By Leighton Woodhouse

On the morning of October 25, 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci dashed off an email to eight of his colleagues, asking them to look into an experiment conducted in Tunisia in 2019. It was urgent. “I want this done right away,” he wrote, “since we are getting bombarded by protests.”

The experiment Fauci was referring to was the one that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene asked him about this week in a heated Congressional hearing. Holding up a photograph on poster board of two beagles with their heads locked into mesh cages, she said, “As director of the NIH, you did sign off on these so-called ‘scientific experiments,’ and as a dog lover, I want to tell you this is disgusting, and evil.”

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Greene is to liberals what Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is to conservatives: an easy target for partisans to mock. Her questioning of Fauci predictably inspired the usual derision. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, referring to Greene as “the consistent frontrunner for stupidest member of the House of Representatives in history,” sneered, “No one knew what she was talking about.”

But in fact, Fauci knew exactly what Greene was talking about. Three years ago, the experiment in question was at the center of an entire crisis communications response within NIAID (the institute within NIH run by Dr. Fauci). Fauci claimed that it had provoked so many angry calls that his assistant had to stop answering the phone for two weeks. The day before Fauci sent his email about being “bombarded by protests,” one of his colleagues had advised him, “It might be wise to hold off on TV until we have a handle on this.” The story had become a full-blown publicity crisis for Fauci and NIAID — until the Washington Post came to his rescue, turning a legitimate news story into “right-wing disinformation,” based on flimsy evidence that was literally concocted by Fauci’s team.

In 2019, under the auspices of a microbiologist at the University of Ohio, researchers in Tunisia placed the heads of sedated beagles in mesh bags filled with starved sand flies. This was the image Rep. Greene had held up at this week’s hearing. Later, the beagles were placed in outdoor cages for nine consecutive nights, in an area dense with sand flies infected with a parasite that carries the disease with which the researchers were trying to infect the dogs.

In his paper, the Ohio microbiologist, Abhay Satoskar, along with his research partner, acknowledged funding from NIAID, which added up to about $80,000, alongside the grant number. The grant application read:

“Dogs will be exposed to sand fly bites each night throughout the sand fly season to ensure transmission…Dogs will be anesthetized…and for 2 hours will be placed in a cage containing between 15 and 30 females…”

The description fits the experiments in Tunisia perfectly.

In August of 2021, White Coat Waste Project, a non-profit group that advocates against federal funding of animal experimentation, exposed NIAID’s support for the experiment in a blog post. In October, based on White Coat Waste’s revelations, a bipartisan group of Congressional representatives released a letter expressing concern about cruel NIAID-funded experiments on dogs, drawing particular attention to the fact that some of the dogs had had their vocal cords severed to keep them from barking and howling in pain and distress. The story generated a maelstrom online, leading to the angry phone calls Fauci claimed to have received.  “#ArrestFauci” trended on Twitter.

NIAID staff went into damage control mode. Within hours of Fauci asking his staff to look into the experiment, Satoskar emailed NIAID, following up on a phone call. Satoskar now claimed that the acknowledgment of NIH funding was a mistake. “This grant was mistakenly cited as a funding source in the paper,” he wrote.

Later, NIAID would claim that it only funded an experiment that involved vaccinating the dogs against Leishmaniasis, the disease carried by the parasites in the sand flies. Leishmaniasis is the disease with which Satoskar infected his subject beagles in Tunisia.

There is no way to know what was said on the phone call with Satoskar, but released emails show that this is exactly what NIAID wanted to hear. “Will you forward this to Dr. Fauci or let me know if I should directly forward to him?”, the recipient of the email at NIAID wrote to a colleague (the names in the emails, which were obtained by a FOIA request from White Coat Waste Project, are redacted).

Satoskar then hurried to delink the paper from NIAID funding. Less than ten minutes after sending his email to NIAID, Satoskar emailed Shaden Kamhawi, editor of PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, the journal that had published the paper on the experiment. “We would like to request correction of this error,” Satoskar wrote.

He might as well have been asking himself. Kamhawi is a colleague of Satoskar. She is an expert on precisely the subject that Satoskar was studying. “Dr. Kamhawi is a world expert on phlebotomine sand flies,” her curriculum vitae reads, “vectors of the neglected tropical disease leishmaniasis.” Like Satoskar, Kamhawi has conducted research in which she used sand flies to infect beagles with the disease. She has even co-published with him. Indeed, Kamhawi’s own research has been the subject of White Coat Waste Project exposé. On top of that, she is an employee of NIAID: meaning that Anthony Fauci is her boss.

Kamhawi was aware of at least the last of these potential conflicts of interest. “BTW,” she emailed her colleagues at PLOS NTD, “as I am an NIAID employee, “I am not sure if there is a COI [Conflict of Interest] here so please let me know.”

