Sunday, September 21, 2025

‘Complete Rubbish’: 5 Ways Pfizer Dodged Trump’s Demand for Transparency

‘Complete Rubbish’: 5 Ways Pfizer Dodged Trump’s Demand for Transparency

Pfizer’s press release addressing President Donald Trump’s demand for transparency regarding the COVID-19 vaccines offers a masterclass in the misleading “tricks of the trade” used by the vaccine industry. Here’s a breakdown of five reasons Pfizer’s reply was “rife with deception” and what we can learn from it.

By Clayton J. Baker, M.D.

On Sept. 1, on Truth Social, President Donald Trump posted a demand for transparency. Specifically, he called for public release of the data he has received from pharmaceutical companies regarding the modified mRNA-based COVID-19 injections, calling out Pfizer specifically.

He wrote:

“It is very important that the Drug Companies justify the success of their various Covid Drugs. Many people think they are a miracle that saved Millions of lives. Others disagree! With CDC being ripped apart over this question, I want the answer, and I want it NOW. I have been shown information from Pfizer, and others, that is extraordinary, but they never seem to show those results to the public. Why not??? … They show me GREAT numbers and results, but they don’t seem to be showing them to many others. I want them to show them NOW, to CDC and the public, and clear up this MESS, one way or the other!!!”

In the same message, Trump also publicly questioned the success of Operation Warp Speed.

On Sept. 8, Pfizer put out a press release touting the results of Phase 3 trials for its newest version of its mRNA gene therapy for COVID-19 for 2025-2026. It begins:

“Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE today announced positive topline results from an ongoing Phase 3 clinical trial cohort evaluating the safety, tolerability, and immunogenicity of a 30-µg dose of the LP.8.1-adapted monovalent COMIRNATY® (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) 2025-2026 Formula in adults aged 65 and older and in adults aged 18 through 64 with at least one underlying risk condition for severe COVID-19.

“The preliminary data show a robust increase in neutralizing antibodies targeting the LP.8.1 sublineage of SARS-CoV-2 following vaccination.”

Pfizer’s document is rife with deception, which comes as no surprise, given Pfizer’s long history of fraud and criminality. However, it is instructive to review the press release, as it reveals several of the deceptive tricks of the trade frequently used in the vaccine industry.

Here are my Top 5 reasons Pfizer’s reply to Trump is complete rubbish.

They are:

  1. Pfizer’s long history of criminality and fraud.
  2. An antibody response does not equal immunity.
  3. Chasing respiratory viruses with vaccines is futile.
  4. Claims of safety are unsupported.
  5. COVID does not merit boosters.

Pfizer’s long history of criminality and fraud

Long before COVID-19, Pfizer had established itself as one of the most prolifically criminal corporations in history, with a rap sheet that would make British Petroleum blush. Since 2000, Pfizer and its subsidiaries have been found guilty of 107 offenses totaling a staggering $11,261,560,400.

That’s right: over one hundred violations, totaling over $11 billion in penalties. At least 22 of those were violations of the False Claims Act — meaning Pfizer has been found guilty of defrauding the government an astonishing 22 times in the last 25 years.

The Pfizer press release provides only a summary of their studies. It does not include the raw data, as Trump ordered. The press release merely states, “Companies have submitted these data to the FDA.” In this respect, it completely fails to answer the president’s appeal for transparency.

Pfizer ends its press release with a 1,100-word italicized disclaimer that begins with the following:

“The information contained in this release is as of September 8, 2025. Pfizer assumes no obligation to update forward-looking statements contained in this release as the result of new information or future events or developments.”

To my reading, this disclaimer essentially states: We are guessing about the future here, and this press release could turn out to be a load of horse crap. We accept no responsibility to correct ourselves if that turns out to be the case.

Do you trust Pfizer’s reported results? If so, I can get you a sweet deal on a bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan. Let us hope and pray the president and his advisors keep in mind exactly whom they are dealing with here, and how this document utterly fails to provide the transparency the president seeks.

An antibody response does not equal immunity

Let’s assume Pfizer is telling the truth this time. (I realize that’s quite an assumption, but humor me for a moment.) Let’s say Pfizer’s 2025-2026 version of the COVID-19 shot does produce “at least a 4-fold increase in LP.8.1-neutralizing antibody titers,” as the press release claims.

So what?

