Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor (2001) “arrived in theatres just weeks before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Although produced before the 9/11 attacks,” says Pollard, “Bay’s film epitomises post-9/11 movie making and anticipates the Asian/Pacific pivot in US foreign policies.” In 2012, MGM changed the villains in Dan Bradley’s Red Dawn (2012) from Chinese to North Koreans as not to alienate the potentially lucrative Chinese market. Anti-China hawks saw this as a conspiracy: that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had taken over Hollywood.

THE NEW YELLOW PERIL

The state typically targets intellectuals who shape doctrines and inform the culture. The US consulate in Shanghai screened several US films to university students. Embassy officials also met with Nanjing University students to discuss Lu Chuan’s Nanjing! Nanjing! (2009), the movie about Japanese atrocities committed in the eponymous province. In addition, the US Embassy in Beijing’s Center for Educational Exchange ran a Q&A session with Li Yang, director of Mang Shan (2007), a film controversial in China because it exposes human trafficking in the country and highlights the weakness of the CCP. 

The Yellow Peril is a racist anti-Asian slur that had its origin in late-19th century European imperialism that sought to portray those in the rival region of the world as a danger to white Christians. Novelist Arthur Henry Ward (Sax Rohmer, 1883-1959) first published his Fu-Manchu series in 1912. The eponymous character is a criminal who seeks to assassinate British diplomats in Burma. The stories and books were pro-British imperial propaganda that portrayed Asians as threats to English “values.” In the 1970s, writer Steve Englehart and artist Jim Starlin adapted the character Fu Manchu into a Marvel comic book character, Shang-Chi, the Master of Kung Fu. Marvel was seeking to profit from the Bruce Lee movies trend in the ‘70s. “The Shang-Chi series harked back to Yellow Peril comics of the Cold War 1950s,” says cultural historian Christopher Frayling.

Produced by Marvel Studios, distributed by Disney, and directed by the American Destin Daniel Cretton, the new movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings revives Yellow Peril propaganda, only this time avoiding accusations of blatant racism by making both the protagonists and antagonists Asian, as well as having a director of Japanese-European heritage. Although the name has been changed, Fu Manchu is a character in the movie. Film critic Shi Wenxue says: “Chinese audiences cannot accept a prejudiced character from 100 years ago is still appearing in a new Marvel film.” In addition, the protagonist is played by Simu Liu, a Chinese-born Canadian who has been vocally critical of the CCP. The political context in which this anti-CCP film is released is America’s ongoing military “pivot” to Asia. 

Setting the Stage from the Top Down

Quoting anti-China right-wingers in the US, the BBC publicised a report by PEN International, claiming that China has increasing control over Hollywood. The report appeared in the context of the global pandemic, to which those seeking to blame China refer to as the “CCP virus.” 

Prior to the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, US television in particular produced a number of shows priming audiences for a pandemic. Many conspiracy researchers believe these to be examples of “predictive programming.” In recent times, they point to the Netflix documentary, Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak, released in January 2020 just before Covid was internationally recognised. 

Whether predictive programming is real or not, and regardless of the extent to which it is real, we can be certain that those who dominate the culture do so as part of a nexus of control that includes economics and foreign policy.  

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Footnotes

1. For instance: Michael S. Hyatt (1998) The Millennium Bug: How to Survive the Coming Chaos, Regnery.

2. Darrell L. Bock, Stanley N. Gundry and Kenneth L. Gentry (1999) Three Views on the Millennium and Beyond, Zondervan Academic.

3. John Hogue (1987) Nostradamus and the Millennium, Doubleday.

4. Sean Martin (2006) The Gnostics: The First Christian Heretics, Pocket Essentials.

5. Hans Jonas (2015) The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, Beacon Press.

6. The Hollywood Reporter, “Boston Marathon Bombing: Seth MacFarlane Calls ‘Family Guy’ Hoax ‘Abhorrent’,” 16 April 2013, www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/boston-bombing-seth-macfarlane-calls-440456

7. Matthew Alford and Tom Secker (2017) National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood, Drum Roll Books.

8. Quoted in Tricia Jenkins (2009) “How the Central Intelligence Agency works with Hollywood: An interview with Paul Barry, the CIA’s new Entertainment Industry Liaison,” Media, Culture and Society, 31(3): 489–95.

9. Quoted in Paul Moody (2017) “Embassy cinema: what WikiLeaks reveals about US state support for Hollywood,” Media, Culture and Society, 39(7): 1063-77.

10. Moody, op. cit. 

11. Pearse Redmond (2017) “The Historical Roots of CIA-Hollywood Propaganda,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 76(2): 280-331. 

12. Ibid. 

13. Ibid. 

14. Quoted in Lawrence Suid, “Hollywood and Vietnam,” Film Comment, 15(5): 20-25. 

15. Quoted in Ali Serdouk (2021) “Hollywood, American Politics, and Terrorism: When Art Turns into a Political Tool,” Arab Studies Quarterly, 43(1): 26-37. 

16. Jenkins, op. cit. 

17. Michael C. Frank (2015) “At War with the Unknown: Hollywood, Homeland Security, and the Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism after 9/11,” Amerikastudien, 60(4): 485-504. 

18. Sebastian Kaempf (2019) “‘A relationship of mutual exploitation’: the evolving ties between the Pentagon, Hollywood, and the commercial gaming sector,” Social Identities, 25(4): 542-58.

