In the video report above, journalist Glenn Greenwald elaborates on a recent expose’1 he published in which he accuses the U.S. government of downplaying the capabilities of the Afghan security forces trained by the U.S. military.
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | This article was previously published on Mercola.com
Story at-a-glance
- In a recent article, journalist Glenn Greenwald lays out evidence showing the U.S. government has intentionally lied about its impact and progress in Afghanistan for the last 20 years.
- Evidence suggests the Afghan war was designed to funnel taxpayer money to security contractors and Afghan warlords.
- If the U.S. government routinely lies to protect financial war interests, could they be lying about the COVID pandemic and facets thereof as well, and for the same reason?
- Biological threats and pandemics are a new form of war meant to continue in perpetuity, where the beneficiaries are both military and corporate.
- We’ve been repeatedly told that the COVID shots will prevent disease far better than natural infection. This flies in the face of everything we know, scientifically, and data from around the world prove just how incorrect that claim is.
“Using the same deceitful tactics they pioneered in Vietnam, U.S. political and military officials repeatedly misled the country about the prospects for success in Afghanistan,” Greenwald writes.2
He points out how presidents over the past 20 years have repeatedly announced victory over the Taliban and Al Qaeda and bragged about what a great job the U.S. is doing in training and fortifying the Afghan Security Forces.
Most recently, July 8, 2021, President Biden insisted a Taliban takeover was essentially impossible and that “the Afghan government and leadership … clearly have the capacity to sustain the government in place.”
A Miscalculation of Epic Proportions
When a reporter asked Biden to comment on intelligence reports warning that the Afghan government would likely collapse, Biden was quick to deny it, saying “That is not true. They did not — they didn’t — did not reach that conclusion.” He also stated that “the likelihood that there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.” In his article, Greenwald goes on:3
“And then, in an exchange that will likely assume historic importance in terms of its sheer falsity from a presidential podium, Biden issued this decree:
Q. Mr. President, some Vietnamese veterans see echoes of their experience in this withdrawal in Afghanistan. Do you see any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam, with some people feeling —
THE PRESIDENT: None whatsoever. Zero. What you had is — you had entire brigades breaking through the gates of our embassy — six, if I’m not mistaken.
The Taliban is not the south — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”
If you’ve watched the news over the past several days, you know those statements did not age well, as the Taliban took over the presidential palace in Kabul and U.S. embassy staff were helicoptered off the roof in a rushed evacuation4 after the security forces surrendered to the Taliban without a fight.
A Lie Repeated Does Not Make It True
July 21, 2021, General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admitted “there’s a possibility of a complete Taliban takeover,” but still insisted that the Afghan Security Forces “have the capacity to sufficiently fight and defend their country.”
Eight years ago, in September 2013, Milley stated the Afghan Security Forces “have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken has also gone on record,5 mere months ago, denouncing fears that U.S. withdrawal would deteriorate the security picture in Afghanistan, and even if it did, it would not occur anytime soon.
“None of this was true,” Greenwald writes.6 “It was always a lie, designed first to justify the U.S.’s endless occupation of that country and, then, once the U.S. was poised to withdraw, to concoct a pleasing fairy tale about why the prior twenty years were not, at best, an utter waste.
That these claims were false cannot be reasonably disputed as the world watches the Taliban take over all of Afghanistan as if the vaunted ‘Afghan national security forces’ were china dolls using paper weapons.
But how do we know that these statements made over the course of two decades were actual lies rather than just wildly wrong claims delivered with sincerity? To begin with, we have seen these tactics from U.S. officials — lying to the American public about wars to justify both their initiation and continuation — over and over.”
Greenwald goes on to review how the Vietnam and Iraq wars were both predicated on complete fabrications “disseminated by the intelligence community and endorsed by corporate media outlets,” and how political and military leaders lied about our chances of success.
The Pentagon Papers, top secret documents by military planners, were released in June 1971, proving U.S. officials were far more pessimistic about the Vietnam war than admitted publicly. A similar cache of documents relating to Afghanistan were published by The Washington Post in 2019.7 According to The Post, “U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it …”
Was the Afghan War Nothing but a For-Profit Scheme?
For 20 years, U.S. generals have claimed they’re making headway in training an Afghan army and national police force to defend the nation without foreign assistance.
In reality, military trainers “described the Afghan security forces as incompetent, unmotivated and rife with deserters. They also accused Afghan commanders of pocketing salaries — paid by U.S. taxpayers — for tens of thousands of ‘ghost soldiers,’” The Post wrote.8
According to The Post, documents and interviews not only contradicted public statements by U.S. presidents and military commanders but proved such statements were intentional lies. Statistics and surveys were intentionally altered and manipulated at every turn to maintain the false appearance that progress was being made and that the effort was well worth it.
In reality, the entire Afghan venture appears to have been little more than a for-profit scheme. In a July 2021 article, independent journalist Michael Tracey interviewed a U.S. veteran of the Afghan war who participated in the training programs of Afghan police and military:9
“‘I don’t think I could overstate that this was a system just basically designed for funneling money and wasting or losing equipment,’ he said.
In sum, ‘as far as the U.S. military presence there — I just viewed it as a big money funneling operation’: an endless money pit for U.S. security contractors and Afghan warlords, all of whom knew that no real progress was being made, just sucking up as much U.S. taxpayer money as they could before the inevitable withdraw and takeover by the Taliban.”