If their claim sounds obscure, it’s because it is. It does not, as Pfizer claims,

“Reinforce pre-clinical data that supported the recent U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the LP.8.1-adapted COVID-19 vaccine, which demonstrated improved [sic] immune responses against multiple circulating SARS-CoV-2 sublineages.”

Equating antibody production with “immune response” is an intellectually dishonest linguistic sleight-of-hand that is all too typical in the world of vaccines.

Antibody production, robust or not, is no guarantee of clinically relevant immunity. Not at all. The assertion that if a vaccine invokes a strong antibody response, it will therefore protect you from catching, spreading or getting sick from an illness is a faulty inference based on false premises.

Equating antibody production with immunity is one of the foundational lies of vaccinology. It’s like a greedy, overzealous sports agent declaring his 18-year-old pitching prospect to be a perennial major league all-star, simply because he can chuck the ball at 98 miles per hour.

The kid may have a strong arm. But if he can’t throw a strike, he’s useless.

The human immune system is extremely complex, beyond the understanding of humanity as a whole, much less the likes of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, a Paul Offit or any other vaccine zealot you care to name. Antibodies are just one of the elements of the immune response to infection. An important one, but just one.

Remember that, contrary to the repeated claims of Pfizer, Dr. Anthony FauciDr. Rochelle Walensky, the legacy media and Joe “winter of severe illness and death” Biden himself, the original Pfizer COVID-19 shots did not prevent recipients from catching or spreading the virus.

Those shots produced a vigorous antibody response, too. But they didn’t do what we were told repeatedly that they would do. Not even close.

Chasing respiratory viruses with vaccines is futile

Even if antibodies were enough to provide immunity, the antibodies that a vaccine stimulates production of in your body have to match the intended part of the virus — the antigen — to have a beneficial effect.

If the virus mutates sufficiently while the product is in development, the vaccine-induced antibodies, designed for the old version of the target antigen, won’t recognize the new, mutated version of the antigen to which they are supposed to attach. In a word, they won’t “stick,” and they won’t do their intended job.

Small, simple RNA-based respiratory viruses, like the one that causes COVID-19, influenza and most common colds, mutate rapidly and constantly. When we hear about the latest “variant” of COVID-19, this refers to the most recent product of this constant evolutionary process.

When it comes to simple, rapidly mutating viruses like SARS-CoV-2 or influenza, vaccine developers are like a would-be fashionista who only shops at Filene’s Basement. They are forever caught in a futile chase to keep up-to-date, although they only have access to last season’s designs.

However, if manufacturers like Pfizer can market their products effectively enough, this fatal flaw becomes a feature, not a bug. Provided Pfizer can keep people convinced they need repeated boosters, seasonal vaccines represent an unbeatable business model.

Liability-free medicines for healthy people? Cha-ching! Inject every man, woman and child, every year, on an endless subscription model? Cha-ching!

In reality, respiratory viruses have us beat with regard to vaccines. They’re too nimble and quick to keep up with. Vaccines end up as weapons suited only for fighting the last war.

Best to cover your cough, wash your hands, and let your immune system do what it does best on its own. (Not to mention, stop gain-of-functioning harmless viruses into deadly bioweapons.) But where’s the money in that?

Claims of safety are unsupported

Pfizer’s press release states that “The safety profile of the vaccine was consistent with previous studies, with no new safety concerns identified.”

Sounds good? Hang on just a second. The press release also states that:

  • Only 100 participants were enrolled.
  • Data was only obtained from “evaluable participants” without stating how many dropouts occurred.
  • The study was conducted over a 14-day period.
  • The safety profile of the vaccine “was consistent with previous studies,” without stating what the previous studies showed.

Here we go again with more of the classic chicanery typical of vaccine studies.

“Safety” cannot be established on the basis of a pitifully small study of fewer than one hundred subjects, followed for a mere two weeks.

“Safety” cannot be established simply by stating the findings were “consistent” with “previous studies” without telling us the findings of the previous studies.

“Safety” cannot be determined without comparison against a true placebo.

Pfizer’s glossing over of the issue of “safety” in this press release would be comical if we did not know the extent of vaccine-related injuries and deaths associated with the earlier versions of the COVID-19-modified mRNA injections.

COVID does not merit boosters

Let me put it bluntly: the SARS-CoV-2 virus simply doesn’t merit a vaccine anymore — if indeed it ever did. By now, this fact is not just an elephant in the room. It is a giant bull tusker trumpeting at top volume.