19. Quoted in Lawrence Suid, “Hollywood and Vietnam,” Film Comment, 15(5): 20-25. 

20. Kaempf, op. cit.

21. Tom Pollard (2017) “Hollywood’s Asian-Pacific Pivot: Stereotypes, Xenophobia, and Racism,” Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 16: 131-44.

22. Moody, op. cit. 

23. Jenny Clegg (1994) Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril: The Making of a Racist Myth, Trentham. 

24. Christopher Frayling (2014) The Yellow Peril: Dr Fu Manchu and The Rise of Chinaphobia, Thames and Hudson.

25. Quoted in Rhea Mogul, “Marvel’s ‘Shang-Chi’ was made with China in mind. Here’s why Beijing doesn’t like it,” NBC, 3 October 2021, www.nbcnews.com/news/china/marvel-s-shang-chi-was-made-china-mind-here-s-n1280571

26. BBC, “Hollywood censors films to appease China, report suggests,” 6 August 2020, www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-53676789

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From New Dawn 196 (Jan-Feb 2023)

On the surface, the men who rule the world are central and investment bankers: those who print money and create money from thin air in the form of loans. I say “men” because almost all of them are male. In addition, the men who run the world are law and private enforcement agencies. The central and private bankers cannot survive without the judges, police, and hired goons that enable their system: arrest for non-compliance, fines for failure to pay debts, etc.

The men who run the world are, on the surface, also the founders, CEOs, and majority-shareholders of multibillion-dollar monopolies, including the internet monolith Alphabet, the tech behemoth Apple, the software monopoly Microsoft, the drug giant Pfizer, and BlackRock – the asset manager that owns the bulk of those firms’ shares. The CEOs of these companies meet several times a year at the Bilderberg Group and the World Economic Forum.

Many of these elites operate in the even-smaller circles of secret societies and fraternal orders. In 2011, BlackRock’s co-founder and current CEO, Larry Fink, sat in the United Grand Lodge of England’s Freemasonic Hall and urged the European Union, of which Britain was then a member, to inject $2 trillion worth of central bank money into the global economy to head off recession.¹ Fink’s colleagues in Wall Street and the City of London Corporation had crashed the economy in 2007-08 with their reckless gambling. Their intervention led to more than a decade of low-growth, low-wages and enormous top-down profits.

The men who rule the world control thought with their privately-owned media. CNN and other broadcasters are owned by Warner Bros Discovery, which in turn is owned by BlackRock and other asset managers. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post (WashPo), eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar owns The Intercept, and centibillionaire Elon Musk owns Twitter.

With campaign donations and propaganda, these and other rich men own politicians. A record-breaking one billion dollars in lobbying in the US was spent in the first quarter of 2022 alone.²

I say these men run the world “on the surface” because, as we shall see, an enormous secret apparatus operates in the name of national security which seeks to control the direction of these men and their investments.

CENTIBILLIONAIRES

In 2018, Jeff Bezos’s estimated wealth surpassed $100 billion, making him the world’s first centibillionaire for two decades. Bezos made his money, in part, by enjoying US federal government subsidies in the form of tax breaks – literally paying nothing in some years³ – and basing his business on computers and the internet, both of which were developed with public money after WWII. Generally, Amazon is notorious for not paying staff a living wage, hiring corporate spies, busting potential unions, and controlling warehouse staff with CCTV-linked to algorithms that punish transgressions, such as going to the toilet. In 2000, Bezos founded his space venture arm, Blue Origin, which in 2021 won millions of dollars worth of taxpayer money from the Pentagon’s Space Force to develop cryogenic fluid management systems for the New Glenn rocket – a heavy-lift orbit vehicle.

Technically, Microsoft founder and CEO Bill Gates became a centibillionaire briefly in 1999, with the so-called “.com” bubble, before seeing his wealth dip below that figure. All that changed in 2019 when his wealth surpassed $100 billion, where it has remained ever since. Like Bezos, Gates enjoyed handouts from the nanny state in the form of procurement contracts, low taxes, and early dibs on innovations in non-computing fields, like geo- and genetic engineering, and particularly injectable products. Under cover of saving black children from malaria and other diseases, Gates’s Foundation has made a fortune pedalling genetically-modified crops and alleged vaccines, which need to be cooled in order to “work.” The lucrative, patented cooling technology is the most profitable part of the new jab technology, which interests Gates the most.

Like Bezos and the rest of them, government responses to the pandemic led Gates to double his wealth⁴ as people were locked down and used his Microsoft products. Gates also bet on various “vaccine stocks.”⁵

The world’s richest man, at the time of writing, is Elon Musk: a person born into wealth⁶ and who, through his Neuralink company, thinks it’s “cool” to torture primates by snatching them from their mothers, raising them in cages, and forcing them to participate in experiments that include wiring their brains to microchips, which will one day be implanted into humans. Musk’s lithium battery firm, Tesla, relies on minerals acquired from Third World countries. In the style of the more right-wing elements of the US Central Intelligence Agency, Musk tweeted about the US-backed putsch in Bolivia: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”⁷ Like Bezos’s Blue Origin, Musk’s SpaceX has enjoyed Pentagon contracts to save it from ruination. Musk recently supplied satellites to Ukraine in its war with Russia. Like Bill Gates buying favourable media coverage of himself and Bezos purchasing WashPo, Musk has taken over Twitter, branding himself as a saviour of the kind of speech that the neoliberal elite has gradually censored over the last few years.

