An honest and authentic news-medium, The Gray Zone, headlined on March 31st, “ICC’s Putin arrest warrant based on State Dept-funded report that debunked itself”, and its reporters, Jeremy Loffredo and Max Blumenthal, opened:
- The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of the “unlawful deportation” of Ukrainian children to a network of camps inside Russia. The warrant was based on a report by the Yale HRL center, which is funded by the US State Department.
- US journalist Jeremy Loffredo visited one of Russian government-sponsored camps in question. At The Donbas Express, located just outside of Moscow, Loffredo met youth from war-torn regions who were flourishing thanks to free music instruction, and grateful to be in a secure environment. This article features his exclusive video report.
- A Grayzone review of the Yale HRL report found the paper’s content contradicted many claims contained in the ICC warrant. It also undercut incendiary statements its director, Nathaniel Raymond, issued during media appearances.
- In an interview with Loffredo, Yale HRL’s Raymond further contradicted allegations he made in a CNN interview about a massive “hostage situation” underway in Russia, acknowledging that most of the camps he researched were “teddy bear”-like cultural programs. He also disclosed his collaboration with US intelligence.
On March 17, the Prosecutor General of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, introduced an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Llova-Belova. The warrant, which accused Putin and Lolva-Belova of conducting the “unlawful deportation” of Ukrainian children to a “network of camps” across the Russian Federation, inspired a wave of incendiary commentary in the West.
US Sen. Lindsey Graham, perhaps the most aggressive cheerleader in Congress for war with Russia, proclaimed: “The ICC has an arrest warrant for Putin because he has organized the kidnapping of at least 16,000 Ukrainian children from their families and sent them to Russia. It is exactly what Hitler did in World War II.”
CNN’s Fareed Zakaria echoed Graham, declaring the ICC warrant revealed that Putin “is in fact following parts of Hitler’s playbook.”
The ICC prosecutor appeared to have based his arrest warrant on research produced by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL). Yale HRL’s work was funded and guided by the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, an entity the Biden administration established in May 2022 to advance the prosecution of Russian officials.
During an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Yale HRL’s executive director, Nathaniel Raymond, claimed his report provided proof that “thousands of children are in a hostage situation.” Invoking the Holocaust, Raymond asserted, “We are dealing with the largest network of children camps seen in the 21st century.”
Yet in an interview with Jeremy Loffredo, the co-author of this report, and in his own paper for Yale HRL, Raymond contradicted many of the bombastic claims he made to the media about child hostages. During a phone conversation with Loffredo, Raymond acknowledged that “a large amount” of the camps his team investigated were “primarily cultural education – like, I would say, teddy bear.”
Yale HRL’s report similarly acknowledges that most of the camps it profiled provided free recreational programs for disadvantaged youth whose parents sought “to protect their children from ongoing fighting” and “ensure they had nutritious food of the sort unavailable where they live.” Nearly all of the campers returned home in a timely manner after attending with the consent of their parents, according to the paper. The State Department-funded report further concedes that it found “no documentation of child mistreatment.” …
The source of the International Criminal Court’s charges in its 17 March 2023 criminal arrest warrant against Putin was, according to Loffredo and Blumenthal, probably the 14 February 2023, 34-page, report, by the Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) of the Yale School of Public Health, titled “Russia’s Systematic Program for the Re-Education & Adoption of Ukraine’s Children”. (The arrest warrant itself did not say.)
On its page 21, which is headlined “Legal Analysis,” the HRL’s report asserts: “The abduction of children is considered one of the ‘Six grave violations against children during armed conflict’ and is an act prohibited by international humanitarian law, international human rights law, international customary law, and multiple international judicial precedents.154”
On this fraudulent basis, the ICC (which has no legal jurisdiction in this matter) issued their criminal arrest warrant against Russia’s President, though neither Russia, nor Ukraine, nor the United States, has ever ratified (become subject to the legal jurisdiction of) that Court.
On 25 August 2022, the New York Times — which on 7 September 2002 had stenographically reported to the world the allegation by George W Bush and Tony Blair that the IAEA had come out with a “new report” which said that Iraq might be only six months away from having a nuclear bomb, and which refused to publish the IAEA’s denial of that assertion — had headlined “The U.S. State Department and Yale identify 21 detention sites in Russian-controlled territory”, and reported that:
The U.S. State Department and Yale University researchers said Thursday that they had identified at least 21 sites in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine that the Russian military or Russian-backed Ukrainian separatists are using to detain, interrogate or deport civilians and prisoners of war in ways that violate international humanitarian law. There were signs pointing to possible mass graves in some areas, they said.
Researchers at the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab said the sites were part of a “filtration system” used for processing detainees and prisoners. They reached their conclusions after examining commercial satellite imagery and open-source information. The detainees and prisoners could be forced to live outside the centers in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, imprisoned for long periods, deported to Russia or even killed.
The research was a collaboration between Yale and the Conflict Observatory program that the State Department set up in May to document war crimes and other atrocities committed by Russian or Russian-backed forces in the Ukraine war. The researchers released their findings through a report from Conflict Observatory.
“We again call on Russia to immediately halt its filtration operations and forced deportations and to provide outside independent observers access to identified facilities and forced deportation relocation areas within Russia-controlled areas of Ukraine and inside Russia itself,” the State Department said in a statement referring to the new findings.
So, the U.S. regime (including its ‘news’-media) had been working for some time to set up this possible provocation to produce WW III.
How blatantly bad, and even patently evil, does a PR stunt, to increase the likelihood of a nuclear war between America and Russia, need to be, in order for America’s, and The West’s, fraud-spreading ‘news’-media, to proclaim their own Governments (and themselves) to be way out of line, and grossly unacceptable threats to the entire planet — dangers of producing (sheerly on the basis of multiple and blatant frauds) a nuclear war between superpowers?
At what point will the current ICC become abandoned by its existing 123 signatories so that it may be reconstituted as being something more than what it is: a propaganda-arm of the U.S. and its allied Governments?
By Eric Zuesse
Published by Oriental Review
Republished by The 21st Century
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of 21cir.com.