In late 2019, SARS-CoV-2 was released from the laboratory into the human population. Yes, it was a gain-of-function engineered virus. Yes, it was initially dangerous to the elderly and to persons with severe underlying conditions.

However, like all living things, viruses evolve in a manner that best suits their own survival and reproduction.

With the consistency of a natural law, viral evolution — especially in simple, rapidly-mutating viruses like SARS-CoV-2 — unfailingly favors mutations that render the pathogen less deadly to its host, yet more transmissible between individual hosts.

This makes perfect evolutionary sense, of course. Through mutation and natural selection, the virus learns to live with its host, rather than killing it. Whether you’re a human being or a virus, it does no good for you or your children to move into a new home and promptly burn it to the ground.

In other words, as we all know intuitively after the past five years, SARS-CoV-2 has evolved from behaving like a lab-engineered bioweapon to another common cold virus — which is exactly what other existing coronaviruses are.

The data confirm this as well. A new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report of 2024 data states that COVID-19 is no longer among the top 10 causes of death in the U.S.

Suicide, the 10th-ranked cause for 2024, was attributed to 48,000 deaths. Authors of the report have been unrevealing about the exact number of deaths attributed to COVID-19, or to its exact rank, elusively stating only that “It’s still in the top 15.”

We are left to conclude that the COVID-19 death count for 2024 is definitely below 48,000, possibly much lower. Given the “experts’” reluctance to give us the exact number, and given that it may well be as low as 15 on the list, it is very possible that it is much lower than that.

Before we jump to credit the modified mRNA injections for this decrease, note that vaccine booster acceptance rates for the COVID-19 injections have plummeted.

In late 2023, one month after the then-new COVID-19 boosters were released with heavy promotion, only 7% of adults and 2% of children got the boosters, an acceptance rate that “experts” referred to as “abysmal.”

Nevertheless, COVID-19 fell off the list of leading causes of death the following year.

Summary

Pfizer’s reply to Trump’s very reasonable call for transparency of data regarding their latest edition of their modified mRNA COVID-19 injections is nothing less than an insult to the intelligence of every reader, including the president himself.

It appears that while Bourla was cynically flattering Trump by calling for a Nobel Prize for Operation Warp Speed, Pfizer was trying to fool the president, and all Americans, with this deceptive document.

May Trump see through all this dishonesty. May he recognize Pfizer’s response to his call for honesty and transparency for what it is: complete rubbish.

Originally published by Brownstone Institute.

Clayton J. Baker, M.D., is an internal medicine physician with a quarter-century in clinical practice. He has held numerous academic medical appointments, and his work has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. From 2012 to 2018, he was clinical associate professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.

Friday, September 19, 2025

Assaults on Free Speech Go Into Hyperdrive After Charlie Kirk Killing

Assaults on Free Speech Go Into Hyperdrive After Charlie Kirk Killing

When you see me refusing to play along with the campaign to canonize Charlie Kirk or respect the emotional hysteria around his killing, this is the main reason why.

It’s amazing how aggressively free speech in the United States is being torn apart in the wake of the Charlie Kirk killing.

Jimmy Kimmel was fired after President Trump’s FCC threatened ABC when the late night comic suggested that Kirk’s killer was a Trumper. I personally dislike Kimmel, but this is about as naked a government assault on free expression as you could possibly imagine.

Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil has been ordered deported to Syria or Algeria after the Trump administration targeted him for political speech critical of Israel.

Trump has brokered a deal allowing TikTok to be purchased by a consortium that includes his billionaire buddies Larry Ellison and Marc Andreesen. US officials have acknowledged that Washington’s push to grab control of TikTok was because of the opposition to the Gaza holocaust that was circulating on the platform.

Oracle co-founder Ellison is a fanatical Zionist oligarch who has expressed support for the idea of a massive surveillance network to control all of society, and his son David just purchased Paramount, which owns CBS News. The younger Ellison has reportedly installed pro-Israel propagandist Bari Weiss to a senior leadership position within the network.

Trump says he has asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to look into bringing “criminal RICO charges” against Code Pink activists who chanted anti-genocide slogans at him while he was dining at a restaurant. Like pro-Palestine demonstrators are mafia kingpins or something.

