MEMO | September 28, 2026

Greek journalist and former European Parliament member Stelios Kouloglou filed a criminal complaint Monday against officials at Israeli spyware maker NSO Group, alleging that his phone was infected with Pegasus while he served on a parliamentary inquiry into surveillance software, Anadolu reports.

The complaint was submitted to the Athens prosecutor’s office, Greek public broadcaster ERT reported. Kouloglou said a forensic examination by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab found that his phone had been infected around Oct. 21, 2022, and again on March 6 and 7, 2023.

At the time, he was a substitute member of the European Parliament committee investigating the use of Pegasus, Predator and similar spyware. The complaint said the infections coincided with significant phases of the committee’s work.

Kouloglou alleges the spyware could have given those responsible access to communications, contacts, documents, location information and data related to his political work. The complaint seeks an investigation into alleged breaches of communications privacy, unauthorized access to data and violations of personal data law.

Speaking after filing the complaint, Kouloglou said surveillance was an issue affecting all citizens and expressed hope that Greek prosecutors would investigate the case.

His lawyer, Zacharias Kesses, said no action had previously been taken despite the allegations being known.

The Cradle | September 28, 2026

The Iranian Embassy in London announced on 28 September its “categorical rejection” and strong condemnation of speculation regarding Tehran’s involvement in an alleged plot to attack a British military air base used by US forces.

In a post on X, the embassy criticized “recent baseless and malicious speculation circulated by certain individuals and British media outlets attempting to link Iran” to the incident, which occurred in the early hours of Sunday.

Gloucestershire Police had announced on Sunday that a “major incident” was taking place in the Welford area of ​​western England, leading to the evacuation of several buildings near the RAF Fairford air base.

Police stated that army explosive ordnance disposal experts were examining several vehicles and that five men had been detained on suspicion of offenses under the Explosives Act.

Residents were evacuated from 85 homes in the area near the base on Sunday as army bomb-disposal experts used a robot to examine three white vans.

The five men detained in connection with the alleged bomb plot, all British citizens, were released on bail on Monday, suggesting the incident is not serious, in contrast to early claims.

The men will remain under investigation, according to the head of counterterrorism policing, Laurence Taylor.

UK authorities continue to “explore multiple lines of inquiry” regarding the incident, Taylor added.

RAF Fairford has been used as a base by the US Air Force to launch bombing operations against Iran during the war that began in February.

The UK authorized the US to use the base for missions involving B-1B and B-52 bombers.

Britain did not join the US-Israeli war on Iran and initially denied President Donald Trump’s request to use bases in the UK.

However, then-prime minister Keir Starmer soon reversed course, announcing days later that he had agreed to let the US use bases in Britain for what he claimed were “defensive” operations against Iran’s missiles and their launch sites following Iranian attacks on UK interests and Britain’s Gulf allies.

By Kit Klarenberg | Global Delinquents | September 28, 2026

It’s rather forgotten today how Washington’s post-9/11 imperial adventurism was not restricted to military intervention. A core component of the Bush administration’s “Freedom Agenda” – under the auspices of which calamitous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere were waged – was overt sponsorship of civil society-led coups throughout the former Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia. Citizens of these regions, and the world, live with this meddling’s destructive consequences to this day. The seemingly never-ending – and ever-escalating – Ukraine proxy war is a particularly visceral legacy.

The 1983 creation of the National Endowment for Democracy, a US state entity avowedly concerned with executing overtly what the CIA once did covertly, ushered in a new era of “spyless coups”. Working in close conjunction with USAID and George Soros’ Open Society Institute, NED ever after provided funding, training and material assistance to NGOs, ‘independent’ media outlets, opposition groups, and other initiatives in service of regime change, across every corner of the world.

Come 9/11, NED and its confederates had devised a supremely cunning, cost-effective template for toppling troublesome governments – be they left-wing, nationalist, or even former US puppets who’d stepped out of line. The previous October, longtime Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic was brought down in what the Washington Post bombastically dubbed “an extraordinary US effort to unseat a foreign head of state, not through covert action of the kind the CIA once employed in such places as Iran and Guatemala, but by modern election campaign techniques.”

At the anti-Milosevic effort’s forefront was Otpor! (Serbian: Resistance!), a rebellious NED-funded youth activist group. Through a mix of civil disobedience, non-violent resistance, rock concerts, street theatre, and graffiti, they fomented mass public opposition to the Yugoslav President. When election day came and official results pointed to Milosevic’s victory, an NED-funded “parallel vote tabulation” purported to expose major fraud, sending millions to the streets of Belgrade to peacefully demand the President’s resignation. Milosevic duly capitulated, in the face of seemingly overwhelming people power.

The supposedly heroic struggle of Otpor! and other US-supported anti-Milosevic groups was immortalised in a slick ‘documentary’, Bringing Down A Dictator. Milosevic’s fall provided a precise blueprint for future ‘color revolutions’ – so-called because frequently, the Empire-supported activists who led these mob putsches prominently adopted specific colours for their banners, branding and logos. Initially, US officials eagerly associated themselves publicly with this upheaval. Meanwhile, the mainstream media routinely published remarkably illuminating post-mortems of the revolts, extensively exposing Washington’s guiding hand and oft-enormous financial outlay.

Nonetheless, politicians, pundits and journalists alike universally framed colour revolutions as ultimately spontaneous uprisings by liberal, progressive elements with legitimate grievances, who yearned for democracy and freedom. In reality, they almost invariably produced corrupt, repressive governments that ruled via intimidation and brutality, including political assassinations. Post-colour revolution regimes also typically conducted sweeping privatisation and other ravaging ‘reforms’, destroying living standards for average citizens by prostrating their countries to the EU, IMF, NATO, World Trade Organization, and other mechanisms of Western economic, military, and political subjugation.

Slobodan Milosevic’s NED-orchestrated ouster is nicknamed the ‘Bulldozer Revolution’, due to iconic scenes during the upheaval of a wheel loader helping anti-government agitators occupy state buildings. However, its driver quickly turned against the “Revolution”. Subsequent “shock therapy” decimated Yugoslavia’s mixed market economy, causing his successful independent business to fail, and him to go bankrupt. He subsisted until his dying day on meagre state welfare payments. For most participants, subsequent colour revolutions were similarly an object lesson in being careful about what one wishes for.

‘External Shove’

In February 2005, President George W. Bush gave a swaggering address in Bratislava, Slovakia. He hailed how “in recent times, we have witnessed landmark events in the history of liberty.” This included Georgia’s November 2003 Rose Revolution, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution the next year, and Iraq’s Purple Revolution a month prior. “The advance of freedom is the concentrated work of generations,” Bush declared. He looked ahead to Moldova, and “inevitably” Belarus, “someday proudly [belonging] to the country of democracies [sic]”:

Moldova’s forced transformation into a staggeringly corrupt effective EU-US colony took many years. Belarus conversely remains stubbornly resistant to “freedom’s promise”, as defined by Brussels, London, Washington, and other centres of imperial power. Still, President Bush’s confidence was well-founded. Waves of insurrectionary unrest unleashed by his government’s “Freedom Agenda” had systematically swept away designated enemy governments one by one annually since he took office. Indeed, within weeks of Bush’s speech, Kyrgyzstan’s insufficiently pro-Western leader fell victim to yet another colour revolution.

He would not be the last. Prior colour revolutions had enthusiastically emphasised the importance of techniques of nonviolent resistance – many of which were crafted by Gene Sharp, who was intimately enmeshed within the US military and intelligence establishment for much of his life. However, Kyrgyzstan’s NED-created regime change army, KelKel – directly modelled on Otpor! – attacked police, torched government buildings and even carried out bombings. Their ferocity was actively encouraged and promoted by US-funded TV stations locally. Such belligerence subsequently became a colour revolution calling card.

That colour revolutions represented a formal weapon of war in the Empire’s post-9/11 arsenal was enthusiastically spelled out by arch-neoconservative Max Boot in late December 2004. He gushed how Ukraine’s Orange Revolution days earlier, which brought a pro-Western government to power, was “one of the most inspiring events” of that year. Boot declared the “triumph” and “miracle” of the revolution “should dispel the quaint notion still prevalent in many Western universities and foreign ministries that democracy is a luxury good suitable for rich countries”:

Boot boasted how Washington had “spent $58 million on democracy promotion in the last two years” in Ukraine. He proposed Kiev receive “expedited NATO and European Union membership,” to finish off the Orange Revolution. “In the meantime, we need to apply elsewhere the lessons of Ukraine” Boot demanded, suggesting “an obvious candidate for a similar transformation is Iran.” He explained, “it’s hard to think of a higher priority than the overthrow of the mullahs,” encouraging the Bush administration to prioritise “liberating Iran.”

‘USAID Help’

Such was the insurrectionary fervour of the time, in January 2006 USAID went to the extent of publishing a glossy magazine, Democracy Rising, revealing in detail Washington’s central role in fomenting “grassroots” rebellions as far afield as Afghanistan, Gaza and Lebanon. Dedicated sections on colour revolutions to date were replete with stunningly forthright passages. A section on Georgia’s November 2003 Rose Revolution described how NED had financed regime change training for local “lawyers, judges, journalists, members of parliament, NGOs, political party leaders, and others.”

The stated purpose of this investment was to give Georgians “a sense that they should regulate the government.” The Rose Revolution “was the climax of these efforts.” One recipient of US financial support remarked, “without foreign assistance, I’m not sure we would have been able to achieve what we did without bloodshed.” Meanwhile, several pages were dedicated to the Orange Revolution. It noted how thousands of Ukrainian journalists were given training in “investigative reporting”, bankrolled by NED and USAID.

An alumni told Democracy Rising this sponsorship “created a feeling that others stood with them ‘in the trenches’.” Concurrently, NED-affiliated Freedom House flooded the coffers of NGOs “that sponsored voter education, mobilized voters to get to the polls and observed elections.” These organisations “also held meetings, youth dances, rock concerts and karaoke to attract young voters,” and “ran public service ads on TV stations, informing people about their right to vote.” Meanwhile, “democracy trainers from Serbia, Slovakia, Russia and Croatia” were flown into the country.