It’s unclear whether the journal took that conflict seriously. In any case, the correction went forward. The journal now read:

“There are errors in the Funding statement. The correct Funding statement is as follows: the authors received no specific funding for this work. The US National Institutes of Health and the Wellcome Trust did not provide any funding for this research and any such claim was made in error.”

This was the exonerating evidence that went out to reporters. On October 27th, a NIAID employee wrote to colleagues that “we can at least share with reporters that the journal has made the correction.” Another NIAID staffer emailed colleagues for help fielding a query from an Associated Press “fact checker,” who asked how NIAID could be sure that their funds weren’t used for the Tunisian beagle experiment. “Our evidence is simply the statement of the PI [Principal Investigator], Dr. Satoskar,” came the reply.

In fact, NIAID had no way to be certain that its funds were not used on the Tunisia experiment. Michael Fenton, Director of NIAID’s Division of Extramural Activities, wrote in an email, “It seems to me that the only way to prove that the grant funds weren’t used for other projects is to do an audit of those grant expenditures and invoices. This would not be something that could be done quickly.”  

The next day, NIAID was still putting out fires. “We are still getting clobbered on this,” one wrote in an email. But three days before, NIAID had scored a huge coup: On October 25, the same day Fauci wrote his “bombarded by protests” note, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote a column facetiously entitled, “Why is Anthony Fauci trying to kill my puppy?” The article maligned the story as a product of “the right wing disinformation machine and its crusade against Fauci,” and cited the correction in PLOS NTD as evidence that it was all just an innocent mistake.

In an email to a NIAID employee the next day, Milbank offered further assistance. He wrote, “I might do a follow-up column on the reaction, and the imperviousness to facts. Do you have any more info that could further prove that you didn't fund the Tunisia study involving feeding the anesthetized dogs to sand flies?” Forwarding Milbank’s story to colleagues, the NIAID staffer wrote approvingly, “Dana is being extremely helpful.”

From Milbank’s story came a cascade of “fact checks”: from Politifact, Snopes, FactCheck.org, MediaMatters, Mic, and USA Today. Then came a big story in the Washington Post about the “viral and false claim” that NIAID had funded the Tunisia experiment. The reporters who wrote the story had evidently already reached their conclusion before they began reporting on it. Their email to Satoskar and others asking for comment opened, “I am working on a story about a massive disinformation campaign that is being waged against Anthony Fauci.”

The media re-framing of the story had its intended effect. Three years later, following Marjorie Taylor Greene’s questioning, reporters are once again citing PLOS NTD’s correction as the definitive debunking of the beagle experiment story. The Washington Post effectively banished it from mainstream public debate, though today, the paper published a fact check that contradicts much of the Post’s previous reporting.

After the story came out, Beth Reinhard, one of the reporters on the Post story, emailed Satoskar the link. “Thanks Beth. This is a great article clearing up all misinformation and falsehood,” he wrote.

“Thanks!” she replied.

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Leighton Woodhouse is freelance journalist and a documentary filmmaker currently based in Oakland, California. You can support his work at https://leightonwoodhouse.substack.com

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Good evening. It's Tuesday, June 25. Tonight: Julian Assange is now finally a free man. Though I had been hearing whispers over the last week, it was not the first time that I thought something imminent would happen, and as a result, I was unable to report it or confirm it. It was only last night – while we were in the middle of doing the show live – that we got actual confirmation that Assange had signed a plea deal with the United States Department of Justice, under which he pled guilty to one felony count under the Espionage Act in exchange for his immediate release from the British high-security prison, where he'd been unjustly detained for more than five years accompanied by his right to travel back to Australia. 

Yesterday he flew to a tiny U.S. territory in the Pacific, where he landed today for a scheduled hearing before the U.S. federal judge there, to formally accept his plea deal: essentially a formality. Assange’s agreement with the Justice Department stipulates that even in the extremely unlikely event that an American judge who just sits in the middle of the Pacific rejected his plea deal, Assange would still be permitted to leave that little island to proceed to travel to Australia, the only country of which he has ever been a citizen, where he plans to reunite with his wife and their two young children and hopefully rebuild his life full of peace, happiness, health, prosperity and, if he wishes, going back to the crucial work that he has long been doing. 

While it is hard on a personal level not to celebrate the video showing Julian Assange walking out of a high-security prison as a free man for the first time in almost 15 years, it is equally difficult not to feel disgust and outrage at the U.S. government, which deliberately forced him into captivity that whole time without having ever convicted him of any crimes and then, at the last minute, vindictively imposing on him one last act of unjust vengeance by conditioning his release back to Australia on a guilty plea to one of the least serious felony charges of the 17 charges in the indictment that he faced.