Bondi said during a podcast that the Trump administration is going to start prosecuting “hate speech” against conservatives, alleging that such speech was responsible for Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

When asked by the press about Bondi’s comments, Trump said “We’ll probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly. It’s hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart. Maybe I’ll come after ABC.” Again, ABC was the network Jimmy Kimmel was fired from.

Trump henchman Stephen Miller said on a podcast that the White House is going to start targeting leftist “terrorist networks”, claiming on no basis whatsoever that Kirk’s assassination was the fault of a “vast domestic terror movement” which foments the kind of violence which led to Kirk’s death. Trump himself said that “a lot of people that you would traditionally say are on the left … [are] already under investigation,” and that he plans to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization.

Vice President JD Vance has publicly been encouraging Trump supporters to try to get ordinary members of the public fired for saying mean things about Charlie Kirk, saying, “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out, and hell, call their employer. We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.”

Trump’s Truth Social account recently shared a video calling for state censorship of media outlets and online influencers who share “propaganda”, falsely framing this authoritarian notion as a reboot of the Smith-Mundt Act and suggesting that it should be called the “Charlie Kirk Act”.

When you see me refusing to play along with the campaign to canonize Charlie Kirk or respect the emotional hysteria around his killing, this is the main reason why. His death is already being used to manufacture consent for sweeping acts of tyranny, and it was clear from day one that it would be.

The empire managers are always seeking excuses to suppress free speech, crush the left, and stomp out opposition to Zionism and the US war machine. They’ll use any chance they get to advance these goals, which are all ultimately about expanding power and control.

Many pre-existing agendas are being shoved forward by those in power, as always happens when emotions run hot over a traumatic event. I’ve said it many times before and I’ll surely say it many times again: it’s precisely when we are most tempted to abandon rationality and play along with the emotionality of the moment that we need to be thinking most clearly and critically.

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Source

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/09/no_author/assaults-on-free-speech-go-into-hyperdrive-after-charlie-kirk-killing/

Tuesday, September 16, 2025

Who Killed Charlie Kirk?

Who Killed Charlie Kirk?

 | Sep 16, 2025

I had the pleasure of appearing on Charlie Kirk’s program a few times over the years and I always found him to be polite, respectful, and genuinely interested in ideas. Even in areas where we might not have agreed, he listened carefully. He was a strong advocate of free speech and he made a career of trying to convince the youth of the value of free speech and dialogue regardless of political differences.

At the young age of 31 years old, he had already founded and ran the largest conservative youth organization in the country and as such he had enormous influence over the future of the conservative movement and even the Republican party. As I discovered during my Republican presidential runs, the youth of this country are truly inspired by the ideas of liberty, peace, and prosperity.

I do not believe we have anything near the real story about the horrific murder of Charlie Kirk last week. The narrative presented by the FBI and other government agencies is wildly contradictory, with an ever-changing plotline that makes little sense.

Some individuals close to Kirk have reported that his foreign policy position was shifting away from the standard neoconservative militarism in favor of a more non-interventionist approach. Tucker Carlson recently recounted that Kirk had even gone personally to the White House to urge President Trump to refuse to take military action against Iran. He was rebuffed by President Trump, Carlson informed us.

Likewise, conservative podcaster Candace Owens, who was a close friend of Charlie Kirk, has stated on her program that Kirk was undergoing a “spiritual crisis” and was turning away from his past embrace of militarism and in favor of America-first non-interventionism, particularly regarding the current unrest in the Middle East.

Was Charlie Kirk murdered – directly or indirectly – by powerful forces who could not tolerate such a shift in views in such an influential leader? We don’t know.

If anything, those seeking to prevent the ideas of peace from breaking out would wish to cover it up, as they have done in so many past political killings. As I recounted in my most recent book, The Surreptitious Coup: Who Stole Western Civilization?, the turbulent 1960s saw several killings of major US figures, including JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King, who were challenging the status quo and pushing for a shift away from the Cold War confrontationist mentality.

The real assassins of these peace leaders from last century were nihilists who did not believe in truth. They only believed in power – the power that comes from the barrel of a gun. Rather than compete in the marketplace of ideas they preferred to snuff out any challenges and therefore decapitate any possibility that our country could take a different course.

More than sixty years after the murder of President Kennedy, the vast majority of the American people do not believe the official story of how he was killed and why. Truth will eventually break through even when the wall of lies seems impenetrable.