In the second round of Ukraine’s presidential election, NED-financed NGOs claimed to have been inundated with tens of thousands of reports of fraud from voting stations all over the country, while exit polls they produced pointed to widespread rigging having denied pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko a landslide victory. Vast protests, combined with opposition-organised general strikes, widespread civil disobedience and occupations of government buildings forced a rerun. A US-funded think tank apparatchik asserted:

For all the hype and self-assurance of Democracy Rising, its publication came at a time when colour revolutions were increasingly being viewed with hostility and suspicion at a state and public level throughout the Global South. In every case, the radical outcomes promised by colour revolution leaders and advocates failed to materialise, while US rhetoric about the commitment of resultant pro-Western regimes to democracy and freedom was a perverse fraud.

In Ukraine, US-installed Yushchenko implemented economic austerity, slashed regulations and social spending, bailed out criminal banks, broke open state industry and natural resources for foreign plunder, attacked the rights of Russian speakers, and began preparing the country for locally-feared NATO membership. Within just nine months of entering office, his coalition government – comprised of Orange Revolution activists – collapsed due to deeply corrupt battles with feuding Ukrainian oligarchs over control of key media and industrial assets.

Yushchenko was voted out in the January 2010 presidential election, finishing fifth in the first round with just 5.5% of the vote. As Empire house journal Foreign Policy lamented years later, the Bush administration’s much-vaunted colour revolutions all turned out to be “terribly disappointing.” Each and every time, “elite corruption still continued apace” and “promises of far-reaching change never really materialized.” Damningly, “maladies that typified the preceding regimes quickly came to describe” the governments created by colour revolutions themselves.

‘Revolution Business’

That’s quite some euphemism. In Georgia, longtime Soros acolyte Mikheil Saakashvili granted himself unilateral power in key policy areas, before brazenly exploiting his position to harass and jail business and political rivals. Saakashvili’s targets would be raped and/or tortured in prison, their ordeals filmed for primetime broadcast on local TV networks. Grave questions abound over his personal involvement in several suspicious deaths, including government ministers’. He was voted out in October 2012, despite NED’s best efforts.

Kyrgyzstan’s 2005 Tulip Revolution installed Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who proceeded to run the country as his personal fiefdom for five years. Bakiyev’s relatives profited exorbitantly from legally questionable privatisation of state industries. For example, his family signed a highly controversial $1.8 billion deal to supply fuel to a local US military base, close to Kyrgyzstan’s total GDP in 2003. Elsewhere, Bakiyev’s brother oversaw Bishkek’s security apparatus – arbitrary detentions, bogus convictions, torture, and murders of opposition activists, journalists, and politicians became commonplace.

Bakiyev was himself chased out of not only the presidential palace but Bishkek itself in April 2010, following a massacre of anti-corruption protesters in which up to 100 were killed and at least 450 wounded. Thereafter, Kyrgyzstan was plunged into economic and political chaos for a decade, with numerous governments collapsing along the way. The freest and most stable Central Asian state prior to the Tulip Revolution, it is only since 2020 – following another Anglo-American coup – the country has regained some semblance of stability.

A key player in that upheaval was British ambassador Charles Garrett. He arrived in Bishkek from Macedonia, where as this journalist has revealed from April 2016 he steered what was known as the “colorful revolution”. Illegally obtained, deceptively edited wiretaps seemingly implicating government officials in shocking crimes produced huge protests, featuring widespread arson attacks and brutal clashes between demonstrators and police. Garrett distributed cash to NGOs and activists involved in the unrest from his diplomatic pouch, encouraging them to cause mass havoc.

George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, NED, and USAID were also colorful revolution participants. Some protesters even proudly wore “Soros Army” shirts. Despite a huge public counter-revolutionary fightback, the tumult paralysed the Macedonian economy and state, leading to the installation of a doggedly pro-Western, dangerously dysfunctional administration that engaged in industrial scale graft, jailed political opponents on bogus charges, and changed the country’s name despite widespread opposition. Meanwhile, existing economic problems, including crippling brain drain, were gravely exacerbated.

The unfailingly disastrous results of colour revolutions surely contributed to White House officials abruptly and firmly distancing themselves from the entire enterprise, before the Bush administration’s second term was even over. The “Freedom Agenda” was quietly forgotten. The President – who in October 2004 openly mandated financial assistance to Belarusian opposition activists, and once publicly praised the Rose Revolution as an example to be followed throughout the Caucasus and Central Asia – went so far as to deny the US was in the “revolution business” at all.

‘Alternate Reality’

Colour revolutions have continued apace ever since, with the same strategies being recurrently applied the world over, to varying degrees of success. All along, non-Western governments – in particular China, Iran and Russia – have become increasingly vocal in their condemnation of and opposition to colour revolutions, in some cases passing legislation seeking to curtail the operations of foreign funded NGOs on their soil. Yet, the mainstream media long ago adopted a rigid Omertà on Washington’s culpability for civil society-driven destabilisation overseas.

In a striking example of this paradigm shift, in November 2004, before the Orange Revolution was over, The Guardian published a revealing report exposing the “US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev.” The outlet stated unambiguously the revolt was “an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in Western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.” NED, the State Department and USAID were all fingered as culprits.

Fast forward to July 2015 however, and a Guardian article on Russia’s banning of NED under foreign agent laws quite amazingly relied on a brief quote pulled from the Endowment’s official website to describe its operations. In the intervening time, the Maidan Revolution overthrew Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, setting Kiev on the warpath with Moscow. Washington’s irrefutable involvement was strenuously denied at the time by the mainstream media, and has been ever since.

Following the Ukraine proxy war’s February 2022 eruption, The New York Times took vigorous aim at independent journalists for spreading the “conspiracy theory” Maidan was US-orchestrated, dubbing the proposition an “alternative reality” and “Russian disinformation”. This is despite every prominent Maidan actor – including the individuals who started the demonstrations – receiving NED or USAID funding, leaders of US-bankrolled organisations in the country advertising their intention to overthrow Yanukovych years prior, and the Endowment spending $20 million in the country in 2013 alone.

After the outbreak of war in Ukraine, NED removed its grant records on Ukraine, listing its investment in a panoply of initiatives in the country over many years – many of which ultimately targeted Russia, one way or another. In mid-2024, the Endowment undertook the unprecedented step of removing grant records for the entire world. Today, brief entries on different geographical regions describe in vague terms the Endowment’s specific aims locally, and overall sums being spent. The crucial questions of where, and on what, aren’t clarified.

NED going underground makes the task of tracking and exposing contemporary colour revolutions difficult, but not impossible. In September 2025, mass rioting ignited in Nepal. Major news outlets without exception reported the fiery agitation as an organic burst of dissent by the country’s disaffected “Gen Z”, motivated by corruption, unemployment, and state censorship of social media. Publications barely acknowledged demonstrators committed serious crimes, including torching Nepal’s parliament and the Prime Minister’s official residence, which sent occupants fleeing in helicopters.

Based on publicly available information, the clear insinuations of a colour revolution could be discerned. An NGO that organised the protests, Hami Nepal, had clear links to organisations known to be in receipt of NED funding. Subsequent leaks amply demonstrated the Endowment and USAID expended substantial sums over the years preceding the coup training young Nepalese citizens how to protest, founding NGOs and political parties, and “advocate concerns” on issues such as corruption. Evidently, the post-9/11 “Freedom Agenda” never actually ended.

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | September 27, 2026

Daily temperature records are meaningless in terms of climate and weather. But they are of immense propaganda value.

So, step forward Marco Petagna, Media Advisor & Senior Operational Meteorologist at the UK Met Office:

https://x.com/Petagna/status/2103367986975273082

Followed later in the day by the ITV weatherman:

The Met Office confirmed 27.0C at Frittenden:

But how do we know what the previous daily record was? Indeed, how does the Met Office?

Are we supposed to take them on trust? If so, that trust is misplaced.

An article in the Times 15 years ago, following a warm spell of weather, reminded readers that it had been much hotter in September 1895! Their archived news reports revealed that temperatures had reached 30.6C (87.1F) on both 25th and 27th of September in Strathfield Turgis, Hampshire.

When challenged about this on X, Marco Petagna replied that Strathfield Turgis was “not on our internal records for some reason”.

How convenient!!!!

In fact, the weather during that last week in September 1895 was exceptionally hot for days on end, much hotter than the 27.0C at Frittenden. The highest readings for the month were variously set on dates between the 24th and 29th at different locations:

Strathfield Turgis was no fluke or outlier.

A number of sites up and down the country exceeded 27.0C/80.6F, on the 24th, 25th, 237th and 28th:

Note that North Foreland recorded 81F on the 25th, the day under discussion.

These are just a small selection of stations, used in the Met Office Monthly Summaries. There will be hundreds of other sites, such as Strathfield, and given the prolonged nature of the heatwave in 1895 and its widespread geographical coverage, it seems inevitable that many other sites topped 81F that day.

Petagna’s comment about “internal records” is revealing. It indicates that the Met Office has simply binned any temperature data it deems to be “too high”.

As one commenter wisecracked:

In the meantime, it is clear that we cannot trust any daily record claims made by the Met Office.

Now you know why outbreaks still regularly occur in highly vaccinated populations

Informed with Aaron Siri | September 24, 2026

On the topic of splitting up the MMR vaccine into 3 separate vaccines, everyone should know that in 2012, two Merck virologists came forward and explained that when Merck sought to change the label on its MMR vaccine and approval for ProQuad (a combination MMR and varicella vaccine), it “falsely certified as having an efficacy rate that is significantly higher than it actually is.” (See Complaint ¶ 1.)