Greenwald also points out that evidence given to him by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden showed the NSA was monitoring and recording every single cell phone call in five countries, including Afghanistan, making it highly unlikely the U.S. did not know the true state of affairs.
“There was virtually nothing that could happen in Afghanistan without the U.S. intelligence community’s knowledge. There is simply no way that they got everything so completely wrong while innocently and sincerely trying to tell Americans the truth about what was happening there,” Greenwald writes,10 adding that, in light of available facts:
“It is simply inconceivable that Biden’s false statements last month about the readiness of the Afghan military and police force were anything but intentional.”
Afghan Veteran Sets Record Straight
In a recent MSNBC interview, Matt Zeller, a former first lieutenant in the Afghan war, former Afghan Security Forces adviser, and cofounder of a veteran’s organization called No One Left Behind, also accused President Biden of telling “a bold-faced lie.”
According to Zeller, the U.S. military certainly has not planned for every contingency, as Biden claims, and the White House has repeatedly rejected plans for the safe and orderly evacuation of American personnel and wartime allies.
“I’m appalled [Biden] thinks we only need to take [out] 2,000 people,” Zeller says. “There are 86,000 people currently left behind in Afghanistan and we’ve identified all of them for the government.”
Are We Being Lied to About COVID Too?
By now you may be wondering where I’m going with this. After all, I’m not known for my political commentary. My point is this: If the U.S. government routinely lies to protect financial war interests, could they be lying about the COVID pandemic and facets thereof as well, and for the same reason?
Just like the military-industrial complex misleads the public, the oil, pharmaceutical, and banking industries pull strings and lie to the American public, and spread propaganda to maintain and augment their wealth, power, and control.
Just as the U.S. government has been blatantly wrong about its role in Afghanistan, they are equally, and just as blatantly, wrong about COVID-19 — its dangers, prevalence, prevention, and treatment. This is clear for anyone willing to actually look at the science and the data.
Interestingly, in 2011, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange noted: “The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the U.S. and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war.”11
Likewise, the goal of the pandemic does not appear to be to put an end to it. Rather, biological threats and pandemics are a new form of war meant to continue in perpetuity, where the beneficiaries are both military and corporate.
Truth May Be Slow to Emerge but Usually Prevails
However, just as their lies about Afghanistan are now blowing up in their faces, I suspect their lies about COVID will come back to bite them as well, eventually. For example, we’ve been repeatedly told that COVID shots will prevent disease far better than natural infection.12
This flies in the face of everything we know, scientifically,13 and data from around the world are now proving just how incorrect that claim is. In Israel, data show half of all COVID-19 infections are now among the fully vaccinated,14 85% to 90% of COVID-related hospitalizations are among the fully vaccinated and the fully vaccinated also account for 95% of severely ill COVID-19 patients.15
Overall, Israelis who have received the COVID jab are 6.72 times more likely to get infected than people who have recovered from natural infection.16,17,18 Among the 7,700 new COVID cases diagnosed so far during the current wave of infections that began in May 2021, 39% were vaccinated, 1% had recovered from a previous SARS-CoV-2 infection and 60% were neither vaccinated nor previously infected.
In the U.S., where health officials and the White House Administration are now insisting that we’re in a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” with 95% of hospitalizations and 99% of deaths occurring among those who have refused the vaccine,19 we find out that this is based on data from January through June 2021.20
January 1, 2021, only 0.5% of the U.S. population had received a COVID shot. By mid-April, an estimated 31% had received one or more shots,21 and as of June 30, 46.9% were “fully vaccinated.”22 Using data from a time when a majority of Americans had yet to get the shot is hardly honest and transparent.
What Makes Natural Immunity Superior?
The concept that natural immunity is superior to vaccine-induced immunity is easily understood when you consider the following: Viruses contain several different proteins. The COVID shot induces antibodies against just one of those proteins, the spike protein.
When you’re infected with the whole virus, on the other hand, you develop antibodies against all parts of the virus, plus memory T cells. So, rather than having just one small army of narrowly-focused “soldiers” you end up with a very large army with a much wider range of attack capability.
This also explains why natural immunity offers better protection against variants, as it recognizes several parts of the virus. If there are significant alternations to the spike protein, as with the Delta variant, vaccine-induced immunity can be evaded. Not so with natural immunity, as the other proteins are still recognized and attacked.
Not only that, but the COVID jabs actually actively promote the production of variants for which they provide virtually no protection at all, while those with natural immunity do not cause variants and are nearly universally protected against them.
Follow the Money
The idea that COVID-19 is a for-profit enterprise is easy to recognize by the fact that we’re told vaccination is the only way forward, and that we’ll need booster shots on a regular basis from here on.
Combine that with vaccine passports, and it’s not hard to see how a never-ending injection treadmill can be generated, where you have to comply with the latest shot recommendations or forfeit your ability to freely go about your business and live your life.
Someone benefits from such a scenario, and it surely isn’t the population at large. The beneficiaries are the pandemic industrial complex, which includes Big Pharma, Big Tech, big multinational investment firms, and the military-industrial complex, all of which are vested in the profitability of these shots.
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | This article was previously published on Mercola.com