If it is true that Charlie Kirk was preparing to shift his organization toward a foreign policy embraced by our Founders, the killing was even more tragic. But no army – or assassin – can stop an idea whose time has come. That may be his most important legacy. Rest in peace.

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Source

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/who-killed-charlie-kirk/

Wednesday, September 10, 2025

The Fear-Mongering Rackets of the U.S. National-Security State

The Fear-Mongering Rackets of the U.S. National-Security State

by 

The end of the Cold War in 1989 provided a fantastic opportunity for a major reset in relations between the American people and the people of Russia, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and other nations that U.S. officials had long designated as official enemies of the United States. For almost 45 years following the end of World War II, U.S. officials had inculcated a mindset of deep fear among the American people — fear that the Russians, Chinese, and other communist nations were coming to get us.

It was all one great big racket designed to justify the conversion of the U.S. government from our founding governmental structure of a limited-government republic to a national-security state, a type of totalitarian-like governmental structure that wields omnipotent powers, such as the power of engaging in state-sponsored assassinations.

Fear-mongering, propaganda, and indoctrination are central to a national-security state governmental structure. The national-security state must convince the citizenry that there are scary enemies coming to get them so that the citizenry will continue to support and embrace the national-security state governmental structure and the ever-increasing power and taxpayer-funded largess that is necessary to sustain it.

The racket worked almost perfectly. Americans fell for it hook, line, and sinker. “The Russians are coming!” people cried. “The Reds are everywhere!”

One big exception was when President Kennedy achieved a personal “breakthrough” after the Cuban Missile Crisis by recognizing that the Cold War and the anti-communist crusade were nothing more than one great big racket. After he vowed to bring the racket to an end in his Peace Speech at American University in June 1963, the U.S. national-security establishment dealt with him in Dallas five months later.

Thus, the Cold War racket continued all the way until 1989, when the Soviet Union suddenly and unexpectedly dismantled itself. The Berlin Wall came crashing down and West Germany and East Germany recombined into one nation. The Warsaw Pact dissolved, Russian troops withdrew to Russia, and Eastern European countries gained their independence.

There was an obvious readiness among Russian officials to do a complete reset with respect to relations with the United States. They made it clear that they desired to establish a world of peaceful and friendly relations. The same held true for China, notwithstanding the fact that it was still headed by a communist regime. The same was true for Cuba.

This was a time of great optimism and hope for the American people and the people of the communist world. Why, for a few years afterward, there were even libertarian conferences being held in both China and Russia.

But the hope and optimism did not characterize the U.S. national-security establishment — i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA. Remember: They needed big official scary enemies to justify their existence. They knew that many Americans were advocating a post-Cold War “peace dividend,” which would have entailed a severe reduction in military-intelligence spending. There was even the danger that Americans might even begin demanding the restoration of their founding governmental system of a limited-government republic.

The U.S. national-security establishment was not going to let that happen, at least not without a big fight. A deadly invasion of Iraq, followed by 11 years of brutal and deadly economic sanctions against the Iraqi people, produced the “blowback” of the 9/11 retaliatory attacks. The national-security establishment was back to the races, this time replacing communism with terrorism as the new official enemy of the American people.

At the same time, however, they never gave up hope of restoring the Cold War to America. It had proven to be too lucrative a racket to simply let it go. If they could combine their “war on communism” racket with their “war on terrorism” racket, they could virtually guarantee that the national-security state governmental structure would remain a permanent and perpetual part of the U.S. government.

That’s why they used their old Cold War dinosaur NATO to begin moving eastward toward Russia, absorbing former members of the Warsaw Pact in the process. It wasn’t exactly consistent with the peaceful and friendly world that people had in mind at the end of the Cold War.

Moreover, once the U.S. national-security state became mired in forever wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. officials could see that China and Russia were prospering, especially given that they weren’t mired in such wars. They could also see that China and Russia were gaining popularity and influence around the world, while there was ever-growing animosity toward the U.S. and its forever deadly and destructive propensity toward war and aggression.

That’s when the U.S. government decided that it was time to “degrade” both China and Russia and initiate the continuation of the old Cold War racket. A vicious trade war and a brutal system of economic sanctions were launched against China, with the aim of diminishing the economic prosperity of that nation. Moreover, the old Cold War dinosaur NATO was used to provoke Russia into invading Ukraine, which provided U.S. national-security state officials with the opportunity to use Ukraine as a proxy or agent to give Russia its own “Afghanistan,” thereby “degrading” Russia through the loss of tens of thousands of Russian soldiers and ever-increasing war expenditures.