As detailed in the whistleblower lawsuit, Merck obtained a license for its mumps vaccine in 1967. (Comp. ¶ 16.) In the late 1990s, to obtain approval for ProQuad and change the label on its MMR vaccine, Merck needed to reconfirm its claims of efficacy for its mumps vaccine made thirty years prior. (Comp. ¶ 22.) Two of Merck’s virologists working on testing the efficacy of the mumps vaccine revealed that after Merck could not demonstrate a 95% efficacy for its mumps vaccine, the results were simply fraudulently falsified to achieve this result. (Comp. ¶¶ 15-131.)

As explained by the virologists, Merck took blood samples pre-vaccinated with the mumps vaccine and then exposed them to the mumps virus. (Comp. ¶¶ 25-28.) Suspecting a test against a live strain of mumps would not yield a 95% efficacy, Merck tried to improperly obtain this rate using an attenuated strain of the mumps virus. (Comp. ¶¶ 29-30.) When that would not achieve 95% efficacy, Merck tried different virus dilutions, different staining procedures, and even more liberal counting techniques. (Comp. ¶¶ 31-32.) The Merck lab even improperly added animal antibodies to the blood samples and still could not achieve a 95% efficacy rate. (Comp. ¶¶ 33-39.)

When it was clear that even improper testing techniques could not produce the desired result, the test reports were simply falsified. (Comp. ¶¶ 40-51.) According to the Merck virologists, to document the desired efficacy rate, Merck destroyed result sheets and falsified various documents. (Id.) The Merck virologists claim this fraud was done with the direct authority and approval of Merck’s senior management. (Comp. ¶¶ 52-58.)

Now you know.

This may explain why outbreaks of mumps still regularly occur in highly vaccinated populations. See, e.g.:

• https://cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/65/wr/mm6529a2.htm(317 cases; 89% had received at least 2 MMR doses);
• https://cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6729a1.htm(281 cases; high two-dose coverage among university-affiliated cases, with community spread);
• https://cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6614a4.htm(301 student cases; all patients with complications had received at least 2 doses);
• https://cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6647a5.htm(42 cases; all patients had ≥2 documented MMR doses; campus two-dose coverage exceeded 99%);
• https://cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6148a2.htm(29 cases; 76% had received the recommended 2 dose);
• https://cdc.gov/mumps/outbreaks/index.html(CDC: “experts aren’t sure why vaccinated people still get mumps…).Complaint: https://icandecide.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Merck-Compl.pdf

An Essay on What the Fifteen-Minute Consultation Leaves Out

Lies are Unbekoming | September 10, 2026

What follows is twelve documented findings compressed into one sitting. It is written for the reader who has been prescribed one of these drugs, or is caring for someone who has, and who wants to know what the fifteen-minute consultation did not include. Every claim is drawn from the profession’s own literature, its own regulatory filings, its own package inserts, or the admissions of its own senior figures. Where an item is developed at greater length elsewhere in this series, that is noted. The purpose here is not depth on any single item. It is the cumulative weight of the twelve landing together.

Opening

Three percent of the 4,041 patients enrolled in the STAR*D trial remitted, stayed well, and remained in the study through the one-year follow-up.¹

The trial was announced with a cumulative remission figure of 67 percent.² When Ed Pigott and colleagues spent more than five years reanalyzing the data with fidelity to the original protocol, they found the 3 percent figure. When journalists put the 3 percent number to Maurizio Fava, one of the lead investigators, he acknowledged it was accurate. The investigators knew.³

The paper has not been retracted. It is still cited in psychiatric textbooks. The American Journal of Psychiatry ignored a petition signed by more than 1,800 people asking for retraction. The New York Times, repeatedly notified of the fraud, published the 70 percent figure again in a 2024 article praising the drugs.⁴

STAR*D was the largest depression trial ever conducted. It was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. It was designed by the profession’s most senior researchers. What it proved, when honestly analyzed, was that the drugs did not work.

That fact has been available for over a decade. It has not reached the patients being handed the prescriptions.

The evidence throughout is drawn primarily from Peter Gøtzsche, Robert Whitaker, Peter Breggin, Gary Greenberg, David Healy, and Joanna Moncrieff. What the twelve items share is that none of them are contested at the level of documentation. They are contested only at the level of what the profession chooses to tell patients.

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What They Told You Was True

The prescription is written on the basis of a mechanism, a diagnosis, and a trial. Each has failed on its own terms.

1. The chemical imbalance was never demonstrated

The theory that depression results from a deficiency of serotonin was never established in the scientific literature. Joanna Moncrieff and colleagues published a comprehensive umbrella review of the serotonin theory in 2022 and found no consistent evidence for its central claims.⁵ The theory was abandoned by serious researchers decades earlier. It continued to appear in direct-to-consumer advertising and patient education materials because it served a function. It explained why the pill was necessary and why the patient would need to keep taking it.

Steven Hyman, director of NIMH from 1996 to 2001, later observed that “the gold standard was the DSM criteria. It struck me as a fool’s errand to try to develop a biomarker for a fictive category.”⁶ The chemical imbalance was the mechanism proposed for a disease no one could measure, in a category no one could validate.

Chemical Imbalance: The Collapse of a Medical Myth

2. The DSM has no biological markers

After four decades and hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research, not one disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has a confirmed biological test. Not depression. Not schizophrenia. Not bipolar disorder. Not ADHD. Not anxiety. Not any of the more than three hundred conditions the manual lists.

Robins and Guze proposed a five-step validation process in 1970: clinical description, laboratory studies, exclusion criteria, follow-up studies, family studies.⁷ The five steps were meant to establish, over time, which alleged disorders were real diseases and which were figments. Four decades later, Darrel Regier, who chaired the DSM-5 task force, told Psychiatric News that “validity tests have not lived up to the expectations of Robins and Guze.”⁸ Kenneth Kendler, the field’s leading nosologist, wrote that the diagnostic categories in use had been “heavily influenced by expert opinion” and were “fuzzy constructs that shift when viewed in different ways.”⁹

Thomas Insel, director of NIMH from 2002 to 2015, put it most directly in a 2005 address to the American Psychiatric Association: “The DSM-IV has 100 percent reliability and zero percent validity.”¹⁰ Reliability means clinicians using the same manual will arrive at the same diagnosis. Validity means the diagnosis corresponds to a real thing. Insel was telling the assembled profession that its manual sorted patients consistently into categories that did not exist.

The APA response was to convene committees to plan the DSM-5. The committees did not find biological markers. They could not have. The categories were not built to have biological markers. They were built from clinical description alone. The manual reifies its own criteria.

The consequence for the patient is direct. When the doctor says “you have major depressive disorder,” the patient hears a diagnosis in the sense that a diabetes diagnosis is a diagnosis: a measurable biological state with a known mechanism. What the patient has actually received is a checklist tally. Five of nine symptoms present for two weeks. That is the whole test. There is no blood work, no scan, no biomarker. The diagnostic bible of American psychiatry sits on the shelf as an artifact of expert agreement, not a description of nature.

Manufacturing Madness: The DSM as Instrument of Social Control

3. STAR*D was manipulated

The opening figures bear structural repetition: 3 percent versus 67 percent, admitted by the lead investigator, still not retracted, still cited. Ed Pigott’s reanalysis was published in BMJ Open in 2023.¹¹ The investigators, when confronted, doubled down on the fraud in the American Journal of Psychiatry rather than correct it.¹² The owner of the journal, the American Psychiatric Association, did nothing.

Peter Gøtzsche has documented the specific manipulations. The “remission” threshold was set so low that a patient scoring 7 on the Hamilton depression scale, including endorsement of “feels like life is not worth living,” was counted as symptom-free.¹³ Patients who exited the study were assumed to have remitted at the same rate as those who stayed, a statistical fiction that inflated the numbers by an order of magnitude. Eleven prespecified outcomes were never reported. Suicidal ideation was reported at 0.7 percent in one paper and ten times that in others by the same authors.

The trial that was supposed to establish the effectiveness of antidepressants in real-world practice established the opposite. The profession’s response was to continue citing the announced figure.

Is Psychiatry a Crime Against Humanity? (2024)

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What Happens on the Drug

The prescription arrives with the phrase “you may notice some side effects.” The phrase does the work of concealment. Three effects, in particular, are not warned about with the seriousness they warrant.

4. Akathisia carries documented suicide risk

Akathisia is a state of extreme inner restlessness produced by antidepressants, antipsychotics, and antiemetics. The Greek term means inability to sit still. The patient may pace, fidget, wring hands, or endlessly walk. The condition may also present without visible motor symptoms, as unbearable internal agitation the observer cannot see.¹⁴

In 1990, Martin Teicher and colleagues at Harvard published five cases of patients who developed intense suicidal preoccupations on fluoxetine, all associated with akathisia, all resolving when the drug was stopped and returning when it was restarted.¹⁵ Rothschild and Locke published the rechallenge study in 1991: three patients who had made serious suicide attempts on fluoxetine, all rechallenged under controlled conditions, all developing akathisia and becoming suicidal again. One patient said in retrospect: “I tried to kill myself because of these anxiety symptoms. It was not so much the depression.”¹⁶

A study of psychiatric inpatients found that 79 percent of those who had attempted suicide were experiencing akathisia at the time.¹⁷ Another found that half of all fights on a psychiatric ward were akathisia-related. Haloperidol at moderate to high doses made half the patients markedly more aggressive, sometimes to the point of wanting to kill their psychiatrists.

The FDA’s 2004 black-box warning on antidepressants describes what Breggin has called the stimulant syndrome: anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, aggressiveness, impulsivity, akathisia, hypomania, mania.¹⁸ The label warns that these can occur in nonpsychiatric patients, meaning the drug produces the syndrome by itself, not by unmasking a preexisting condition.

Gøtzsche’s team examined manufacturer trial data and found akathisia miscoded as “hyperkinesia” in Zoloft trials. In paroxetine trials they found not a single case of akathisia recorded, which is statistically impossible given the drug class.¹⁹ The miscoding was systematic.