But these men are not free to do as they wish, despite the godlike status they try to portray.

Melinda Gates implied during a TV interview that she left her husband partly because of his association with the child rapist and trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, who was part of an intelligence agency plot to entrap and blackmail wealthy and influential people. US intelligence has had to deny plausible rumours that it is investigating Musk as a threat to national security because he reinstated former US President Trump’s Twitter account.

SHADOW GOVERNMENT

The men with the most influence over national politics and economics are those who work in the shadows. For instance, the “magic wall” of CNN gives Americans the supposed results of democratic elections. But not only are the candidates of elections bought by lobbyists, the “magic wall” that purports to show election results was the product of the company Perceptive Pixel, a start-up funded by the Central Intelligence Agency’s venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel.⁸ CNN’s then-head of politics, David Bohrman, first saw the “magic wall” at a military-intelligence event.⁹ In other words, CNN viewers receive their election data indirectly from the CIA. Bill Gates’s Microsoft acquired Perceptive Pixel in 2012. (In-Q-Tel is named after Q in the James Bond movies. The original Bond novels were written by the British Naval officer, Ian Fleming. Bond’s cypher was 007: the real-life cypher of the occultist and cryptologist, John Dee, a spy for Queen Elizabeth I.)

Unlike CEOs and corporate co-founders who have their own private intelligence units and investigators,¹⁰ the military and intelligence apparatus can and does murder and threaten to murder whoever it deems a threat to “national security” – a vague phrase that, in reality, does not mean the security of you or me, but rather, the given elite’s grip on power. The controlled media complex is quick to say that the Russian state murders rival politicians and dissident journalists but claims “accident” or “suicide” when Western states do the same to irksome citizens.

For instance, after the journalist Gary Webb exposed CIA cocaine trafficking in the 1980s, he supposedly killed himself with two bullets to the head. Agencies rely on a gullible culture and media plants to tell the public that any investigation into foul play is crazy conspiracy theorising.

During his stint at the LA Times, Ken Dilanian worked closely with the CIA, asking for their approval for stories and to suggest stories.¹¹ In mid-2021, Dilanian, then at NBC, downplayed the lab-leak theory of SARS-CoV-2.¹² It turns out that the US had outsourced dangerous gain-of-function experiments to China via a non-profit called the EcoHealth Alliance [for more on this, see the interview with Prof. Jeffrey Sachs in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 16 No 6].

In part, intelligence agents also rule the world by taking over local investigations. After 9/11, for example, New York police arrested Israelis who were seen appearing to celebrate the attacks. The case was transferred to the FBI, then run by the longest-serving director Robert Mueller, who let them flee to Israel.

Intelligence agencies and their political supporters compel judges to drop certain cases. In 1989, US Attorney General Dick Thornburgh prevented evidence against a former CIA station chief from being heard in a federal court under the Classified Information Procedures Act. This led the judge to dismiss all charges.¹³ The agencies can do anything they like while protecting their agents from exposure under legislation like the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Even if the higher-ups disagree with a particular operation, they protect the given agency’s reputation by shielding the rogue agents from public scrutiny.

But agents and officers are not all-powerful. They merely exert influence by having a de facto license to kill. The public execution of John F. Kennedy in 1963 was a display of who runs the United States. In those days, it was Freemasonic networks operating in the CIA, FBI, and military intelligence. Freemasonry as an institution did not necessarily condone or have anything to do with the murder, but rather, the agents and individuals involved in the assassination happened to be high-ranking Masons: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Kennedy’s replacement Lyndon B. Johnson, and Abraham Zapruder who captured the killing on camera.

Today, multimillion-dollar companies and the people running them are already powerful, so it does not take much for agents to threaten non-compliant CEOs into doing the bidding of the intelligence agencies. This mafia form of politics makes agents operating in intelligence circles more powerful than CEOs, who become those agents’ puppets. It has been five decades since the Church Committee of the US Congress attempted to launch a serious investigation into agencies’ structures and operations.

Ex-agents hope to become – or have become – politicians: for example, in the US, Matt Castelli (Democrat), Will Hurd (Republican), Elissa Slotkin (Democrat), and Abigail Spanberger (Democrat).

In an interview with the multimillionaire podcaster Joe Rogan, the billionaire Facebook (Meta) co-founder Mark Zuckerberg said that his company’s decision to limit information favourable to US President Donald Trump was due to pressure from the intelligence agencies, which claimed that Trump and his supporters were a threat to US national security – again, meaning to the interests of certain elites. “Liberal” legacy media ignored the story, and the right wing focused upon it as proof of a political agenda against Trump.

Zuckerberg was saying nothing new. In December 2020, weeks before the 6 January events, he had testified to Congress and made the same remarks. Zuckerberg: “In the weeks leading up to the election, the Director of National Intelligence, the Head of the FBI, and the bipartisan leaders of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reminded Americans about the threat posed by foreign influence operations… Along with their public warnings, and as part of the ongoing cooperation that tech companies established with government partners following the 2016 election…”¹⁴ Hardly anybody noticed. Twitter co-founder and billionaire Jack Dorsey said virtually the same thing during his Congressional question and answer session.