Thus, what began with lots of hope and optimism at the end of Cold War I ended up with Russia and China being restored to the top tier of America’s official enemies as part of Cold War II.

According to a recent article in Politico, however, the U.S. government is now shifting its attention to Latin America, using its decades-old, ongoing, never-ending, perpetual drug war as its excuse. That shift in official enemies is clearly reflected by the new U.S. obsessiveness with Venezuela’s socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro.

The irony is that when Cold War I ended, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA were so panicky over having lost Russia as their official enemy, they were suggesting that they could help fight the drug war as their new mission. And so here they are — with their new official enemies — drugs and drug lords in Latin America.

Don’t think for a minute, however, that they are giving up on Russia and China as official enemies. They are just hedging their bets by adding more official enemies to keep the American people agitated and afraid. In that way, Americans will continue to look on the U.S. national-security state to keep them “safe” and “secure” from all those scary official enemies.

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.
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Source

https://www.fff.org/2025/09/09/the-fear-mongering-rackets-of-the-u-s-national-security-state/

Monday, September 8, 2025

Pearl Harbor vs. 9/11

Pearl Harbor vs. 9/11

 When asked the question, “What impresses you more about George W. Bush and Barack Obama, their absence of intelligence or their absence of integrity,” a ready answer comes to mind, and it is clearly not the same for each.  But in the case of Bush’s first Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, I think you will have to agree that it’s a tough call. 

That was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw in the pages of The New York Times that Rumsfeld had essayed a comparison between the momentous events in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, and in New York City, Arlington, VA, and Shanksville, PA, on September 11, 2001.  The one big similarity that he was able to note was that—as the official script reads—we were caught completely by surprise in each case.  

In turn, that got me to thinking along the lines that I lay out in the opening paragraphs of my article, “America’s Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent Foster.”  Suppose you were a professor of United States history and had the opportunity to give the following assignment to your students in an exam:  “Compare and contrast Pearl Harbor and 9/11.” What are the answers that you would be looking for from your best students?

Surely they would have to say that each of the events resulted in our going to war.  That’s where the comparison almost has to begin.  But no sooner have we written it than a contrast arises.  When Japan attacked us, we were, by definition, already at war.  Disregarding, for the moment, what might have led up to the attack, one could hardly say about our war with Japan, as with our subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, that it was a “war of choice.”  One might argue, however, that the war with Germany was a war of choice, even though Hitler declared war on the United States four days later on December 11.  His rationale was not, as is commonly believed, that they were obligated by treaty to do so, but that the United States had every intention of going to war with Germany after the attack and he might as well beat us to the punch.  One can’t read FDR’s speech of December 9, 1941, and come to any other conclusion than that Hitler was correct in his assessment, whether or not the “beating to the punch” move was wise from a propaganda perspective.  That FDR speech laid the blame for the Pearl Harbor attack as much on Germany as on Japan and was clearly intended to prepare the country for war with all three Axis powers, Germany, Italy, and Japan

The next strong comparison that can be made is that the wars that resulted were wars that powerful people within the United States government wanted to happen.  For months Roosevelt had been doing almost everything he could to provoke Hitler into attacking us, but Hitler would not go for the bait.  Even Roosevelt’s greatest defenders will admit that this was true.  They argue that it was simply the right thing to do to ally ourselves with Britain (and the Soviet Union) against “Nazi aggression.” The big problem, from that perspective, is that the mood of the country was still strongly against our involvement in “foreign wars,” based upon our bitter World War I experience.  In a campaign speech on October 30, 1940, as the European war raged, Roosevelt had catered to the national mood with these words, “And while I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance.  I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”

Pearl Harbor got him off the hook that he had created for himself with that promise.  It wasn’t a “foreign war” anymore because we had been attacked.

Similarly, the key people in the George W. Bush administration, including Rumsfeld, but also his top assistant Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney, as members of The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in 2000 had called for precisely the sort of aggressive military policy that followed 9/11, but acknowledged that it would not happen very quickly “absent a catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor.” 