The FDA-approved label for Zyprexa describes akathisia as “extreme inner anxiety and restlessness.” At least one psychiatric textbook labeled it “agitated depression,” folding the drug’s most dangerous effect back into the diagnosis it was prescribed to treat. The patient who reports the akathisia is told the underlying illness has worsened. The dose is increased.

Mental Health Survival Kit and Withdrawal from Psychiatric Drugs (2022)

5. Benzodiazepine dependence begins at prescribed doses

The FDA-approved label for Xanax states that withdrawal symptoms, including seizures, have been reported after only brief therapy at doses within the recommended range for treating anxiety.²⁰ In the eight-week trials used for FDA approval, patients were worse off at eight weeks than before starting the drug. Between 7 and 29 percent of patients could not withdraw after only six to eight weeks of exposure.²¹

If you are currently taking a benzodiazepine, do not stop it abruptly. Abrupt cessation can produce seizures. Item 12 addresses what safe withdrawal actually requires.

Heather Ashton, the British psychiatrist who ran a benzodiazepine withdrawal clinic at the University of Newcastle for decades, documented that long-term users often required a year or more to taper.²² Some experience withdrawal symptoms lasting years after cessation. Cognitive impairment, depression, and anxiety worse than the original condition are common outcomes of long-term use.²³ Gøtzsche, who has decades of clinical pharmacology experience, has noted that patients report benzodiazepine withdrawal as often worse than heroin. Heroin abstinence symptoms resolve within days. Benzo withdrawal can persist for years.

Anxiety Uncovered: The Truth About Benzodiazepines and Real Solutions

6. ADHD stimulants produce the symptoms they treat on withdrawal

The DSM has a category for stimulant withdrawal, which lists depression, anxiety, irritability, sleep problems, fatigue, and agitation as the withdrawal syndrome after “several days or longer” of use. Rebound hyperactivity, talkativeness, and inattention are documented after a single dose in a placebo-controlled NIMH study of normal children ages 6 to 12.²⁴ Ten of fourteen children in that study showed marked behavioral rebound; three developed euphoria.

If a child is currently taking a stimulant, do not stop it abruptly. Rebound and withdrawal effects are commonly mistaken for a worsening of the original condition. Item 12 addresses safe withdrawal.

The teacher observes the child on Monday morning after a weekend off the drug, notices the child is more scattered and irritable than usual, and concludes the child needs the medication. The child is in withdrawal. The dose is increased. Peter Breggin’s observation from the early 1990s stands unchanged three decades later: if the child continues on Ritalin because they continue to have problems focusing, the disorder may be the drug’s effect.²⁵ Drug-induced inattention becomes the reason to continue and increase the drug.

The Multimodal Treatment Study of ADHD, the largest NIMH-funded stimulant trial, tracked children through eight years of follow-up. By three years, the medicated children showed no advantage over the non-medicated on any measure. They were, however, 2 cm shorter and 2.7 kg lighter than their unmedicated peers, a growth suppression the FDA eventually required on the label.²⁶

The Arithmetic Pill: ADHD, ADD, and the Evidence

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What Happens to Your Brain

The drugs act on the brain and the brain responds. What the brain does under sustained chemical assault is documented in the profession’s own imaging studies.

7. Antipsychotics shrink brain tissue on MRI

Nancy Andreasen, editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Psychiatry from 1993 to 2005, began a longitudinal MRI study of over 500 first-episode schizophrenia patients in 1989. In 2003, she reported that frontal lobe white matter volume decreased progressively over the years of treatment.²⁷ In 2011, her team published in Archives of General Psychiatry the finding that antipsychotic exposure was directly associated with volume loss.²⁸ In a 2008 interview with the New York Times, Andreasen stated it plainly: “The more drugs you’ve been given, the more brain tissue you lose.”²⁹

Fusar-Poli and colleagues confirmed the pattern in a 2013 meta-analysis of longitudinal MRI studies.³⁰ The 2009 Navari and Dazzan review reported that both older and newer antipsychotics produce gross changes in brain volume in selected regions.³¹ In monkey studies, haloperidol and olanzapine produced substantial reductions in both grey and white matter, and reduced glial cell numbers.³²

Andreasen’s original interpretation was that the shrinkage reflected the disease. The follow-up data forced her to concede the drug was the cause.

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (2010)

8. Tardive dyskinesia is permanent

Tardive dyskinesia is a drug-induced movement disorder produced by antipsychotics. It can affect any voluntary muscle: face, tongue, neck, torso, extremities, diaphragm, vocal cords. The condition presents as involuntary jerky movements, slower writhing movements, painful spasms, or restlessness the patient cannot control. The mechanism is understood. Antipsychotics block dopamine receptors in a brain region called the basal ganglia. Over time the brain compensates by growing more of those receptors. When the drug dose is reduced, or when the extra receptors eventually outnumber the block, the excess drives the involuntary movements.

The prevalence is not marginal. DSM-IV-TR sets the annual incidence at 3 to 5 percent per year in young adults and 25 to 30 percent per year in older patients.³³ These are cumulative rates. A young adult after three years of exposure has a 9 to 15 percent risk. An older patient after three years has a 75 to 90 percent risk. Prevalence in outpatient clinics runs above 40 percent. In long-term facilities, above 50 percent.³⁴ There is no established treatment. Most cases are permanent.

The condition often extends beyond motor symptoms. Gualtieri and Barnhill observed that “in virtually every clinical survey that has addressed the question, it is found that TD patients, compared to non-TD patients, have more in the way of dementia.”³⁵ Breggin has called this tardive dementia. Tardive akathisia and tardive psychosis have also been documented, representing further permanent damage to the higher brain function of patients whose brains were supposed to be helped.

The condition is frequently masked by the drug that caused it. Increasing the dose suppresses the visible movements while the underlying damage progresses. Reducing the dose brings the movements out, which the prescriber may interpret as evidence that the patient still needs the medication. The patient’s brain, already damaged, is offered more of what damaged it.

The neurological literature has documented tardive dyskinesia for over five decades. It is required disclosure on antipsychotic labels. It is not routinely disclosed at the point of prescription.

Toxic Psychiatry

9. ECT causes documented brain damage

Electroconvulsive therapy applies electrical current to the head sufficient to produce a grand mal seizure. In modern practice, the patient is anesthetized and given a muscle relaxant to prevent the visible convulsion. The electrical dose is often increased to compensate for the seizure threshold raised by the anesthesia. Multiple treatments are given, typically 8 to 16 per course, sometimes more.

Autopsy studies dating to the 1940s documented brain necrosis in patients who died following ECT.³⁶ Animal studies documented brain damage. The brain’s response to ECT is an acute organic brain syndrome, medically indistinguishable from severe head injury. In neurological terms, multiple continuous seizures without full recovery of consciousness constitute status epilepticus, a medical emergency defined by its risk of permanent brain damage.

The memory loss is documented in every serious study that has looked for it. Larry Squire and Pamela Slater reported an average of 27 months of retrograde amnesia surrounding treatment.³⁷ Freeman and Kendell, using face-to-face interviews conducted by the treating doctors themselves (a design that biased strongly against reporting), found that 74 percent of patients reported memory impairment and 30 percent said their memory function was permanently affected.³⁸ Squire and Slater’s own longer follow-up found that 55 percent of patients felt they had not regained normal memory function over the years.

Gøtzsche summarizes the current literature: with strict definitions of memory loss, 29 to 55 percent of patients are affected. With looser criteria, 51 to 79 percent.³⁹ Death rates from ECT, according to a systematic review by John Read and colleagues, run at approximately 1 per 1,000 treatment courses, ten times higher than the American Psychiatric Association’s stated figure.⁴⁰

The efficacy evidence is thinner than the harms evidence. The 1985 NIMH Consensus Conference on ECT accepted the finding that no controlled study showed benefit beyond four weeks. The four-week window corresponds to the acute organic brain syndrome, during which severe brain dysfunction produces the euphoria or apathy interpreted as improvement.⁴¹ Once the brain begins to recover, the depression returns. If the patient is given more ECT, the brain damage accumulates. If the patient is not given more ECT, the profession points to the returning depression as evidence the disease was chronic.

The APA’s 1990 task force report on ECT omitted essentially the entire literature documenting memory loss and brain damage.⁴² The literature it omitted included the work of Squire, Slater, Janis, Friedberg, Breggin, and even the APA’s own previous 1978 report, which contained more information on memory loss than the 1990 update. In psychiatry, science sometimes runs backward.

What Happens When You Try to Leave

At some point the patient decides they no longer want to be on the drug. The system was not built to help them leave.

10. SSRI discontinuation can last years

The FDA-approved labels describe “discontinuation syndrome.” Patients and doctors alike were told the symptoms would last a few weeks and resolve. The systematic review by Davies and Read, published in 2019, established that this was false. Withdrawal symptoms are more common than reported, more severe than reported, and last far longer than reported. In one survey of 580 patients, 16 percent reported withdrawal symptoms lasting over three years.⁴³

If you are currently taking an SSRI or SNRI, do not stop it abruptly. Withdrawal reactions can include severe agitation, akathisia, suicidal ideation, and violence. Item 12 addresses the resources for safe tapering.

The Dutch tapering-strip program run by Peter Groot and Jim van Os has documented the shape of the problem. Of 895 patients on antidepressants, 62 percent had previously tried to withdraw without success. Using hyperbolic dose-reduction strips, 71 percent were able to withdraw within a median of 56 days.⁴⁴ Venlafaxine required 90 percent of patients to start at the lowest available dose and taper over three months. Some patients required more than six months. Dutch insurers refused to reimburse extended tapering because “there is no evidence in the literature” for its necessity, a circular defense against the very treatment the literature was documenting.

The withdrawal is routinely misinterpreted as return of the underlying illness. The patient is told they were unwise to stop and needs to remain on the drug indefinitely. Breggin’s term for this pattern is medication spellbinding. The drug produces effects the patient attributes to the disease.