In addition, Meta has hired ex-CIA and FBI agents to police content. Here is a small sample: CIA contractor Hagan Barnett; US Army Officer Joey Chan; CIA analyst Cameron Harris; Department of Defense project manager Sherif Kamal; DoD Intelligence Officer Suzanna Morrow; FBI threat investigator Ellen Nixon; Marine Corps Intelligence Officer Neil Potts; CIA targeting officer Scott Stern; CIA senior analyst Mike Torrey; FBI supervisory special agent Emily Vacher; and CIA counterintelligence specialist Bryan Weisbard.¹⁵

This tells us several things. First, no matter how wealthy and powerful somebody may be, in this case Zuckerberg and Dorsey, they are usually afraid of intelligence agencies and bend to their will, even when doing so is economically harmful to the corporation (in this case downgrading and limiting content). Second, the given President’s power depends on whether or not the media support him (“him,” because at the time of writing, no women have entered this office in the US). Third, major influence can be wrought upon an election by politically-motivated intelligence agencies – in this case, killing a damaging story about the opposition candidate’s son (Hunter Biden). Fourth, their influence over corporations often involves having words with the CEOs. This is usually sufficient to push them in the desired direction.

There is an entire network of corporate-intelligence operatives influencing business and politics.

A few years ago, the business press reported that Deutsche Bank, HSBC, and JPMorgan were hiring former intelligence and military operatives, ostensibly to stop rogue traders. These include employees of Britain’s spy agency, GCHQ (which the NSA allegedly used as a conduit to spy on Trump), and the CIA. Big banks buy politicians with campaign donations and intelligence agencies work for those banks and influence politics.¹⁶

BlackRock is the biggest asset manager and institutional investor in the world. Together with State Street, Vanguard, and others like Fidelity, it has a controlling institutional stake in Alphabet (which owns Google and YouTube), Amazon, Facebook (Meta), and America’s other giant corporate monopolies, as well as big pharma, big oil, big real estate, and much more. President Obama selected Tom Donilon as National Security Advisor. Donilon went on to chair the BlackRock Investment Institute. President-elect Biden even considered picking him to head the CIA.¹⁷

Biden also filled the Treasury with BlackRockers. “BlackRock is becoming one of Wall Street’s key D.C. conduits,” says the business journal Bloomberg. Biden’s Treasury choice as senior advisor on Russia and Ukraine is Eric Van Nostrand, former BlackRock managing director. Biden already wanted former BlackRock “Sustainability” head, Brian Deese, to head his National Economic Council. Vice President Kamala Harris’s Chief Economic Advisor was another ex-Obama flunky, namely Mike Pyle who before working for Harris was BlackRock’s Chief Investment Strategist.¹⁸

•  •  •

These are the kind of people who meet annually at the World Economic Forum, Bilderberg Group, and other exclusive dining clubs to chat, off the record, about the direction of the world they are trying to impose on the rest of us in the name of democracy and security.

They have already succeeded in undermining real democracy, in injecting billions of people with an experimental product under the guise of countering a global health emergency, and are now using taxpayer money and the cloak of national security to create a new era of biological manipulation to shift from the data economy to the biotech economy.

In addition to the multitude of behind-the-scenes players like intelligence agents, the men who rule the world have some public faces, too, like Bill Gates – the so-called philanthropist buying America’s farmland and openly using “charity” as a way of making more money for himself.

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Footnotes

1. www.fnlondon.com/articles/blackrock-larry-fink-financial-news-awards-for-excellence-asset-management-2011-20111013.

2. www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/05/unprecedented-1-billion-first-quarter-lobbying-haul-puts-2022-on-track-for-record-year/.

3. www.cnbc.com/2020/02/04/amazon-had-to-pay-federal-income-taxes-for-the-first-time-since-2016.html

4. www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/ten-richest-men-double-their-fortunes-pandemic-while-incomes-99-percent-humanity.

5. www.fool.com/investing/2020/09/24/4-coronavirus-vaccine-stocks-the-bill-melinda-gate/.

6. https://sites.imsa.edu/acronym/2021/03/04/elon-musk-is-not-an-entrepreneur-hes-a-rich-deceitful-hack/.

7. https://twitter.com/panoparker/status/1318157559266762752?lang=en.

8. www.businessinsider.com/25-cutting-edge-companies-funded-by-the-central-intelligence-agency-2012-8?r=US.

9. www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/arts/television/22king.html.

10. https://truthout.org/articles/corporate-spies-are-watching-organized-labor/.

11. https://theintercept.com/2014/09/04/former-l-times-reporter-cleared-stories-cia-publication/.

12. www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fauci-s-emails-don-t-prove-wuhan-conspiracy-raise-further-n1269650.

13. www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-11-25-mn-226-story.html.

14. https://web.archive.org/web/20210329134044/https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Zuckerberg%20Responses%20to%20QFRs.pdf.

15. www.mintpressnews.com/meet-ex-cia-agents-deciding-facebook-content-policy/281307/.

16. www.businessinsider.com/banks-hire-former-spies-to-try-and-prevent-misconduct-2016-2.

17. www.politico.com/news/2020/11/25/biden-leans-toward-donilon-as-cia-chief-440669

18. www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-11/biden-ties-to-blackrock-deepen-with-latest-treasury-hire.