Two events brought PNAC into the mainstream of American government: the disputed election of George W. Bush, and the attacks of September 11th. When Bush assumed the Presidency, the men who created and nurtured the imperial dreams of PNAC became the men who run the Pentagon, the Defense Department and the White House. When the Towers came down, these men saw, at long last, their chance to turn their White Papers into substantive policy. 

Vice President Dick Cheney is a founding member of PNAC, along with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is the ideological father of the group. Bruce Jackson, a PNAC director, served as a Pentagon official for Ronald Reagan before leaving government service to take a leading position with the weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin.

-- “The Project for the New American Century,” by William Rivers Pitt

This “new Pearl Harbor” was something of a godsend to the men whose portraits we see in this video like the original one was to FDR and to the people behind him.

Maybe the most important contrast between the two events, again, using only the official narrative, is that the Japanese attack plan was, at least tactically, thoroughly rational and depended for its success upon predictable behavior by the U.S. adversary.  By contrast, the 9/11 attacks were tactically irrational and, on paper, well nigh hopeless, depending as they did upon unprecedented incompetence on the part the North American Air Defense Command and amazing docility by airline passengers and crew and no less amazing competence by novice pilots of airliners.  The Japanese, as we knew, were well served by their espionage agents in Hawaii and they knew that General Walter Short had not been supplied with an adequate number of patrol planes to provide sufficient warning by the air attack from carriers that they planned. *  They also knew from observation that security tended to be somewhat more relaxed on a Sunday than on any other day.  The Japanese attackers were professionals doing something very similar to what they must have done many times before in their training. 

How could the supposed 9/11 hijackers have known that the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) would not follow its usual protocol and simply intercept the airplanes very shortly after they had departed from their normal flight paths?  The question holds true in particular for the attack upon the Pentagon, which occurred a full 51 minutes after the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center.  Through what extraordinary espionage could the attackers have known in advance that the U.S. Air Force would send up interceptor jets from Langley Air Force Base in distant Hampton, Virginia, that would arrive too late, instead of from nearby Andrews Air Force Base just a few miles away in Maryland or even Bolling Air Force Base across the river in Washington, DC?  See my satire, “Bin Laden’s Home Video: The Missing Portion,” for more on this whole question.

The supposed Al Qaeda plan, as it has been told to us, violated radically the U. S. military’s KISS (keep it simple, stupid) doctrine and Sun Tzu’s dictum, “Never underestimate your opponent,” in The Art of War.   The Japanese attack plan, by contrast, was simple and took due regard of our expected defense.

After Pearl Harbor, scapegoats were blamed and punished.  No one has been punished for allowing 9/11 to happen.  Admiral Husband Kimmel, in charge of the Pacific Fleet—based at Pearl Harbor instead of San Diego over the vigorous protests of his predecessor—who had been relieved of his duty over the issue—and General Short were promptly relieved of their commands and were later blamed by the Roberts Commission for “errors of judgment and dereliction of duty.”

The report of the Roberts Commission had its counterpart in the 9/11 Commission Report.  There are no counterparts to Admiral Kimmel and General Short in that report, however.  To this writer’s knowledge, no individual has ever been singled out for punishment for what happened.  We have previously summed up the situation with the following poem:

            That Government of the People…

            The feds left us unprotected

            On that fateful September day.

            If we were a truly free

            And democratic nation

            Somebody up high would pay,

            And, to be sure, there would be

            A proper investigation,

            But wouldn’t you know, it is we

            Who get detained and inspected.

At Pearl Harbor, from the very first moment it was obvious that we were being attacked by the formidable military of a relatively large country population-wise in Japan.  On 9/11, it was not at all obvious who was attacking us and it is still not to this day.  The authorities and the news media were suspiciously quick to solve the crime and lay the blame on Osama Bin Laden when they had been suspiciously incompetent in preventing it.  In this aspect of the case, 9/11 resembles the Oklahoma City bombing and the two Kennedy assassinations and the Martin Luther King, Jr., assassination more than it resembles the Pearl Harbor attack.  Moreover, in terms of the real threat that it represents to the nation, there is a huge difference between being attacked by a heavily armed country and being attacked by a ragtag, stateless organization or group of individuals whose armaments amount to almost nothing.

The strategic objective of the Japanese was obvious, to gain a large advantage in the shooting-war phase of its war with the United States.  The 9/11 attacks had no clear objective. 