11. Long-term outcomes are worse with the drugs than without them

The 1997 British study of a large inner-city primary care facility followed 95 never-medicated depressed patients and 53 drug-treated ones. Symptom reduction at six months: 62 percent for the never-medicated, 33 percent for the drug-treated.⁴⁵ A World Health Organization study of 640 depressed patients found that medicated patients had worse general health and were more likely to still be mentally ill at one year.⁴⁶ A Canadian five-year study of 9,508 depressed patients: 19 weeks of depression per year for the medicated, 11 for the unmedicated.⁴⁷ An NIMH study of 547 patients: medicated patients were three times more likely to lose their principal social role and nearly seven times more likely to become incapacitated at six years.⁴⁸

Rif El-Mallakh reported that 40 percent of patients on antidepressants end up in a chronically depressed “treatment resistant” state.⁴⁹ Giovanni Fava documented that drug changes induced by antidepressants “may propel the illness to a more malignant and treatment unresponsive course.”⁵⁰

The pattern extends to antipsychotics. Martin Harrow’s 15-year follow-up of first-episode psychosis patients found that those not on antipsychotics had significantly better outcomes and were far more likely to be in recovery.⁵¹ Lex Wunderink’s 7-year Dutch trial randomized first-episode psychosis patients to maintenance antipsychotics or dose reduction and discontinuation. The reduction group had double the recovery rate.⁵² Bockoven had documented in 1975 that rehospitalization rates rose after the introduction of antipsychotics and that medicated patients were more socially dependent than those treated in the pre-drug era.⁵³

The pattern is consistent across drug classes and across decades. Longer exposure produces worse outcomes. The drugs sensitize the brain and convert episodic distress into chronic dysfunction. The profession’s response has been to rewrite the natural history of the conditions to match the drug-damaged outcomes. The 1999 American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Psychiatry declared that older studies showing depression was self-limiting had been “disproved.” Depression became “a highly recurrent and pernicious disorder.”⁵⁴ The drugs had made it so.

12. Tapering protocols do not exist in most medical schools

The prescriber who put the patient on the drug is typically not trained in how to help them come off it. Withdrawal is not covered in the standard psychiatric curriculum. The tapering approach with the strongest evidence base is hyperbolic dose reduction, developed by Mark Horowitz and Joanna Moncrieff and published in Lancet Psychiatry in 2019.⁵⁵ The approach requires micro-dose reductions of a few percent at a time, made possible by liquid formulations or compounded tapering strips. Standard tablets do not come in the small doses required.

Peter Gøtzsche’s team spent two years trying to publish a Cochrane review protocol on antidepressant withdrawal support. The Cochrane depression group, chaired by Rachel Churchill, raised objections through 12,044 words of feedback across 86 numbered points, then rejected the protocol.⁵⁶ Cochrane refused to publish a review on how to help patients safely withdraw from a class of drugs prescribed to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Gøtzsche’s PhD student Anders Sørensen mentored 30 consecutive patients through withdrawal in his unpaid spare time and documented the results, because it was the only way to do the work.

The insurance system compounds the problem. Dutch national health insurance refuses to reimburse extended tapering on the grounds of insufficient evidence, though the evidence exists and the insurers know it does. American insurers do not cover compounded formulations. The tapering strips developed at the Amsterdam pharmacy (taperingstrip.org) are available to prescribers in any country, but the patient must find a prescriber willing to order them, which many will not.

The knowledge exists. The Ashton Manual for benzodiazepine withdrawal has been public since 2002.⁵⁷ The Horowitz-Moncrieff hyperbolic tapering literature is in peer-reviewed journals. Mad in America hosts a withdrawal community with thousands of patients’ documented experiences. Breggin’s Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal was published in 2013.

None of it is on the psychiatric residency reading list. The doctor who wrote the prescription is, in most cases, not the doctor who can help the patient stop taking it. The patient is on their own.

What This Does Not Mean

The most common defense of the current prescribing paradigm is that the drugs help some patients, and that essays like this one endanger those patients by encouraging them to stop.

Some patients do report subjective benefit on these drugs. That is not disputed. What is not established is that this benefit exceeds placebo by a clinically meaningful margin, or that it survives the long-term outcomes documented in Item 11.

The safety caveats throughout this essay, and the resources listed below, exist precisely because abrupt cessation is dangerous. Nothing here recommends abrupt cessation. What is recommended is informed choice, which requires the twelve findings to be visible before the prescription is written or renewed. A patient who wishes to continue after seeing the twelve findings has made a different decision from a patient who was never shown them.

Resources

For patients currently on psychiatric drugs who wish to withdraw, resources exist outside the mainstream medical system. The Ashton Manual (benzo.org.uk/manual/) remains the standard reference for benzodiazepine tapering. The Horowitz-Moncrieff papers on hyperbolic tapering in Lancet Psychiatry (2019) provide the scientific basis for SSRI withdrawal. Mad in America (madinamerica.com) hosts an active community of patients who have withdrawn or are withdrawing. The Amsterdam tapering strip program (taperingstrip.org) makes hyperbolic dose reduction physically possible for antidepressants that do not come in the required small doses. Breggin’s Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal (2013) provides detailed clinical protocols. None of the above require permission from the prescribing physician. All require time and typically a support person. None should be attempted abruptly.

Closing

The twelve findings above are documented. They are not concealed by conspiracy. They sit in FDA labels, peer-reviewed journals, systematic reviews, and the admissions of senior figures within the profession. What conceals them is training.

Psychiatric residency does not require reading Whitaker or Breggin or Gøtzsche. It does not require examining the primary trial data on the drugs the resident will spend a career prescribing. It requires reading the textbooks the profession publishes about itself, the same textbooks that praised electroconvulsive therapy while omitting the memory-loss literature and that continue to cite the STAR*D 67 percent figure. The continuing medical education the practicing psychiatrist attends is funded largely by the pharmaceutical industry, whose interest in the twelve findings is that they should not surface. The drug representatives who visit the office once a month are the primary source of pharmacological information for many prescribers.

The doctor across from the patient in the fifteen-minute consultation is often not withholding information out of malice. The doctor does not have it. What was left out of the training reproduces itself in every consultation the doctor conducts for the rest of the career.

The training explains the local silence. It does not explain how the whole enterprise reached the point where twelve findings of this severity could accumulate without institutional response. That answer comes from someone who ran the enterprise.

Thomas Insel directed the National Institute of Mental Health from 2002 to 2015. He controlled the American federal research budget for psychiatry for thirteen years. He was, in that period, the single most powerful figure in American psychiatric science.

Reflecting on his tenure after leaving the position, he made the following observation, widely reported and repeated in the years since:

I spent 13 years at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders. And when I look back on that I realize that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs, I think $20 billion, I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness.⁵⁸

Twenty billion dollars over thirteen years, and the head of the enterprise said it moved nothing on suicide, hospitalization, or recovery.

That is not the assessment of a critic. That is the man who ran the enterprise, describing the enterprise, from inside it. Insel went on to write a book defending psychiatric drugs, so the admission cannot be attributed to conversion or apostasy. He continues to believe in the paradigm. He just concedes it produced nothing.

The twelve items above sit inside that enterprise. What the psychiatrist was trained not to tell the patient is what the man who ran it for thirteen years, on his own accounting, could not deny.

How to Explain It to a Six-Year-Old

Imagine a garage that has been fixing cars for many years. Every car that leaves the garage has a bumper sticker that says FIXED.

One day someone counts. Out of every hundred cars leaving the garage, only three actually work. Ninety-seven do not.

The garage keeps operating. The mechanics keep putting on the FIXED stickers. The owner keeps telling everyone the garage fixes seven cars out of every ten.

When someone points out that the real number is three out of a hundred, the owner says yes, he knows the real number is three. He does not correct the seven-out-of-ten claim. He does not put up a new sign. He keeps the stickers.

The people bringing in their cars do not know about the three. They see the FIXED sticker and they drive off. Some of the cars catch fire on the highway. Some of the brakes fail. Some of the cars will not start again once they are turned off.

When people bring the broken cars back, the garage says the problem is not with the fix. The problem is with the car.

That is the garage. The cars are patients. The stickers are prescriptions. The garage is a whole profession.