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 17 No 2 (Apr 2023)

More than a decade ago, the US drug giant Pfizer was described as a “habitual offender” by the journal, Healthcare Policy. Between 2002 and 2009, the company had forked out $3 billion in civil and criminal penalties.

But Pfizer is far from being the only one. At the end of 2019, the Australian Department of Health and Aged Care’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) fined the UK-based multinational, Mundipharma, more than $300,000 for 24 infringements over the company’s relations with medical professionals in its efforts to promote opioids, which were marketed as TARGIN. “[A]dvertising to health professionals was misleading, imbalanced and otherwise inaccurate,” says the TGA. It was “in breach of the requirements of the Medicines Australia Code of Conduct regarding promotional materials directed to health professionals.” According to TGA guidelines, opioids should not be advertised as a core element of managing non-cancer pain, yet the company’s promotional material did exactly that.

Pharmaceutical giants have a long history of criminal behaviour, some of which involve killing people by selling dangerous products for profit, while others involve killing people by raising prices on life-saving medicine and suing for the production of generics. Regulators tend to give companies a financial slap on the wrist and thus enable them to continue their gangster operations while appearing to take public health seriously. Mundipharma generates an annual $2 billion, so a $300k fine is hardly a deterrent.

Smaller pharmaceutical companies, particularly those developing drugs derived from natural substances and not synthetic chemicals, are receiving comparable fines. In September last year, the TGA fined three domestic firms specialising in cannabinoid-based products: Cannatrek, Little Green Pharma, and MGC Pharmaceuticals, which shares its headquarters with Europe. The companies were accused of promoting prescription-only medical cannabis, including products not on the Register of Therapeutic Goods.

Why are regulators going after natural and natural-based producers? ABC Australia reported on the “secretive relationship” between companies and government advisors, which the report said “is enough to make you sick.” But I thought conspiracies were just a theory and you’d be a fool, a weirdo, and even a menace to society to believe and promote them? In 2012, Bond University’s Ray Moynihan said: “The TGA has confirmed to me there is no public disclosure of the financial relationships between drug companies and the professionals who advise Australia’s drug regulator.” In 2017, Dr Wendy Bonython and Associate Professor Bruce Arnold of Canberra University’s Health Research Institute told the Senate that the TGA needed a complete overhaul. They said: “There needs to be a clear break between the regulator and the parties they’re trying to regulate.” In August last year, the BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal) cited professionals who advocated changing the “TGA’s structure and function, arguing that the agency has become too close to industry.”

One could reasonably assume that the New York Times, with all its bias and spin, would at least cover penalties imposed by courts on major drug companies. Yet, from 1970, when Pfizer and others won major court appeals, to the early-2000s when increasing numbers of fines were imposed, the archive contains hardly any information. This suggests that successfully suing drug giants is a relatively new phenomenon. Most of the information contained in this article, therefore, comes from the post-Millennium period. What follows are the top ten global (mostly US-based) pharmaceutical and biotech companies, by market capitalisation, and a sample of their criminal history.

ABBVIE

AbbVie was founded in Chicago in 2013 as a spinoff from Abbott Laboratories. The parent company has a sordid history. The earliest fine I can find dates back to 1975 when the company’s lawyers accepted guilt but entered a no plea in a case where the corporation was fined just $1,000 for adulterating and misbranding intravenous solutions. Since then, Abbott and its subsidiaries have been fined millions of dollars in the US for committing various crimes, including environmental, consumer and labour violations, and false claims and the promotion of unapproved or off-label products.

The fines have become increasingly steep. In 1999, Abbott had to pay $100 million over its production of diagnostic devices that did not meet federal regulations. The biggest was a near-record $1.5 billion in 2012 for illegally marketing the anti-epileptic drug Depakote as a dementia drug.

Abbott’s spin-out, AbbVie, has an even worse record, given its nascence. For instance, in 2016 a company called Teva Pharmaceuticals bought another company called Allergan. In 2020, Allergan was purchased by AbbVie. But Allergan was bogged down in lawsuits relating to its alleged role in America’s opioid crisis. In 2022, AbbVie agreed to clear the lawsuits for Teva to the tune of $2.37 billion so that AbbVie and Teva could agree a deal worth $6.6 billion.

ASTRAZENECA

The Anglo-Swedish firm AstraZeneca is known for its COVID “vaccine” being withdrawn from more than a dozen countries over fears that it causes blood clots. In June 2021, after previously being described by the Australian government as building a “pathway to normal,” it was announced that the government would withdraw the product in favour of Pfizer’s jab.

The company was formed in 1999 when Sweden’s Astra AB merged with Britain’s Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). Between 1948 and 1960 with intermittent help from Australia, Britain invaded and fought “communists” in Malaya (now Malaysia and Singapore), during which time the military engaged in chemical warfare, spraying defoliant over swathes of jungle in order to identify the hidden enemy and drive villagers into British-run concentration camps. The Colonial Office reckoned that ICI saw it as “a lucrative field for experiment.”

In the 1970s, ICI fabricated toxicology and efficacy reports into its PP796 chemical, an additive to the paraquat pesticide. ICI scientist Jon Heylings described it as “a conspiracy within the company to keep this quiet.” Company documents show that 1980s’ efforts to introduce a diluted and less deadly compound were rejected, as they would “destroy Group profit from paraquat.” In 2010, as AstraZeneca, the company paid $520 million after it “illegally marketed the anti-psychotic drug Seroquel for uses not approved as safe and effective by the [US] Food and Drug Administration.”