On air last night, I offered, more or less from the top of my head – we obviously didn't plan to discuss it – the timeline and history of the saga as best I could, but I've been covering Wikileaks and Assange ever since I first wrote about the group and interviewed him back at the beginning of 2010. But watching the reaction today to the same group of people who have long demanded and justified his imprisonment – CIA and FBI goons, jealous corporate media employees, and American liberals enraged at Assange for disclosing incriminating facts from the Obama administration and then, even worse, from their view, reporting incriminating facts about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election – I was reminded of just how many outright lies and fabrications and propagandistic deceits and easily proven falsehoods have been circulating about Assange for years to justify his late, lengthy imprisonment. I watched media figures interview one liar after the next to spread the same falsehoods all day long to justify why Assange deserved the prison term that he got. 

Now, we do have more information on the plea deal and on the dishonest situation that we had last night. We did some reporting today and found out some more details and I want to report on what it is that I now know and explain the implications of these events. Most definitely, I want to identify by name these people in media and politics in the U.S. security state who have been deliberately spreading falsehoods about the situation regarding Assange and Wikileaks to justify the U.S. imprisonment of what I think is the most consequential and important journalist of our generation. 

Then: CNN is hosting the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump on Thursday night, in Atlanta, to be hosted by CNN personalities Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. The Trump campaign, for whatever reasons, decided to hand CNN an unprecedented level of control over the debate.  This is something we were going to talk about last night and ran out of time. But essentially, early yesterday morning, a CNN host named Kasie Hunt invited the Trump campaign press secretary on the air, and she proceeded to have a remarkable on-air meltdown that culminated in her abruptly terminating the interview. We'll examine what happened not only because of how deeply entertaining it was but also because it reveals so much about the character and function of U.S. corporate media. 

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now. 

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Good evening. It's Monday, June 24. 

Tonight: Very little attention is paid these days to the war in Ukraine. Remember that? That would be, I suppose, somewhat understandable if the war were static or had become a frozen conflict or were in some retreat or a winding down. But none of that is happening; the opposite is. From the perspective of escalatory risks between the United States and Russia – which just happen to be the nations with the two world's largest nuclear stockpiles – the war in Ukraine is more dangerous today than ever. That's what makes the relative indifference toward it, the silence about it, so mystifying and so dangerous. 

Three weeks ago, the Biden administration announced that it was lifting restrictions on the use of U.S.-supplied weapons to strike inside Russia, on Russian soil. Over the weekend, a horrific airstrike launched by Ukraine, which the Russians insist was carried out with U.S. weapons, took place on a beach inside of Crimea, which Russia has governed since the U.S. supported coup in Kiev, in 2014, and whose residents are overwhelmingly Russian with far more allegiance to Moscow than to Kiev. The strike, aimed at a beach popular among area residents, killed at least four people and injured at least 150 more, including many children. 

The reaction from the highest levels of the Russian government was as clear as it was ominous. They said they do not hold Ukraine responsible for the attack and the death of those civilians but, instead, they hold the United States government responsible, given that the U.S. military, they say, played the key role in the launching and targeting of the bomb site. Unsurprisingly, the Russians not only blamed the United States but vowed retaliation not against Ukraine but against the U.S. And thus, as we spiral to greater and greater risk of escalatory dangers all over the question of who rules a few provinces in eastern Ukraine, or whether NATO will be permitted to expand right up to the most sensitive part of the Russian border, very few people in the U.S. seem to care much and are barely discussing these grave dangers, even as they escalate. It is worth examining how the main objective of the U.S. and Russia during the Cold War, avoiding direct combat between the two and avoiding the risk of nuclear aggression, whether through intentional choice or miscalculation and misperception, really seems to have almost no weight these days in Western capitals or among American liberals and their neocon allies in the Republican Party. 

Then: CNN is hosting the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump on Thursday night, in Atlanta. It will be hosted by CNN personalities Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. The Trump campaign, for whatever reasons, decided to hand CNN an unprecedented level of control over how the debate proceeds. Early this morning, a CNN host – someone named Kasie Hunt – invited to her show the Trump campaign's press secretary to talk about that debate. Hunt then proceeded to have a remarkable on-air meltdown that culminated in her cutting off that interview with the Trump campaign's spokesperson. We’ll examine exactly what happened, not only because of how deeply entertaining this was but also because it reveals so much about the character and function of U.S. corporate media. 

Finally, the independent journalists Lee Fong and Jack Paulson, working in collaboration with The Guardian, published an investigation today about the extent of Israeli influence operations in the United States. 

In the words of the article, the investigation reveals, “a hard line and sometimes covert operation by the Israeli government to strike back that student protests, human rights organizations and other voices of dissent inside the United States.” We'll speak to both of those journalists about their findings and try to understand the full gravity and extent of Israeli influence operations in the United States, including their connection to some very serious laws that abridge the free speech rights of Americans in the name of protecting Israel. 

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.