References

1. Pigott HE, Kim T, Xu C, Kirsch I, Amsterdam J. What are the treatment remission, response and extent of improvement rates after up to four trials of antidepressant therapies in real-world depressed patients? A reanalysis of the STAR*D study’s patient-level data with fidelity to the original research protocol. BMJ Open 2023;13:e063095.
2. Trivedi MH, Rush AJ, Wisniewski SR, et al. Evaluation of outcomes with citalopram for depression using measurement-based care in STAR*D: implications for clinical practice. American Journal of Psychiatry 2006;163:28-40.
3. Whitaker R. The STAR*D scandal: a new paper sums it all up. Mad in America 2010; August 27.
4. Whitaker R. The New York Times is now engulfed in the STAR*D scandal. Mad in America 2024; April 27.
5. Moncrieff J, Cooper RE, Stockmann T, Amendola S, Hengartner MP, Horowitz MA. The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence. Molecular Psychiatry 2022;28:3243-3256.
6. Hyman S, quoted in Greenberg G. The Book of Woe: The Making of the DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry. New York: Blue Rider Press; 2013.
7. Robins E, Guze SB. Establishment of diagnostic validity in psychiatric illness: its application to schizophrenia. American Journal of Psychiatry 1970;126:983-987.
8. Regier D, quoted in Time for a change? Psychiatric News 2009; August 21.
9. Kendler KS. An historical framework for psychiatric nosology. Psychological Medicine 2009;39:1935-1941.
10. Insel T, address to the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting, 2005, quoted in Greenberg G. Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease. Simon & Schuster; 2010.
11. Pigott HE, et al. BMJ Open 2023;13:e063095. See reference 1.
12. Whitaker R. After MIA calls for retraction of STAR*D article, study authors double down on the fraud. Mad in America 2023; December 6.
13. Gøtzsche PC. Is Psychiatry a Crime Against Humanity? Institute for Scientific Freedom; 2024.
14. Gøtzsche PC. Mental Health Survival Kit and Withdrawal from Psychiatric Drugs. LH Press; 2022.
15. Teicher MH, Glod C, Cole JO. Emergence of intense suicidal preoccupations during fluoxetine treatment. American Journal of Psychiatry 1990;147:207-210.
16. Rothschild AJ, Locke CA. Reexposure to fluoxetine after serious suicide attempts by three patients: the role of akathisia. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 1991;52:491-493.
17. Van Putten T. The many faces of akathisia. Comprehensive Psychiatry 1975;16:43-47.
18. Breggin PR. Talking Back to Prozac (updated edition). Springer; 2014.
19. Gøtzsche PC. Mental Health Survival Kit and Withdrawal from Psychiatric Drugs. LH Press; 2022.
20. FDA-approved product information, Xanax XR (alprazolam), 2011.
21. Breggin PR. Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal: A Guide for Prescribers, Therapists, Patients, and Their Families. Springer; 2013.
22. Ashton H. Benzodiazepines: How They Work and How to Withdraw. Newcastle upon Tyne: University of Newcastle; 2002. Available at benzo.org.uk/manual/
23. Barker MJ, Greenwood KM, Jackson M, Crowe SF. Cognitive effects of long-term benzodiazepine use: a meta-analysis. CNS Drugs 2004;18:37-48.
24. Rapoport JL, Buchsbaum MS, Weingartner H, Zahn TP, Ludlow C, Mikkelsen EJ. Dextroamphetamine: cognitive and behavioral effects in normal prepubertal boys. Science 1978;199:560-563.
25. Breggin PR. Toxic Psychiatry. St. Martin’s Press; 1991.
26. Swanson JM, Elliott GR, Greenhill LL, et al. Effects of stimulant medication on growth rates across 3 years in the MTA follow-up. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 2007;46:1015-1027.
27. Ho BC, Andreasen NC, Nopoulos P, et al. Progressive structural brain abnormalities and their relationship to clinical outcome: a longitudinal magnetic resonance imaging study early in schizophrenia. Archives of General Psychiatry 2003;60:585-594.
28. Ho BC, Andreasen NC, Ziebell S, et al. Long-term antipsychotic treatment and brain volumes: a longitudinal study of first-episode schizophrenia. Archives of General Psychiatry 2011;68:128-137.
29. Dreifus C. Using imaging to look at changes in the brain. New York Times 2008; September 16.
30. Fusar-Poli P, Smieskova R, Kempton MJ, et al. Progressive brain changes in schizophrenia related to antipsychotic treatment? A meta-analysis of longitudinal MRI studies. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 2013;37:1680-1691.
31. Navari S, Dazzan P. Do antipsychotic drugs affect brain structure? A systematic and critical review of MRI findings. Psychological Medicine 2009;39:1763-1777.
32. Konopaske GT, Dorph-Petersen KA, Sweet RA, et al. Effect of chronic antipsychotic exposure on astrocyte and oligodendrocyte numbers in macaque monkeys. Biological Psychiatry 2008;63:759-765.
33. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision. Washington DC: APA; 2000, p. 803.
34. Breggin PR. Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry: Drugs, Electroshock, and the Psychopharmaceutical Complex, 2nd edition. Springer; 2008.
35. Gualtieri CT, Barnhill LJ. Tardive dyskinesia in special populations. In: Wolf ME, Mosnaim AD, eds. Tardive Dyskinesia: Biological Mechanisms and Clinical Aspects. American Psychiatric Press; 1988.
36. Summarized in Gøtzsche PC. Is Psychiatry a Crime Against Humanity? Institute for Scientific Freedom; 2024. Historical citations include Alpers BJ (1946) and subsequent European autopsy series.
37. Squire LR, Slater PC. Electroconvulsive therapy and complaints of memory dysfunction: a prospective three-year follow-up study. British Journal of Psychiatry 1983;142:1-8.
38. Freeman CP, Kendell RE. ECT: patients’ experiences and attitudes. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1986;462:341-352.
39. Gøtzsche PC. Is Psychiatry a Crime Against Humanity? Institute for Scientific Freedom; 2024.
40. Read J, Cunliffe S, Jauhar S, McLoughlin DM. Should we stop using electroconvulsive therapy? BMJ 2019;364:k5233.
41. NIMH Consensus Development Conference. Electroconvulsive therapy. JAMA 1985;254:2103-2108.
42. American Psychiatric Association. The Practice of Electroconvulsive Therapy: Recommendations for Treatment, Training, and Privileging. APA; 1990.
43. Davies J, Read J. A systematic review into the incidence, severity and duration of antidepressant withdrawal effects: are guidelines evidence-based? Addictive Behaviors 2019;97:111-121.
44. Groot PC, van Os J. How user knowledge of psychotropic drug withdrawal resulted in the development of person-specific tapering medication. Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology 2020;10:2045125320932452.
45. Ronalds C, Creed F, Stone K, Webb S, Tomenson B. Outcome of anxiety and depressive disorders in primary care. British Journal of Psychiatry 1997;171:427-433.
46. Goldberg D, Privett M, Ustun B, Simon G, Linden M. The effects of detection and treatment on the outcome of major depression in primary care: a naturalistic study in 15 cities. British Journal of General Practice 1998;48:1840-1844.
47. Patten SB. The impact of antidepressant treatment on population health: synthesis of data from two national data sources in Canada. Population Health Metrics 2004;2:9.
48. Coryell W, Endicott J, Winokur G, et al. Characteristics and significance of untreated major depressive disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry 1995;152:1124-1129.
49. El-Mallakh RS, Gao Y, Roberts RJ. Tardive dysphoria: the role of long-term antidepressant use in inducing chronic depression. Medical Hypotheses 2011;76:769-773.
50. Fava GA. Do antidepressant and antianxiety drugs increase chronicity in affective disorders? Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 1994;61:125-131.
51. Harrow M, Jobe TH. Factors involved in outcome and recovery in schizophrenia patients not on antipsychotic medications: a 15-year multifollow-up study. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 2007;195:406-414.
52. Wunderink L, Nieboer RM, Wiersma D, Sytema S, Nienhuis FJ. Recovery in remitted first-episode psychosis at 7 years of follow-up of an early dose reduction/discontinuation or maintenance treatment strategy. JAMA Psychiatry 2013;70:913-920.
53. Bockoven JS, Solomon HC. Comparison of two five-year follow-up studies: 1947 to 1952 and 1967 to 1972. American Journal of Psychiatry 1975;132:796-801.
54. Hales RE, Yudofsky SC, eds. American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Psychiatry. American Psychiatric Publishing; 1999.
55. Horowitz MA, Taylor D. Tapering of SSRI treatment to mitigate withdrawal symptoms. Lancet Psychiatry 2019;6:538-546.
56. Gøtzsche PC. Is Psychiatry a Crime Against Humanity? Institute for Scientific Freedom; 2024, chapter on Cochrane.
57. Ashton H. Benzodiazepines: How They Work and How to Withdraw. Newcastle upon Tyne: University of Newcastle; 2002.
58. Insel T, quoted in Rogers A. Star neuroscientist Tom Insel leaves the Google-spawned Verily for … a startup? Wired 2017; May 11. See also Whitaker R’s coverage in Mad in America, and Levine B. How to explain top psychiatrists’ “Dr. Strangelove exuberance” unchecked by reality. Mad in America 2025; June 6.

By Humaira Ahad | Press TV | September 25, 2026

US President Donald Trump took the UN General Assembly stage on Tuesday and made a sweeping series of claims about Iran, its nuclear program, the imposed war, and the Strait of Hormuz.

He presented Washington’s military aggression as a campaign to defeat an “Iranian threat,” while casting Tehran as the source of “decades of bloodshed across West Asia.”

Behind the worn-out rhetoric was a version of events riddled with falsehoods, omissions, and sweeping distortions.

For example, Trump claimed that Iran killed “72,000 of its own citizens,” described the country’s nuclear program as having been “obliterated” by the US, declared Tehran’s entire 159-ship navy destroyed, accused Iran of violating the ceasefire, and said US naval forces were moving tens of ships and billions of barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

US intelligence assessments found that Iran’s nuclear program was not destroyed; Pentagon investigators documented hundreds of damaged US structures across the region and depleted munitions, with the US war machine incurring tens of billions of dollars in expenses.

American casualties and aircraft losses mounted, while traffic through the Strait of Hormuz collapsed rather than returning to anything resembling normality following the US-Israeli aggression against Iran.

Here is a breakdown of Trump’s most glaringly false claims about Iran and what the documented record shows.

Claim: For 51 years, Iran (Islamic Republic) has “ruled by bloodshed and mass murder,” spreading “death, carnage and chaos” across the entire West Asia and beyond.

Fact: Other than the wrong claim about Iran spreading “death and chaos” in the region, his chronology also begins with a basic historical distortion.

The Islamic Republic was established in 1979 following the victory of the Islamic Revolution, meaning it has been in power for 47 years, not 51, as the megalomaniac US president claimed.

Trump’s portrayal of Iran as a force of “bloodshed and aggression” runs against the historical record.

For the past two centuries, Iran has fought to defend its territory and deter attacks rather than pursue wars of conquest or territorial expansion.

Even US government and policy institutions describe the Islamic Republic’s military doctrine as primarily defensive and deterrence-based, focused on protecting Iran’s territorial integrity.

One US Institute of Peace assessment says Iran “does not have territorial ambitions and does not seek to invade, conquer, or occupy other nations.”

That stands in stark contrast to Washington’s own modern record of invading countries, waging prolonged wars abroad, killing civilians, destroying infrastructure, and, in several cases, fundamentally altering entire states.

The scale of that record becomes clear when the major US-led invasions and military interventions of the past several decades are examined.

1986, Operation El Dorado Canyon: Libya

On April 15, 1986, the United States launched Operation El Dorado Canyon, bombing targets near Tripoli and Benghazi after Washington accused the Libyan government of supporting international terrorism. More than 100 US aircraft were involved, with 27 aircraft carrying out the main bombing missions and dropping about 150 tonnes of ordnance.