BRISTOL-MYERS SQUIBB

BMS was founded in 1989 when Bristol-Myers merged with the Squibb corporation. In 1937, for instance, Bristol-Myers was ordered by the US Federal Trade Commission to stop presenting its hair tonic, Vitalis, as a baldness cure. In 1941, to give another example, E.R. Squibb and other companies were accused by the US Department of Justice of fixing insulin prices.

But they did much worse. In the 1940s, Bristol Laboratories, the Squibb Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Johns Hopkins University tested their new penicillin products on Guatemalans: over 400 of whom were deliberately infected with syphilis without their knowledge or consent.

This spirit of deception has followed the company into more recent history. In 2007, BMS was fined $515 million for illegally marketing drugs. Attorney R. Alexander Acosta of the Southern District of Florida said that the company “fraudulently inflated the cost of a drug used primarily to reduce the side effects of cancer treatments and other generic drugs without regard to the increased costs borne by government health care programs or elderly and indigent patients.”

GLAXOSMITHKLINE

Now stylised as GSK, the British company was formed in 2000 when Glaxo Wellcome merged with SmithKline Beecham. For 40 years, Glaxo scientists warned in secret that chemicals used in the production of the company’s ulcer drug, Zantac, were potentially carcinogenic, but the company covered it up. The story broke in 2019 when researchers found potentially significant cancer-causing elements in the drug. One year later, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recalled the product.

In the ‘90s, SmithKline Beecham was fined by the Hungarian government for exaggerating the efficacy of its hepatitis B vaccine. In the US, the company billed the federal government for unnecessary lab tests, some of which were not even performed. The company was fined $325 million for these fraudulent practices, as well as for bribing doctors. In 2012, the merged GSK was at it again. This time, the company was fined $3 billion in the US for bribing doctors to overprescribe the anti-depressants Paxil and Wellbutrin, as well as the asthma drug, Advair.

The antidepressants were unlawfully marketed to children, despite not being approved by the FDA. In 2020, the Federal Court of Australia fined GSK and Novartis $4.5 million for marketing what amounts to the same product, Osteogel and Emulgel, at unjust prices.

JOHNSON AND JOHNSON

For decades, J&J knowingly sold talcum powder contaminated with asbestos. To avoid litigation, J&J created a new company called LTL Management and then placed LTL into bankruptcy. Prior to the filing, the company paid $2 billion to women who claimed that their cancers had resulted from J&J’s products. The BBC covered for the company, saying that the volumes of asbestos were “small.”

In 2013, J&J was fined $2.2 billion by US authorities for promoting the mental health drugs Risperdal and Invega for non-approved uses and for bribing doctors. In 2019, Australia’s Federal Court awarded damages after J&J’s subsidiary, Ethicon, failed to warn professionals about the risks to women using vaginal mesh implants to treat pelvic floor damage. Hundreds of women endure “debilitating pain” as a result of various injuries related to the product. Justice Anna Katzmann said: “While the law does not require that goods be absolutely free of risk, it does require that manufacturers and suppliers disclose the risks.”

Another J&J subsidiary, Janssen, attempted to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. In December 2021, the US FDA ordered a halt after six women developed blood clots, one of whom died. In May last year, the FDA imposed more restrictions over further clots, limiting the Janssen jab as a shot of last resort.

MERCK

Merck is the world’s oldest drug company. Set up in Germany in the 17th century, it is now owned by US asset managers, like all the giants, such as BlackRock and State Street. In 2017, the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote that Merck had “skewed the results of clinical trials in favour of the arthritis drug, Vioxx,” which was approved in 1999, “to hide evidence that the drug increased patients’ risk of heart attack.”

Internal documents reveal that the marketing team developed what they called Assessment of Differences between Vioxx and Naproxen to Ascertain Gastrointestinal Tolerability and Effectiveness. This was a doctrine for manipulating clinical trial results. For example, the company compared trial data to the existing drug Naproxen instead of comparing it to placebos. They hid the fact that Vioxx increased the risk of heart attack by 400 per cent. Instead of neutral scientists, articles for publication in peer-reviewed journals submitted by Merck listed company employees as the lead authors of original drafts. Merck looked for prominent scientists willing to use their names on the pre-written articles. The Union alleges that 100,000 people died as a result of the product in the seven years that it was available.

More recently, France launched an investigation into Merck’s failure to inform patients about potentially damaging changes to its thyroid drug, Levothyrox.

NOVARTIS

Novartis is a Swiss pharmaceutical giant created in 1996 when Sandoz merged with Ciba-Geigy. During the 1970s, the latter company “conspired to defraud and deceive [US] government agencies by concealing the nature of the chemical waste in order to obtain and keep certain disposal permits,” says the Associated Press, reporting on a fine imposed a decade later.

Ciba-Geigy was fined again in 1992 for dumping waste from its Toms River chemical plant in New Jersey (now owned by BASF). Local authorities attribute elevated rates of leukemia among girls in the area to the pollution.