Having been given an ultimatum by the United States that no Japanese government could have accepted, the Japanese leaders initiated war in precisely the way in which they had been successful in the past.  It was either that or be choked and starved by the U.S. embargo.  They were fully aware that it would bring down the full might of the United States in retaliation, but they felt they had no choice in the matter.  No such rationale existed for Osama Bin Laden to invite U.S. retaliation in a similar fashion.

In neither case did the attacks catch everyone on our side by surprise.  Our military leaders in Washington, through the interception and decryption of a message from Tokyo to its negotiators in Washington, knew beyond a reasonable doubt that Pearl Harbor would be attacked four hours before the attack took place, but failed to convey a warning to General Short and Admiral Kimmel until it was too late.  They knew by the night before that an attack would occur somewhere in the Pacific.  By the next morning, when the last part of the cable had been decrypted and they saw that the negotiators were ordered to deliver their message ending peace talks at 1 pm Washington time, they could see that the most likely target for attack was Pearl Harbor.  That was 7:30 am Honolulu time, which was approximately dawn, the most likely time for an attack.  See “Six Myths of the Traditional Pearl Harbor Story” by Michael T. Griffith for a good short summary.   

No more than the American public or the American Congress, Short and Kimmel had not been told about the November 26 ultimatum to Japan that made war virtually inevitable.  The most obvious conclusion to be reached is that to do so, like alerting them the morning of December 7 or the evening of December 6, would have resulted in their preparation to defeat the sort of attack that occurred.  Japan’s spies in Hawaii, it was known, would have detected these preparations, and the desired war-starting attack would have been called off. 

A number of people seemed to have had advance notice of the 9/11 attacks.  To the list of links provided in this article, one might also add the group of “celebrating Israelis” who got themselves into place to “document the event.”   In the specific case of Building 7 of the World Trade Center, the BBC and CNN seem to have had prior warning of its collapse because they reported that it had fallen before it had done so. 

As for the claims by various people in the Bush administration, detailed in this web site, that they could not possibly have imagined such a stunt as hijacking airliners and flying them into buildings, they are perhaps best belied by the fact that the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) had planned a drill for precisely that on the day of the attacks. 

From all indications, the ships at Pearl Harbor that were damaged by the attack either sank or they did not in accordance with the laws of physics.  That seems not to have been the case with respect the buildings damaged in New York or Arlington, VA if the official narrative is to be believed.  No one has ever been given any reason to suspect that Pearl Harbor was a false flag incident.  Although General Short had been led to believe by his superiors in Washington that the greatest danger he faced was from sabotage, and prepared accordingly, no one has claimed that sabotage caused any of the damage that occurred on December 7, 1941.  By contrast, virtually all of the damage that occurred on 9/11 bears a very close resemblance to sabotage.

The United States was able to portray itself purely as a victim in each case.  Such “victimology” is completely consistent with the historical tactics of one particular interest group that wielded a great deal of power within both the Roosevelt and Bush administrations.  Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war against that group’s greatest enemy, Nazi Germany, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, himself, said that the 9/11 attacks were “good for Israel.”  It can also be safely said that Israel is the only country in the world where the majority of the population favored the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The comparisons and the contrasts could go on and on, but we shall conclude by noting that the war in which the United States became involved as a result of Pearl Harbor was against other countries that would end in the usual way, when one side or the other surrendered.  Since 9/11, our leaders have told us that we are in a war against a tactic, an abstract noun, “terrorism,” and that is a war that promises no end.  An abstract noun cannot sign surrender papers.

* “Col. Melvin W. Maas, of the Marine Corps Reserve, former Minnesota Congressman, said that when two hundred fifty patrol bombers necessary to bring Hawaii up to required minimum strength of three hundred planes came off the production lines, Washington ordered them sent to Britain.  When protests were made to Roosevelt, he referred the admirals to Harry Hopkins, in charge of allocating war materials.

“’Hopkins received them as he lay in bed, nonchalantly smoking a cigarette,’ said Maas.  ‘He listened to them, then told them the interview was over and that he had already made the allocation.  Adm. Kimmel told me if those two hundred fifty patrol planes had been sent to Hawaii, the December 7 attack could never have succeeded, and probably would never have been attempted.’” (George Morgenstern, Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War, Kindle location approx. 2300) 

David Martin

April 3, 2014

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Source

https://www.dcdave.com/article5/140403.html

 


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