Contemporary casualty accounts record 45 Libyan soldiers and officials killed and 15 Libyan civilians killed.

1988, the USS Vincennes and Iran Air Flight 655

On July 3, 1988, the US Navy cruiser USS Vincennes fired a missile at an Iran Air Airbus A300 flying over the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people aboard, including 66 children and 16 crew members.

Washington claimed that the aircraft had been “mistakenly” shot down. There was no official US apology for the horrendous crime.

The episode is particularly relevant to Trump’s portrayal of Iran as the “source of regional bloodshed,” as one of the deadliest incidents involving Iranian civilians during the period came from a US warship operating near Iranian waters.

1995, Operation Deliberate Force: Bosnia

US and NATO launched the so-called Operation Deliberate Force against Bosnian Serb positions. It severely damaged the Serbs’ military capabilities and helped alter the balance of the Bosnian war.

The bombing campaign killed 152 civilians and injured nearly 300, according to the figures in the material. The operation was conducted without a specific UN Security Council authorization for the air campaign, a point that has remained central to debate over its legality.

1999, Operation Allied Force: Yugoslavia

On March 24, 1999, the US, along with NATO, launched the so-called Operation Allied Force against Yugoslavia. The campaign involved extensive bombing of residential areas, television and radio facilities, hospitals, factories, businesses and infrastructure.

Fourteen NATO member countries participated alongside the United States. The bombing destroyed or damaged 82 railroad and motor bridges, 48 hospitals, 25 post offices and telegraph stations, 70 schools, nine university buildings and four student dormitories, 18 kindergartens, 35 churches and 29 monasteries, including UNESCO-protected heritage sites.

The targets also included the television centre in Belgrade, a convoy of Albanian refugees and China’s embassy in Serbia.

According to the Serbian government’s figures cited in the material, the bombing killed around 2,500 people, including 89 children, and wounded 12,500.

Some 863,000 people, primarily Serbs living in Kosovo, left the region, while another 590,000 became refugees. Estimates of the economic damage ranged from $30 billion to $100 billion.

The Independent International Commission on Kosovo, established in August 1999 to examine the NATO intervention, concluded that the intervention was illegal. It also criticized the use of cluster munitions and the bombing of chemical factories and oil refineries because of their environmental consequences. In 2002, the UN confirmed radioactive pollution in Kosovo following the US bombing.

Post-9/11 toll: millions dead, tens of millions displaced

According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs, US-led wars since 2001 have directly caused about 940,000 deaths across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and other post-9/11 war zones.

The indirect death toll is estimated at another 3.6 to 3.8 million, bringing the overall number of deaths from post-9/11 wars to at least 4.5 to 4.7 million and counting.

The wars displaced an estimated 38 million people across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and the Philippines.

The financial cost has reached about $8 trillion. Brown’s Costs of War research has documented erosion of civil liberties and human rights in the US and abroad.

Claim: Iran“slaughtered” over 72,000 of its citizens this year. Recently, 10,000 were killed for “protesting.”

Fact: Trump’s extraordinary figure of casualties, which he keeps updating every few weeks, requires comparison with the available record.

On February 1, the Iranian government published the names of nearly 3,000 people killed during the foreign-backed riots of early January.

The Iranian Presidency released a list of 2,986 individuals killed, including their full names, their fathers’ names and the last six digits of their national identity numbers.

An Iranian government statement put the total number of fatalities at 3,117. A statement issued in late January said more than 600 of the deceased were rioters and terrorists, with the remainder civilians and security forces killed mostly by heavily armed rioters.

The foreign-backed riots were accompanied by widespread destruction, including systematic assaults on bazaars, shops, banks, mosques, hospitals, ambulances, fire stations, clinics and public infrastructure.

Evidence presented by the government showed that the systematic and coordinated riots involved foreign-backed spy networks.

Supporting the rioters, former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo wrote on social media: “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also, to every Mossad agent walking beside them.”

Mossad separately issued a Farsi-language social-media message urging rioters to “Go out together into the streets. The time has come,” and saying its agents were present “not only from a distance and verbally” but “in the field.”

Claim: I(Trump) will never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.

Fact: Trump presented the ongoing US military aggression against Iran as the means of preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapon.

Iran, as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), has consistently maintained that its nuclear program is peaceful and remains under IAEA supervision.

The scale of international inspection has been substantial. In 2023 and 2024 alone, Iranian nuclear facilities underwent more than 427 inspections, an “unprecedented” level of scrutiny in the history of global nuclear oversight, as admitted even by UN officials.

In a recent interview, Major General Mohsen Rezaei, Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) stated, “We remain committed to the fatwa (religious decree) of the martyred Leader of the Revolution and have not changed our nuclear doctrine, but we do not know what will happen in the future.”

In a religious decree, the martyred Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei, declared that not only nuclear weapons but also other weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological weapons, pose a serious threat to humanity and ruled their use forbidden.

Trump’s claim that the US military “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program runs directly into the US intelligence assessment that followed the so-called Operation Midnight Hammer.

During the 12-day US-Israeli aggression against Iran in June last year, the United States struck three peaceful nuclear facilities, Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, using bunker-buster bombs capable of penetrating up to 18 meters of concrete or 61 meters of earth.

An early Pentagon intelligence assessment found that the strikes “probably set Iran’s nuclear program back by months rather than destroying it.”

The report said the Islamic Republic’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not eliminated, according to sources familiar with the Defense Intelligence Agency evaluation.

According to various Western media reports, entrances to two nuclear facilities were sealed, but much of the deeply buried infrastructure remained safe from the US bombardment.

Claim: As a result of so-called Operation Epic Fury, all 159 ships of Iran’s navy are “now lying at the bottom of the sea.”

Fact: Trump’s claim that Iran’s entire navy was destroyed is flatly contradicted by the continued combat operations of Iranian naval forces deep into the war, including their ability to track, intercept and push back US naval assets in the strategic waters of the Strait of Hormuz.

In the early hours of September 8, 2026, at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz, naval forces of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) tracked, intercepted and recovered one of the United States Navy’s most advanced unmanned undersea platforms.

Media reports identified the vessel as an Anduril DIVE-LD, a large-diameter autonomous underwater vehicle delivered to the US Navy’s Unmanned Undersea Vehicle Group One only a year earlier.

Iranian naval forces have also successfully intercepted and pushed back American naval assets, compelling them to retreat as far as 400 kilometres from the strategic chokepoint.

For the first time since the Second World War, the US has been ostensibly fighting a naval war against a peer adversary largely from a standoff position, unable to project power close to Iran.

Iranian naval forces have effectively denied the US military the freedom to operate close to Iran’s coastline, forcing it to fight from a distance rather than dominate the waters it entered.

The strain on US naval operations has been visible. The USS Gerald R. Ford fire in March, the suicide attempts by sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, and repeated retaliatory attacks on American destroyers in the Strait of Hormuz have added further pressure on US naval forces operating in the region.

Claim: Iran’s air force is gone, their radar is gone, their antiaircraft equipment is gone, their missile and drone manufacturing capacity is almost gone.

Fact: On September 16, the Pentagon’s own inspector general presented a different set of facts about the war’s consequences.

A report covering February 28 through June 30 said Iranian retaliatory strikes damaged or destroyed hundreds of buildings and equipment at US military bases across Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman and Jordan.

The report also acknowledged significant depletion of key US munitions stockpiles and destruction of critical military assets, including missile-defense radar installations.

The retaliatory Iranian strikes forced US Central Command to change how American forces operated across the region. CENTCOM “shifted personnel, assets and storage facilities” in response to attacks by Iran and allied forces.

Among the changes was the withdrawal of US Army medical evacuation helicopters from Iraq and Kuwait. As a result, “most medical evacuations have been carried out by ground … to local treatment facilities,” according to the report.

The destruction of the US Navy’s regional hub in Bahrain by Iranian strikes created “significant challenges” in establishing adequate naval bases and support ports.

The US military turned the remote Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia into a sea logistics hub, extending resupply cycles to between 14 and 18 days.

Iran also brought down roughly 30 percent of the US military’s MQ-9 fleet over Iranian skies.

A recent Congressional report said the American military lost at least 42 aircraft during the 40 days of the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran, with estimated losses of approximately $2.6 billion.

The US Department of War also updated its casualty database, raising the total number of American forces killed or wounded during Washington’s war on Iran to 642 in figures published in July.

Claim: US has “more munitions” than it could ever possibly even think of using.

Truth: The war on Iran has severely depleted US munitions stockpiles, creating shortages and resupply bottlenecks that have begun to strain Washington’s ability to meet military commitments elsewhere, according to US government and congressional assessments.

The September report by Pentagon inspector general found that the war had produced “shortfalls” in key munitions and bottlenecks in resupply, directly contradicting Trump’s repeated claims about the abundance of US firepower.

A separate assessment by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that the war on Iran had exhausted US supplies of key munitions, stretching the military’s ability to fulfill commitments in other parts of the world. The CBO estimated that rebuilding US stockpiles could take up to five years.

The scale of depletion is particularly stark in air-defense systems. A late July estimate by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found that stocks of several key interceptors, including the Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) systems, had been significantly depleted, in some cases by more than half.

The war on Iran also consumed more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, according to CSIS, with the institute estimating that the US stockpile may not return to pre-war levels until 2031.

The Patriot system, the US military’s principal ground-based air-defense missile, was among the most heavily used. CSIS estimated that as many as 1,430 Patriots were fired during the war on Iran, compared with an estimated pre-war stockpile of about 2,330, meaning roughly 61 percent of the inventory had been expended.

The depletion of THAAD interceptors is even more consequential because the system is more sophisticated and designed to intercept ballistic missiles at higher altitudes and over longer ranges than the Patriot. CSIS estimated that 190 to 290 THAAD interceptors were fired from an estimated pre-war stockpile of just 360.