As noted above, in the year 2020, Australia’s Federal Court fined GSK and Novartis for marketing what amounts to the same product at different prices. In February this year, Novartis, Roche, and Gentec (now owned by Roche) won an appeal in France against a record fine of more €500 million. The companies developed a drug called Lucentis to combat macular degeneration. To promote the product, the companies were alleged to have colluded to discredit the rival drug, Avastin.

PFIZER

When it comes to fines, Pfizer is in a league of its own. Little has been reported on Pfizer’s criminality in Australia and information is hard to find. In 2005, Pfizer Australia violated the industry’s supposed code of conduct when it sent a letter to health professionals in defence of its anti-inflammatory drug, Celebrix, following the recall of its predecessor, Vioxx. Pfizer claimed that Celebrix, which it said could aid in the treatment of arthritis, had no significant impact on cardiovascular systems. But in 2004, Dr Peter Mansfield, then-Director of Healthy Skepticism, wrote to Medicines Australia to alert them to Pfizer’s unfounded claims. In early-‘05, Medicines Australia issued Pfizer with a paltry $25k fine. The report casually mentions at the close of the article two previous Pfizer Australia fines: One in 2003 relating to the promotion of Viagra and another in 2004 for undisclosed violations.

In 2014, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) took Pfizer to the Federal Court for profiting from the cholesterol treatment drug, Lipitor, when the product became a generic in 2012.

[Editor’s Note: Read the shocking truth about Pfizer – and its numerous legal cases – in an article published in New Dawn 197 (Mar-Apr 2023)].

ROCHE

Switzerland’s other drug giant, Roche, was founded in 1896, making it one of the oldest pharmaceutical companies in the world. In 1999, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) sentenced Roche’s Swiss marketing director, Dr Kuno Sommer, to four months’ US jail-time and issued the company with a then-record $500 million fine. For those who think it’s stupid and weird to have an interest in conspiracy theories, the short DoJ press release used the word “conspiracy” and derivations of the word 17 times. But the DoJ protects US companies that were involved by not naming or investigating them. These “unnamed co-conspirator companies in the US” allocated contracts to supply vitamins for human and animal consumption and then rigged contract bids.

In 2008, Australia fined Roche $110,000 for violating the country’s ban on direct consumer drug advertising. The company promoted approved drugs for unapproved indications. For instance, it promoted the results of its clinical trial for trastuzumab, even though the drug was not approved for treating early-stage breast cancer.

Roche promoted Tamiflu, claiming through its funded research published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, that the drug reduces the risk of death from H1N1 by 19 per cent and up to 50 per cent if taken within two days of contracting the flu. Based on these data, the US government spent $1.5 billion stockpiling the drug. But a whistleblower working undercover, the British epidemiologist Tom Jefferson, has brought a lawsuit against Roche to reclaim the $1.5 billion. At the time of writing, the suit is ongoing, despite Roche’s efforts to get it quashed.

SANOFI

In 2021, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi were fined $834 million by a Hawaiian court for dangerous marketing of the blood thinner, Plavix. Ethnic Chinese and black people are generally less able to metabolise the product than whites, yet the companies did not update their product information to warn non-white patients of this fact.

Dengue fever kills 22,000 people a year, mostly children in the southern hemisphere. Sanofi claimed to have developed a vaccine for the disease. But in 2017, the company’s so-called Dengvaxia was withdrawn over safety concerns. Rose Capeding was head of the dengue department of the Philippine’s Research Institute for Tropical Medicine. Capeding was principal author of a 2014 Lancet publication promoting the safety and efficacy of the injection. The very notion of vaccinating against dengue fever alarmed some virologists because secondary, not primary, infection risks fatality. Virologists feared that being injected would produce a similar immune response to the first infection. So, if a vaccinated child caught their first dengue infection, their immune system would respond as if it was the second and thus heighten the risk of death. By that year 130 injected Filipino children had died.

OPEN CRIMINALITY

A tiny minority of Westerners – typically ten per cent of any given population – were opposed to being injected with experimental COVID-19 products, mandated or not. Roughly the same percentages remain unjabbed. For the rest of the population, however, it’s a different story. The majority wanted the injection and got double-jabbed and, later, majorities or significant minorities took three or more doses.

The public did this despite Big Pharma’s long history of criminality. The criminality is not a secret: it is just that the media only report the crimes when they happen. The media do not return to the crimes, make them central news stories, or make a point of reminding viewers that they occurred. They present Big Pharma context-free, as if it exists for health not profit.

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Footnotes

1. Robert G Evans (2010) “Tough on Crime? Pfizer and the CIHR,” Healthcare Policy, 5(4): 16-25

2. “Mundipharma fined for misleading advertising of opioids to health professionals,” 20 December 2019, tga.gov.au/news/media-releases/mundipharma-fined-misleading-advertising-opioids-health-professionals

3. Kane Wu, “Sackler-owned Mundipharma seeks bids for China unit in over $1 bln deal -sources,” Reuters, 5 May 2021

4. “Three medicinal cannabis companies fined almost $1 million for alleged unlawful advertising,” 27 September 2022, tga.gov.au/news/media-releases/three-medicinal-cannabis-companies-fined-almost-1-million-alleged-unlawful-advertising

5. Ray Moynihan, “The unhealthy alliance between drug companies and regulators,” ABC News, 23 October 2012

6. Quoted in Joanne McCarthy, “Australia’s health watchdog accused of ‘too close’ relationship with industry,” Sydney Morning Herald, 5 November 2017

7. BMJ News, “Are drug regulators sufficiently independent from the companies they regulate?,” August 2022

8. nytimes.com/search?dropmab=false&query=%22pfizer%22%20%22fined%22&sort=oldest.