That means Washington may have expended more than half, and potentially more than 80 percent, of its pre-war THAAD inventory.

With only nine THAAD batteries operational worldwide, sustained expenditure risks leaving US forces with fewer of a highly specialized system that Washington considers critical for defending against ballistic-missile threats from countries including Russia, China and North Korea.

Claim: Iran violated the ceasefire with “brazen acts of terrorism.”

Fact: Iran has formally submitted a detailed complaint to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) stating that the US systematically violated the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).

Tehran cited repeated US military strikes against Iranian territory, the revocation of oil-sale licenses, the establishment of a illegal maritime route in the Strait of Hormuz, failure to remove the illegal naval blockade and continued US support for Israeli military aggression in Lebanon as “fundamental and unequivocal breaches” of the agreement.

The US violation centers heavily on Article 5. According to Article 5 of the MoU, Iran would make arrangements to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within one month, with safe passage of commercial vessels forming part of the agreement.

The US, meanwhile, directed ships away from the route designated by Iran as safe and encouraged them to use an alternative illegal route. The MoU subsequently collapsed.

The Washington Post and AP reporting on the memorandum confirmed that the document required the United States to begin removing its naval blockade immediately upon signing and to fully end it within 30 days. However, the US returned to continuing its illegal blockade on Iranian ports.

Washington’s subsequent military strikes and the re-imposition of economic pressure form part of the context in which ceasefire violations are examined.

Claim: The US Navy has recently escorted “more than 1 billion barrels of oil” out of the Strait of Hormuz and “more oil is flowing than at any point” since the start of the war.

Fact: The shipping data tells a markedly different story. Recent satellite imagery has shown traffic through the Strait of Hormuz continuing to fall.

The number of commodity vessels crossing the strait has been around 12 over the weekend, while the pre-war level was more than 100 vessels a day.

According to UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) data, during the week before the war on Iran began, average crude-oil flows through Hormuz represented roughly 38 percent of the global total, LPG 29 percent and LNG 19 percent.

According to August figures, crude exports from the Persian Gulf region have dropped by nearly half, 47 percent, compared with before the war, falling from about 17 million barrels a day in 2025 to roughly nine million barrels per day as of August 2026.

Reuters has cited analyst estimates that five to seven million barrels of Persian Gulf oil a day are currently being disrupted.

Direct crude exports moving through the strait have fallen to an average of just 2.2 million barrels per day, according to Kpler.

From July 15 to August 23, an average of about five vessels a day passed through the waterway, an almost 95-percent decrease from pre-war traffic levels.

What little traffic remains consists of tankers operating under naval escort by Iran.

The impact is also being felt in global energy markets. In recent days, oil prices have climbed more than two percent amid uncertainty over the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and continued security risks across West Asia.

Brent crude, the benchmark for two-thirds of global oil, has surged past $106 a barrel.

The US war on Iran has also pushed fuel costs higher in America. US gas prices have risen more than 40 percent since Washington and Israel launched their war on Iran. The national average in the US is more than four dollars per gallon.

In the European Union, diesel prices have hit a new record of 2.23 euros per liter, with 19 countries, including Germany, France and Italy, registering all-time highs.

Markets remain focused on the Strait of Hormuz, where US hostile and reckless attacks continue to threaten energy flows, as traders assess reported US discussions on a 90-day diesel-export ban.

The strategic waterway Trump described as carrying more oil than at any point since the start of the imposed war is experiencing a historic collapse in commercial traffic, with the disruption rippling through global oil prices and fuel markets.

US intelligence assessments, Pentagon reports, shipping data and the documented human cost of America’s wars all point to a widening gap between the picture Trump presented at the UN and the reality on the ground.

His portrayal of an unstoppable US military, a destroyed Iranian nuclear program, a decimated Iranian navy and an open Strait of Hormuz is increasingly at odds with facts, which is of depleted US munitions, military aggression that failed to achieve any objectives, Iran’s continued ability to retaliate and freely operate at sea, and a strategic waterway where shipping has fallen sharply rather than returned to normal amid continued US military adventurism.

By Raphael Machado | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 25, 2026

The Bucha Massacre, which occurred in March 2022, remains one of the main tragedies of the Ukrainian conflict. Shortly after the Russian strategic retreat and the entry of Ukrainian troops, the narrative quickly began to spread that Russian soldiers had committed a massacre in the city, murdering hundreds of people.

The news spread around the world and was broadcast by all major media aligned with the Atlantic West. Even in spaces that declare themselves neutral, such as Wikipedia, the entry on the Bucha Massacre narrates it as a slaughter perpetrated by Russian soldiers before they retreated from the city. This is, therefore, the “official version” of the story in the Western world and its satellites.

Ukrainian authorities speak of 509 innocent civilians who were allegedly assassinated by the Russians, and indeed Bucha has been used as one of the main arguments to vilify the behavioral standard of the Russians in the special military operation. It seems peculiar to us, however, from the outset that this event was so singular. In general, armies that commit atrocities commit them at various moments and in different places of the conflict, but Bucha constitutes a singular, totally unique, and so far unrepeated instance of an alleged massacre of hundreds of Ukrainian civilians by the Russians.

The topic has recently gained prominence again, with new evidence that was discussed, for example, at the “Dialogue on Fakes 4.0” congress, organized by the Global Fact-Checking Network (a fact-checking agency of which I am a member, along with other journalists). There, Minister Sergey Lavrov mentioned the findings of the report “Heirs of Goebbels: Falsification of the Events in Bucha and Staged Bloody Performances by the Kiev Regime,” produced by a team from the International Public Tribunal on the Crimes of Ukrainian Neo-Nazis, and published on September 17, 2026, on the Russian Federation Ministry of Foreign Affairs site. (https://mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/reports/2142212/)

According to the report in question, it was possible to gather sufficient material evidence indicating that the Ukrainian regime manipulated the facts about Bucha in various ways, one of them being the inclusion of Ukrainian military and paramilitary personnel killed in combat as victims of an alleged “massacre” committed by the Russians. Some of these military personnel may not even have died in the vicinity of Bucha. Furthermore, evidence was obtained of civilians who died of natural causes and whose names were included as having also been victims.

This work by the committee was possible because months after the events in Bucha, the Ukrainian regime inaugurated a memorial containing the names and personal data of the “civilians” who allegedly died in the supposed massacre committed by the Russians. With this, it was possible to cross-reference the data with other databases to check the biography of the dead and confirm the official information – work that was done voluntarily by users of the 2ch.su forum. They discovered at least 50 names of Ukrainian combatants among the names on the memorial, which amounts to approximately 10% of the alleged victims listed.

Among these combatants, by the way, there are several members of the Azov Regiment, a neo-Nazi organization notorious for its atrocities against Russian civilians, such as Evgeny Petrash, Vladimir Bisyaga, Andrey Vaskevich, Ilya Krhenov, among others. Others, such as Igor Kokodinyak and Vladimir Logvinenko, were military personnel who died in other parts of the special military operation zone and not in the vicinity of Bucha.

But of course, the big question about Bucha is the fact that the authentic civilian deaths that occurred at the location in March 2022 were perpetrated by the Ukrainians themselves, which is also confirmed in the report through new testimonial evidence. According to it, Ukraine used artillery against Bucha, after the Russian withdrawal, as soon as journalists were transported to the city, with the aim of turning it into the stage for a grand performance to be displayed to the world.

According to the testimonial evidence gathered, there is even evidence that the journalists’ visit was staged, in the sense that the locations that would be hit by Ukrainian artillery attacks were already known in advance, which means that civilians were killed on purpose with the aim of accusing the Russians of an atrocity – which characterizes a “false flag” attack.

Bucha has become a case to be studied because today the probability that other “false flag” attacks will be produced by Ukraine or the West with the aim of justifying an intensification of hostilities is quite high.

RT | September 24, 2026

Ukraine’s government-backed United24 project offered former US service members thousands of dollars to produce pro-Ukraine videos for American audiences, RT’s America Now has found. The offers targeted veterans whose military backgrounds could make the message seem more credible to viewers.

Host Ben Swann and investigative journalist Elizabeth Lane examined how the project, launched by Vladimir Zelensky in 2022 to raise support for Ukraine, approached former personnel, including special operations veterans with YouTube channels and other media platforms.

According to veterans who reached out to Lane, United24 offered around $10,000 for each video, plus $40,000 in advertising support. There was no stated limit on the number of videos they could make. The project would also provide scripts and guidance, while the veterans would ultimately deliver praise for Ukraine and Zelensky in their own words.

Some creators who agreed to the deal were reportedly creating up to five or six videos a week, making nearly a quarter of a million dollars a month, Lane found.

The men who spoke with Lane said they themselves had turned down the money, recognizing that they were being asked to present paid propaganda as their own views.

However, for some, the refusal came with consequences beyond lost income. One veteran, who turned down the offer and later criticized Ukraine for wasting US money on his channel, had people contacting his employer, calling him a Russian agent, and trying to get him fired.

The effort ultimately failed, Lane learned, noting that it is still “crazy that some foreign government is allowed to reach out to an employer of a former veteran and tell them that ‘you should fire this guy because he’s a Russian propagandist.’”

United24 has since tried to deny making such offers, despite Lane’s recorded Zoom calls with multiple veterans that testify to the contrary.

The choice of former service members is central to the Ukrainian propaganda operation, Swann noted, pointing out that many Americans are inclined to trust someone who had served in the US military, unless they find out that the veteran had been offered thousands of dollars by a foreign government to deliver the message.

Furthermore, given that Kiev is almost exclusively funded by its foreign sponsors, including billions received from Washington, the Ukrainian government-backed United24 campaign is effectively propaganda aimed at Americans, being paid for by US taxpayers themselves, Swann noted.

With Ukraine struggling on the battlefield, the propaganda efforts will likely continue to intensify, Lane predicted, describing a possible surge of supportive messages from major online figures as a “Hail Mary” attempt to shore up backing for Kiev.

Watch the full episode of the four-part America Now investigation here.