9. New York Times, “Abbott Pleads No Contest In Adulterated Drug Case,” 14 August 1975

10. Good Jobs First, Violation Tracker, “Abbott Laboratories,” violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org

11. Department of Justice, “Abbott Laboratories to remedy deficiencies…,” justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/1999/November/522civ.htm

12. Department of Justice, “Abbott Labs to Pay $1.5 Billion to Resolve Criminal & Civil Investigations of Off-label Promotion of Depakote,” justice.gov/opa/pr/abbott-labs-pay-15-billion-resolve-criminal-civil-investigations-label-promotion-depakote

13. Jan Hoffman, “Allergan Reaches Tentative $2.37 Billion Deal to Settle Opioid Suits,” New York Times, 29 January 2022

14. Al-Jazeera, “Which countries have stopped using AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine?,” 15 March 2021, aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/15/which-countries-have-halted-use-of-astrazenecas-covid-vaccine

15. Nick Sas and Sophie Scott, “Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine result gives Australia pathway to ‘normal’, Government says,” ABC, 24 Nov 2020

16. Frances Mao, “Covid vaccine: Why are Australians cancelling AstraZeneca jabs?,” BBC, 22 June 2021

17. Quoted in Mark Curtis, “Malaya—Britain’s forgotten war for rubber,” Economic History Malaya, ehm.my/publications/articles/malaya%25E2%2580%2594britains-forgotten-war-for-rubber

18. Quoted in Sharon Lerner, “The paraquat poisoning problem,” The Intercept, 24 March 2021

19. Cited in Crispin Dowler, “The Paraquat Papers: How Syngenta’s bad science helped keep the world’s deadliest weedkiller on the market,” Green Peace Unearthed, 24 March 2021, unearthed.greenpeace.org/2021/03/24/paraquat-papers-syngenta-toxic-pesticide-gramoxone

20. justice.gov/opa/pr/pharmaceutical-giant-astrazeneca-pay-520-million-label-drug-marketing

21. New York Times, “Hair Tonic and Perfume Claims Will Be Discontinued,” 20 June 1937

22. New York Times, “Indicted in a Plot on Insulin Prices,” 1 April 1941

23. Jonathan Stempel, “Johns Hopkins, Bristol-Myers must face $1 billion syphilis infections suit,” Reuters, 4 January 2019

24. justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2007/September/07_civ_782.html

25. Eric Sagonowsky, “GSK was warned repeatedly about Zantac impurity but played down risks: Bloomberg,” Fierce Pharma, 15 February 2023

26. Carl Kovac (1997) “SmithKline Beecham fined in Hungary,” BMJ, 315: 1397

27. Tampa Bay Times, “Drugmaker to pay $325-million fine,” 25 February 1997

28. Simon Neville, “GlaxoSmithKline fined $3bn after bribing doctors to increase drugs sales,” Guardian, 3 July 2012

29. justice.gov/opa/pr/glaxosmithkline-plead-guilty-and-pay-3-billion-resolve-fraud-allegations-and-failure-report

30. accc.gov.au/media-release/gsk-and-novartis-to-pay-45-million-in-penalties-over-voltaren-osteo-gel-claims

31. Peter Hoskins, “Johnson & Johnson to replace talc-based powder with cornstarch,” BBC, 12 August 2022

32. justice.gov/opa/pr/johnson-johnson-pay-more-22-billion-resolve-criminal-and-civil-investigations

33. Quoted in Nick Pearson, “Victims to be compensated in pelvic mesh class action lawsuit,” Nine News, 21 November

34. Noah Weiland, Sharon LaFraniere and Carl Zimmer, “Johnson & Johnson Vaccinations Paused After Rare Clotting Cases Emerge,” New York Times, 16 December 2021

35. Kevin Dunleavy, “Back where it started: FDA restricts use of J&J’s COVID-19 shot because of blood clot threat,” Fierce Pharma, 6 May 2022

36. Union of Concerned Scientists, “Merck Manipulated the Science about the Drug Vioxx,” 12 October 2017, ucsusa.org/resources/merck-manipulated-science-about-drug-vioxx

37. France24, “Merck charged in France over changes to popular thyroid drug,” 19 Oct 2022

38. nytimes.com/1985/10/25/nyregion/ciba-geigy-indicted-in-jersey-for-illegal-dumping.html

39. United Press International, “Ciba-Geigy to spend $64 million to settle dumping suit,” 28 February 1992

40. Wayne Parry, “Town where child cancer rose blasts deal over polluted site,” Associated Press, 27 January 2023

41. Le Monde and Agence France-Presse, “Novartis, Roche win French appeal after being handed record fine,” 16 February 2023

42. Bob Burton (2005) “Pfizer Australia is fined for misleading promotion of celecoxib,” BMJ, 330(7502): 1230

43. accc.gov.au/media-release/accc-takes-action-against-pfizer-australia-for-alleged-anti-competitive-conduct

44. justice.gov/archive/atr/public/press_releases/1999/2450.htm

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48. www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/dengue-fever

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